Ruth Rendell is really first-class, easy, natural and gemutlich in her writing, unhampered in her invention, a natural storyteller who uses crime as conveniently as the Victorian novelists used to, as a tensing part of stories about people. In [No More Dying Then], a provincial policeman has lost his wife and is suffering agonies of deprivation, and a child disappears, not the first to go in this town. Among many good characters, the creation of the destructively indolent Ivor Swan is especially worth praise.
A review of "No More Dying Then," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1971; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 3644, December 31, 1971, p. 1638.
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