Ruth Rendell (born 1930) was one of the world's most skillful and popular writers of mysteries and suspense thrillers. Ruth Grasemann was born on February 17, 1930, in London, England, and was educated at Laughton High School in Essex. She worked as a...

Ruth Rendell has in recent years established herself as a major force in modern detective fiction, having won such prestigious awards as the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, the Current Crime Silver Cup for the best crime...

In the world of mystery and detective fiction, Ruth Rendell is considered by most critics as one of the leading, if not the leading, practitioners of the genre. Often hailed as the "Queen of Crime" or "the First Lady of Mystery," she has also been...

Anyone who hasn't yet read a book by Ruth Rendell should consider themselves lucky, very lucky indeed. There's an unbelievable, indescribable pleasure in finding a 'new' writer - new to you, at least - who gets your motor running, who writes stories that...

A FATAL INVERSION By Barbara Vine Bantam. 272 pp. $14.95 TALKING TO STRANGE MEN By Ruth Rendell Pantheon. 280 pp. $16.95 RUTH RENDELL, along with P.D. James, is Britain's principal recent gift to crime readers. Rendell writes three different sorts of crime story. The...

Theatrical and literary agents are taking leading roles in a corporate drama in London, resigning one after another from a major agency and threatening to take their clients with them.The exodus from PFD Group Ltd., a leading international literary and talent agency, could be a...

Today is Saturday, Feb. 17, the 48th day of 2007. There are 317 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On Feb. 17, 1801, the House of Representatives broke an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, electing Jefferson president; Burr became vice president.On...

Ruth Rendell is hailed by her publishers as "The New First Lady of Mystery." The fact is that, publishers' enthusiasm aside, Rendell is worth serious critical attention because she has not only created a series of ingenious and clever plots, but has, above all, explored human nature effectively and with genuine insight. The appeal of the Rendell novels is diversified and full; she uses such interest-generating devices as social criticism, brief comments upon the detective story, and sho...

With twenty-two books written over eighteen years, Ruth Rendell has established a double eminence in two separate categories of crime fiction: the classic puzzle, with a stable background and a recurring cast headed by a mildly eccentric detective and his more conventional subordinate; and the novel of pure suspense, in which a blundering innocent and a haunted psychopath become fatally entangled in a paranoid atmosphere of cross purposes and sinister coincidence. In both fields success is difficult, but fo...

Although most of the eleven stories in Ruth Rendell's new collection [The Fallen Curtain] have a crime as their subject, its detection is not the object in any of them. Instead she sets out to create a mood—ranging from the domestic to the mildly macabre—and then suddenly, in the last few pages, whisks away the veil to reveal a situation which startles the reader as much as the characters. The method could become mechanical, but it is never so here: each story has its own individual and...