Ruth Rendell, a prolific and hugely popular writer of intricately plotted mystery novels that combined psychological insight, social conscience and, not infrequently, teeth-chattering terror, died on Saturday in London. She was 85.
Ms. Rendell, who lived in London, was a Labour Party member of the House of Lords and was known more formally as Baroness Rendell of Babergh. Her death was announced by her publisher, Penguin Random House, according to British news media. A cause of death was not given but Ms. Rendell had been hospitalized since having a stroke in January.
Like her friend P.D. James, who died last year at 94, Ms. Rendell was widely credited with pushing mystery into new themes and ways of storytelling. It was often said of her, as it was of Ms. James, that her work transcended the genre, and that by any measure she was an enormously talented writer.
Ms. Rendell wrote more than 60 books, many featuring her best-known protagonist, Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford. The most recent book was “The Girl Next Door,” published last year. The works of Ms. Rendell, who also wrote under the name Barbara Vine, have been translated into more than 20 languages and have had worldwide sales estimated as high as 60 million.
Ms. Rendell won three prestigious Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, which named her to its list of grandmasters. She also won four Gold Daggers and a Diamond Dagger from England’s Crime Writers’ Association.
“None of that happened by accident or luck,” Val McDermid, a Scottish crime writer, told The Guardian on Saturday. “Talent played its part but so too did hard graft. A book flowed from her prolific pen approximately every nine months.”
Ms. McDermid wrote that Ms. Rendell, along with Ms. James and the British writer Reginald Hill, who died in 2012, “transformed what had become a staid and formulaic genre into something that offered scope for a different kind of crime novel. In their separate ways they turned it into a prism for examining the world around them with a critical eye.”
Chief Inspector Wexford appeared in her first novel, “From Doon With Death,” published in 1964 and in many books thereafter. He also became a familiar figure on British television.
Unlikely or not, Wexford was Ms. Rendell’s alter ego, she said in a video statement for Simon & Schuster: “I’m not creating a character so much as putting myself as a man on the page.” The author once said she imagined Wexford as a rather taciturn “big, ugly man.” As Wexford’s caseload grew book by book, Ms. Rendell tried to make him grow as well, becoming “a bit less tough, a bit more tolerant.”
Chief Inspector Wexford was almost christened Waterford, as Ms. Rendell recalled. On vacation in Ireland, she visited both Wexford and Waterford and decided that either would be acceptable for her sleuth’s surname. So, how did she settle on “Wexford”?
“I don’t know why,” she said. “I guess I just like the letter ‘X.’ ”
Ms. Rendell also wrote a score of stand-alone novels, typically featuring protagonists on the edges of society. From her earliest writing days, Ms. Rendell wanted to do more than create puzzles revolving around who killed whom and why. So, as she recalled for Simon & Schuster, she laced her mysteries with such themes as racism in the English countryside, damage to the environment, domestic violence and arranged marriages among immigrants.
She acknowledged worrying early on that her readers might not like her delving into such serious issues. “But they did,” she said. “They wrote to me and told me that they did.”
Ms. Rendell began writing as Barbara Vine with her 1986 novel “A Dark-Adapted Eye,” a story of family secrets set in World War II. The novel was so different from what she had been doing that the author thought she needed a nom de plume. As The Guardian noted, Ms. Rendell saw Barbara Vine as “a bit more serious, a bit more searching, analytical perhaps.”
Ms. Rendell eschewed gratuitous violence and torture in her works. Yet she could create hair-raising suspense as she did, for instance, in “Master of the Moor,” her 1982 novel about particularly grisly killings in a community of tormented souls. And she had a taste for the macabre, demonstrated for example in “Not in the Flesh,” her 2007 novel that opens with a truffle hound finding a human hand in a patch of woods.
Ms. Rendell did not have to struggle to imagine troubled people and bleak settings. “I don’t think the world is a particularly pleasant place,” she once told The Associated Press.
Ms. Rendell was friendly and approachable, as she demonstrated at gatherings of mystery fans. But she could be steely as well. At a mystery convention in Philadelphia some years ago, several eager picture-takers got too close as she was giving a talk. Her eyes flashed in rebuke, and the camera shutters were silenced.
The crime writer Simon Brett captured the force of Ms. Rendell’s personality. “I last saw her when she was giving a speech last year and she was mesmerizing,” he told The Guardian on Saturday. “Although it was always quite spooky, because she was so affable in person, and yet you knew she could summon up dark places in her mind.”
Born Ruth Barbara Grasemann on Feb. 17, 1930, to a Swedish mother and British father, the author began her writing career as a reporter on an Essex newspaper. She did not last long, as she made the mistake of writing about a local sports club dinner without attending the event. Thus, her article failed to note that the after-dinner speaker dropped dead midway through his speech.
Ms. Rendell’s husband, Don, whom she divorced and remarried, died in 1999. She is survived by a son, Simon.
Mr. Rendell was a made a Labour Party life peer in 1997. She was reputed to have given generously to charities and was a vocal campaigner against female genital mutilation.
In an interview with The Guardian in 2013, Ms. Rendell said she had no plans to retire. “I couldn’t do that,” she said, calling her writing “absolutely essential to my life. I’ll do it until I die.”
Ms. Rendell’s final novel, “Dark Corners,” is to be published in October.
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