Dark Journeys Live Flesh

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

British Author Ruth Rendell writes two kinds of novels: the continuing adventures of two shrewd and dogged suburban policemen, Wexford and Burden, which delight her fans, and dark journeys into the deranged psyches of outwardly normal people, which fascinate her but sell far fewer copies. The first group fits comfortably into the mystery genre. The second resists pigeonholes. The books feature no heroic detective and no gathering of suspects for a summing up. Sometimes the precise nature of a crime remains known only to the perpetrator. The lure to the reader is not to see justice done but to understand the way a dangerous person apprehends the world.

To create these tales Rendell has spent quite a lot of time thinking about unpleasant people. The central character in Live Flesh, Rendell's 31st book of fiction in 22 years, is a rapist, mutilator and murderer. A Dark-Adapted Eye, Rendell's first under a new pen name, Barbara Vine, imagines a murder preceded by intimations of incest, infanticide and homosexual child molestation, all within the bosom of an apparently conventional and loving clan.

For Rendell fans, it may be a bit disappointing to learn that neither book features sly, plump, kindly old Reg Wexford and stern, judgmental, middle-aged John Burden. Live Flesh rests instead on a daring premise: a released convict's obsessive determination to make a friend of the policeman whom he shot and paralyzed while resisting capture. The policeman and the reader are alternately encouraged to believe in this felon's capacity for rehabilitation and disillusioned by his consuming selfishness. Complicating the uneasy relationship is the criminal's growing attraction toward the woman whom the policeman means to marry and cannot sexually satisfy.

A Dark-Adapted Eye belongs to the genre of old murders reconsidered. But the question of who did what to whom and why is teasingly left unresolved. Nonetheless, the reader is almost certain to become enmeshed in the story of domineering, possessive Vera Hillyard, her malicious older son, her seemingly illegitimate younger son, and the devoted sister who secretly seeks to escape Vera's grasp and instead provokes a murder.

Given the remorseless nature of her writing, Rendell, 56, is surprisingly coy about her attempts to comprehend the workings of the criminal mind. "I do research," she says in crisp British tones. "But not in the conventional sense." She does acknowledge that her son Simon, 32, a social worker who has emigrated to Denver, "was a children's officer and has been rather a help with psychopaths and with case histories, especially of children in care." She disclaims firsthand acquaintance with crimes and sounds positively appalled when discussing readers who write in with suggestions they have concocted: "I am always hearing from little old ladies living in quiet places with their even older mothers who say they have a plot they want me to do. It's usually cannibalism or something unspeakable to do with children. Why do I write about such things? Not because I am working out any impulses. My work and my daily life are two separate compartments of my mind."

The compartments were constructed when she left suburban journalism in East London and its Essex suburbs at the time of Simon's birth. It was then, she recalls, that she began writing fiction, waiting for her husband Don, a political reporter, to come home. "I started a historical novel, a romance novel, a Jewish novel although I am only a little bit Jewish, some straight novels. A publisher rejected my comedy-of-manners novel with a nice note saying, 'Do you have any more?' So I gave him my first mystery novel, featuring Wexford and Burden, had it accepted and rewrote it all over Christmas one year."

The two detectives, who have appeared in 13 novels, are the mainstay of a popularity that has seen more than 1 million copies of Rendell's books printed in English; she has also been translated into 14 other languages. Still, Wexford and Burden are fast becoming the bane of her career. Whenever Rendell makes a public appearance, readers are apt to tell her that they could do with fewer explorations into the midnight of the mind. Says the author: "It is very difficult for the creator of a series character to realize that he is very much more real and important to readers than to oneself. I can fully understand why Conan Doyle tried so hard to kill off Sherlock Holmes." Even so, Wexford and Burden are more fully rounded than most series characters. They have lived through infidelities, family estrangements, affairs with suspects and the death of a beloved wife. Through their exploits in the fictional town of Kingsmarkham, Rendell records a key concern of her work and personal life, the suburbanization of the countryside.

Although Rendell's views on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's foreign and economic policies tilt to the left, she sounds deeply conservative when she laments the steady disappearance of rural England. She attributes her alertness to these issues, and her deft handling of nuances of social class, to her long association with the rolling East Anglia plains near Colchester, where she now occupies a 16th century farmhouse on twelve acres outside the village of Polstead. A native of East London, where her parents taught school, and then of the near-in Essex suburbs, Rendell has maintained at least a weekend residence in the region for decades, and settled there a few years ago. "People like to think they rise above class," she says, "but it is a very important element in their lives, and it is much more open out here." She and her husband, whom she married in 1952, divorced in 1975 and remarried in 1977, have thrown themselves into local affairs and avidly tout the region's cultural institutions. Rendell has steeped herself in local tradition and, according to one of her American editors, gives driving directions to her secluded home by enumerating various haunted houses along the way.

Several years ago, Rendell wrote two screenplays but she refuses to do any more or to attempt a play for the stage, despite pleas from producers, because "I cannot stand the tedious business of having to tell everything through dialogue." She is protective of her stories in the hands of others. When Bette Midler made a six-figure offer for the rights to Rendell's favorite book, The Killing Doll, the author spurned the offer. Midler, she says, was wrong for the role.

It is not surprising that a writer tempted to kill off her moneymaking detectives resists repeating herself. The New Girl Friend, a volume of short stories published earlier this year, displayed a dry, macabre humor. Live Flesh is an intimately detailed working-class character study. And A DarkAdapted Eye is a contemporary version of the sprawling Edwardian family tale and a minor classic. Its central theme is the nature of how to tell a story. It begins, and begins again and again -- each time more ripely. Its searching in direction after direction, its inclusion of swatches of pseudojournalism, its final metaphysical ruminations are attempts to define the nature of perception. Yet Rendell craftily plays herself down: "I suppose the subject of my book traces to Tristram Shandy and to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. But I am perfectly happy being considered just a part of the crime genre. I write as I read, for pleasure. At present I am making my way through Rider Haggard's She -- for the 15th time."