More than sixteen million of her novels (published in twenty-five languages) have been sold worldwide, several of which have been adapted as motion pictures, including eight television series in the United Kingdom.
Her work has received not only the recognition of substantial international sales but also the praise of fellow writers and reviewers. P. D. James, although on the other side of the political bench, has stated of her good friend that, when it comes to mystery fiction, "No one has explored with greater sensitivity and compassion those dark recesses of the human psyche. She is one of the remarkable novelists of her generation" (quoted in People, 18 December 1995). Val McDermid, who has called her "an anatomist of the human psyche," declared in Crime and Mystery Fiction Journal, "No-one can equal her range or her accomplishment; no-one has earned more respect from her fellow practitioners." Like so many other reviewers, Francis Wyndham of TLS: The Times Literary Supplement (1994), praising her "highly developed faculty for social observation" and her "masterly grasp of plot construction," has written that "Ruth Rendell's remarkable talent has been able to accommodate the rigid rules of the reassuring mystery story (where a superficial logic conceals a basic fantasy) as well as the wider range of the disturbing psychological thriller (where an appearance of nightmare overlays a scrupulous realism)."
Ruth Barbara Grasemann was born on 17 February 1930 in South Woodford, London, to an English father, Arthur Grasemann, and a Swedish mother, Ebba Elise Kruse Grasemann, both schoolteachers with great interest in literature and the arts.
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