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...

Primarily ["Murder Being Once Done"] is a novel of police routine, traditional in its plotting, full of false clues and leads that peter out. Secondarily it is a novel of character exploration, sensitively written, full of the deft touches one comes to expect from the author of "One Across, Two Down" and "No More Dying Then." Newgate Callendar, in a review of "Murder Being Once Done," in The New York Times Book Review (copyright © 1...