Sun 27 Jun 2010
RUTH RENDELL – Not in the Flesh. Crown, US, hardcover, June 2008. Trade paperback: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, June 2009. British edition: Hutchinson, hardcover, 2007.
Jim Belbury likes to walk his dog through Old Grimble’s Field because the dog is good at sniffing out truffles which he can sell to fancy restaurants in London. But one summer’s day the dog digs out a skeletal hand which brings Chief Inspector Wexford and his team to investigate.
The remains turns out to be those of a man who was killed about eleven years earlier. At that time Old Grimble’s stepson, who inherited the land, had the idea he could get the planning commission’s permission to put up houses on it.
He and the man he hired had begun digging a trench where the sewage pipes would be laid. Permission was refused and the trench was filled in, but someone used it as a convenient place to hide a body.
So the search begins to try and identify the body of someone who has been missing for eleven years. Then, a few days later, when two of Wexford’s men are searching the bungalow, they discover in the basement buried under a woodpile, the body of another man who, it turns out, was killed eight years earlier. Are the two dead men connected and, if so, how?
Meanwhile, a subplot deals with female “circumcision” among the Somali community in Kingsmarkham when the Somali waitress at an Indian restaurant Wexford and his assistant, Mike Burden, like to eat lunch approaches Wexford because she fears her 5-year-old sister is about to have that procedure, which the waitress had undergone as a child.
As usual, with Rendell, you cannot fault her writing or characterization. With this one, though, even before the identity of the body in the trench was discovered, I realized the motive for the murder and, if I didn’t know the exact name of the killer, I knew in which household the killer could be found.
One other thing, and someone perhaps in the UK can help me out here: during the course of the novel the police are looking for a man nicknamed Dusty and, automatically, assume his last name must be Miller because all man nicknamed Dusty are invariably named Miller. Why? Over here we are likely to think his last name is Rhodes, but not invariably.
June 27th, 2010 at 5:51 pm
It is difficult to believe that Ruth Rendell has been writing up the cases of Inspector Wexford since 1964, when From Doon with Death came out.
This book that Ray reviews is the 21st in the series, with the 22nd, The Monster in the Box, being published sometime last year.
This doesn’t include Rendell’s other books, the non-series ones. There are probably more of those than there are Wexford’s, especially if you add in the ones whe wrote as Barbara Vine.
(And why did she bother with a pen name, when the connection to her was made obvious as soon as the first Vine book appeared? Is there something that sets them apart from the rest of her work? I’m asking because, I’m somewhat reluctant to admit, I’ve never enjoyed her non-series crime novels very much, and I’ve read no more than one or two, and none by Vine.)
I also hope that Rendell’s books are not being taken for granted, a sin that I’ve been guilty of myself. I’ve not read a Wexford since Road Rage, and that was the 17th of them, appearing in 1997.
Here’s a question for you, besides the one that Ray asks about Dusty Miller (some kind of plant, isn’t it?). In the almost 50 years that Wexford has been working, he hasn’t aged more than two or three years, or so it seems to me.
England has changed around him in that time, but he himself hasn’t. This doesn’t mean anything to me, but it does bother some people, or so I’ve been told.
Comments?
June 27th, 2010 at 6:45 pm
The Vines are more in the tradition of the Victorian mystery novel it seems to me, more discursive and spacious. Of course the Rendells, especially the non-Wexfords, have been getting longer as well the last quarter century. Often the Vines look into the past and involve sifting documents and/or memories.
I’ve happened to start Not in the Flesh and thought it an improvement on the previous Wexford, The Babes in the Wood, which seemed an absolute dud to me: uninteresting characters and murky plotting. By the end, I could not have cared less “who done it” and was totally disengaged from the characters.
In the last three Wexford’s Rendell has been exploring people’s reactions to change in England, particularity the Muslim issue, which is somewhat interesting. What might be called the Silver Age of British detection is clocking out, with P. D. James turning 90 this year and Ruth Rendell having turned 80 and other writers, like Robert Barnard and Peter Lovesey, in their mid-70s.
I think with the new generation of English crime writers (born after WW2), led by Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, we have really moved past the grasp of the lingering hand of the Golden Age.
June 27th, 2010 at 7:56 pm
The Vines books are more novelistic than the Rendell books — Curt isn’t far off on the Victorian mystery statement, but I think they are also closer to the Gothic tradition that Collins and Le Fanu touched on (true Gothic, not the governess in danger vein). It’s a little like the difference between Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels, though somewhat more subtle. Overall I find the Vines books much darker than her suspense or Wexford stories.
I’m not sure on the ‘Dusty Miller’ thing, however, it is the name of the David Niven character from Alistair MacLean’s GUNS OF NAVARONE, so whatever its origin it was common enough during the Second World War when the story was set. My only thought is the prosaic one that mills grind grain and are quite dusty, so a miller would by nature be … well, you see where I’m going.
But Dusty Rhodes? In this part of the world it’s more often Dusty Rivers.
Curt
I agree wholeheartedly that with Rankin and McDermid we see the British crime story moving away from the Golden Age influence at last, though I would suggest a few earlier voices like William McIlvaney, Derek Redmond, Julian Rathbone, and a few others began the movement. Strangely the new breed of British writers seem to be having a tougher time overall getting into the American market (obviously not Rankin).
I guess we want our Agatha Christie.
June 27th, 2010 at 8:41 pm
From A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English on Google Books:
“Dustie, Dusty – A nickname for any man named Miller, late C.19-20. Because a miller is generally dusty.”
flour dust, I gather.
And then under
“Dusty Miller – a coal mine worker. miners’ joc. C.20.”
June 27th, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Thanks, Joel. Just what we needed. Looks like you were right, David, and I would have been, too, if you’d pressed me on it.
June 27th, 2010 at 9:32 pm
It’s only with Rankin and McDermid, I think, that the British crime novel has developed really big name replacements for James and Rendell, just as James and Rendell eventually became the new Crime Queens, displacing Christie, Sayers, Marsh and Allingham (though Christie remains, with Shakespeare, the world’s bestselling author). I think James and Rendell really dominated the 1980s and into the 1990s, with Rankin and McDermid eventually displacing them sometime in the last dozen years? Though James and Rendell still get a lot of attention, reader reviews of their books I’ve noticed are becoming more tepid, especially on amazon.co.uk (American fans seem more tolerant).
If Rankin and McDermid are the newer Big Names, though, does that mean the whole conception of the British Crime Queen is on its way out? Rankin’s a man, and I don’t believe McDermid is thought of as a particularly “feminine” writer so who are the new Crime Queens?
Steve,
I would read among Vines either A Dark-Adapted Eye, A Fatal Inversion, The House of Stairs, Asta’s Book or The Brimstone Wedding. I think you definitely get a different feel in these from the Rendells, even the psychological Rendells.
June 27th, 2010 at 9:50 pm
Curt
I second your choice of Vine novels. In general I would say Rendell books are more plot driven and Vine more character driven, but that’s a broad generalization.
I agree in terms of success about Rankin and McDermid. Re the crime queens, certainly one is American Elizabeth George with her Inspector Lynley novels — like John Dickson Carr she has successfully been adopted by the Brits. Martha Grimes less so perhaps, save in terms of sales.
We mostly know Lynda La Plante here from PRIME SUSPECT, but she is better known as a crime writer in England.
I don’t think a more or less classical version of the British detective story is in any trouble, but certainly Rankin and McDermid are moving the genre in other directions and inspiring their own schools.
There was a very good dramatization of one of McDermid’s novels recently on BBC7 where they have also done Rankin. While they tend to the Golden Age and thrillers a few American hardboiled voices and some modern crime writers also get represented.
October 8th, 2011 at 11:26 pm
Better late than never, but dusty miller was the common name of a popular bedding plant in the 20’s and 30’s, senecio cineraria.