Black bird scheming in the dead of night: 95 Years with The Maltese Falcon (1930) by Dashiell Hammett

"What's this bird, this falcon, that everybody's all steamed up about?"

"You're a fine lot of lollipops!"

--PI Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, published 95 years ago this month, is such a landmark archetype of detective fiction that it feels kind of hard to say anything original about it at this point.  If you had to compile a list of the ten most important detective novels it would have to be on there, along with what?  The Moonstone? The Mystery of Orcival?  The Hound of the Baskervilles?  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd?  Those few titles come immediately to mind.  I suppose some people would include Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, but I've always felt that one was actually somewhat dreadful, the wonderful fractured stained-glass similes notwithstanding.  The Long Goodbye, now...

From the previous year, 1929, American reviewers had loved Hammett's Continental Op crime novels Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (the latter, to be sure, to a lesser extent) and they were primed to embrace Hammett's new tough detective, Sam Spade.  In 1930 they simply went bonkers over The Maltese Falcon.  

Everyone wants the bird....

Author and El Paso Times book review editor Eugene Cunningham raved: "I shall be surprised if it doesn't find a niche among the Best Detective Stories of All Time."  Popular newspaper columnist and satirical wit Franklin P. Adams, a member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, pronounced The Maltese Falcon "the only detective tale that I have been able to read through since Sherlock Holmes."  

It was the realism of the book that appealed most strongly to American reviewers: the realism of the cops, the crooks and most of all the private detective. They felt like they had read an account of something that really might have happened on the streets of San Francisco, where the novel is set.  The precious falcon statuette which nominally drives the plot--the dingus as Sam calls it--is something out of an Edgar Wallace thriller, sure, but the desperate, dangerous characters hiding it and hunting for it make the story feel real.  The vitality of Hammett's writing makes these people live (until they die).

"Until the coming of Mr. Dashiell Hammett in Red Harvest and now in The Maltese Falcon," observed Donald Douglas in the New Republic

the memorable detectives were gentlemen.  The ever-delightful M. Lecoq and his copy, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, are fair gods against the gnomes.  Their only worth successor, Father Brown, is a priest.  Scratch every other detective and you'll find an M. Lecoq.  Now comes Mr. Hammett's tough guy in Red Harvest and Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, and you find the Pinkerton Operative as a scoundrel without pity or remorse, taking his whiffs of drink and his casual amours between catching crooks, treating the police with a cynical contempt, always getting his crook by foul and fearless means, above the law like a satyr--and Mr. Hammett describing his deeds in a glistening and fascinating prose as "American" as [Ring] Lardner's, and every bit as original in musical rhythm and bawdy humor.  

There is nothing like these books in the whole range of detective fiction.  The plots don't matter so much.  The art does; and there is an absolute distinction of real art.  It is (in its small way) like Wagner writing about the gnomes in "Rheingold."  The gnomes have an eloquence of speech and a fascinating mystery of disclosure.  Don't get me wrong, bo.  It's not the tawdry gum-shoeing of the ten-cent magazine.  It is the genuine presence of the myth.  The events of The Maltese Falcon may have happened that way in real life.  No one save Mr. Hammett could have woven them to such a silver-steeley mesh.  

Alberich in Wagner's Das Rheingold

Reviewers disagreed over whether the nominal hero of the novel, Sam Spade, could even be seen as a hero at all.  Barend Beek at the Book Nook in the Miami News observed that after finishing The Maltese Falcon "one still wonders whether the hero is a hero or a deep-dyed villain."  In England in the Daily Herald reviewer Maurice Fagenck expressed no doubt that the ending of the novel would leave readers "better disposed to the murderers than towards the gloating detective."  

Reviewers in England generally seemed less enamored with the novel than besotted Americans.  I think the public school honor code ethos still held greater sway among the Brits, at least the elite tastemakers in the papers and journals.  

Sam's motivations were a mystery to a lot of people because of the way Hammett weaves his silver-steely mesh, his exterior third person narrative capturing people's words and actions but not their thoughts.  So in judging Sam we can only judge him by what he does and says.  And for most of the characters in this book their words aren't worth shit, to be blunt, and their actions are elliptical, if not downright shameful.  

The plot that so many found startlingly original at the time seems fantastically familiar a century later.  So imitated was Hammett that the plot must have seemed cliched even a decade later.  The whole thing opens at the detective offices of Sam and his partner Miles Archer.  Their secretary Effie Perine ushers in to see them a luscious young redhead, wonderfully named Miss Wonderly.  The lady explains that she wants someone to shadow a certain unsavory character named Floyd Thursby, who has run off to San Francisco with her younger sister Corinne, only seventeen, five years younger than she.  Archer, obviously very smitten with Miss Wonderly (as is Sam but he keeps a better grip on himself), volunteers for the job.  

That's the end of chapter one; chapter two opens with Sam learning from the cops that Archer has been found shot dead in the night on the job; soon afterward he learns that Thursby has been shot dead as well.  Sam himself is suspected by the cops in their murders.  Worse yet, he also finds that Miss Wonderly has been lying to him (which he already suspected) and that her name is not even Wonderley but, supposedly, Brigid O'Shaughnessy.  She's a crook of some sort, and there are other crooks in the game as well.  

What is the game?  Well, whatever it is, it involves a statuette of a black bird known as the maltese falcon.  A certain dingus as Sam Spade colloquially calls it--a gizmo or a thingummybob, say.  

Alfred Hitchcock would have called it a macguffin--the mystery object that propels the story's plot, even if we never actually see it. The thing everyone is after.  Hammett certainly didn't invent this sort of plot--you can look back to Conan Doyle's "The Six Napoleons," for example--but he certainly put a new, modern gloss on it.

Maltese Falcon is such an epochal work of mystery fiction that most of us can never capture the excitement of the novelty which 1930 readers felt when first perusing it.  But we can feel excitement at seeing so many genre tropes really come together and into scintillating life for the first time.  

And, here, I guess, I'm going to get into some SPOILERS, so if you actually haven't read it yet and you keep on reading, I WARNED you.  

Humphrey Bogart playing Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941)
It's the iconic hard-boiled detective on film, although Bogart looking nothing
like Same Spade as described in the novel  ("pleasantly like a blond satan")

First we see here the client who lies to the detective.  And, man, does Brigid lie!  Practically every word out of this woman's mouth is a lie, including "and" and "the."  She is, for all practical purposes, a malignant sociopath, the mother of all femmes fatales.  The story is largely the story of a man, Sam, overcoming his poisonous attraction to this fatal woman.  Brigid killed one man outright and is directly responsible for two other men getting killed.  And then she expects Sam to play the sap for her!  Sensibly Sam declines.  

Hammett establishes the whole PI ethos here with the line "I won't play the sap for you"--no man is going to let himself be taken advantage of by a woman--and also his honor system: "When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it."  Brigid killed Archer--whom Sam didn't even like and in fact was cuckolding by having an affair with his wife--and now she has to take the rap for it.

That's it, there you have every hard-boiled detective novel for years to come.  Spillane may have made his detective an outright psychotic, which Spade emphatically is not, but he's simply imitating Hammett. It was Ross Macdonald who finally brought something new to PI detective fiction, by bringing psychology and sensitivity into it--taking the egg out of the boiling water a couple of minutes earlier, as it were, where Spillane left it in so long the yolk hardened into an unpalatable slab of sulphurous rock.  

Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in The Maltese Falcon 

Hammett also introduced decadent queer villains into the hard-boiled detective story, in the form of that emphatically gay Levantine, Joel Cairo, with his chypre-scented handkerchiefs, not to mention notorious gunsel Wilmer Cook and the falsely avuncular fat man, Caspar Gutman.  

I don't know why people assume Gutman necessarily is gay--he has a daughter, Rhea, and unctuously refers to Wilmer as being like a son to him.  However, Joel Cairo undeniably is flaming.  He's your classic crime fiction queen, elegantly nasty and frequently bitchy.  It's not long before he and Brigid are literally scratching at each other like cats and slanging like a pair of dolled-up Dynasty divas.  

Bridgid resents it when Joel sneers to her that long-lashed pretty boy killer Wilmer was "the one you couldn't make" in Constantinople.  (The city's name was changed to Istanbul the year Falcon was published.)  It's Joel who cooingly caresses Wilmer when he is dealt a great blow late in the novel.  It's obviously they who have been intimate, not Wilmer and Gutman.  It's hard, actually, to imagine anyone having sex with Gutman, certainly in the present day of the novel.  Did anyone else see him, by the by, as inspiration for Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe?  Actor Sydney Greenstreet, who memorably incarnated Gutman on film, also played Nero Wolfe on radio, I recall.  

Wilmer (Elisha Cook, Jr.),
Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet),
and Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), 
all perfectly cast

I always read that Hammett in referring to Wilmer slipped in the word "gunsel," meaning catamite, tricking publishers into thinking the word meant gunman.  But Cairo gets called a fairy and a pansy and there's not any doubt what those words meant in 1930!  So just why would gunsel have been such a tough sell?  Hammett also alludes to Wilmer, that nasty little tyke, telling Sam "Fuck you" without actually spelling the words.  Sam calls the whole queer gang "a fine lot of lollipops," which may be another example of Twenties gay slang.  

Amusingly The Film Experience website described The Maltese Falcon basically as "the story of a group of gay men that went on an antiquing trip that got out of hand."

I have to say Chandler ripped off a lot of this in the very derivative, vastly inferior novel The Big Sleep. When old Ray got mad about Ross Macdonald ripping off "his" signature Big Sleep PI patter in The Moving Target, he should have thought about how a decade earlier he had brazenly ripped off from The Maltese Falcon actual plot elements, like Wilmer, in The Big Sleep.  But then almost everyone in the field ripped off Hammett in one way or another.

END SPOILERS

What is it about this damn bird?

Hard-boiled crime fiction's debt to The Maltese Falcon is incalculable, like the value of the fabled jewel-encrusted bird itself.  It's fascinating to think how much the hard-boiled ethos owes to a man who himself was an op (however much he may have exaggerated what he did as one) and had egregiously bad relations with women as a chronic adulterer and even a sexual assaulter.  Did it take a deeply flawed man like this to shape all the inchoate "tough" hard-boiled elements into a landmark novel, a book that forever changed the landscape of crime fiction?  

Often the central theme of The Maltese Falcon feels like "Women are the very devil."  Brigid, of course, is no picnic, shall we say, but then there's Iva too, Miles Archer's wife whom Sam is having an affair with and at this point just wants taken off his hands.  As portrayed in the novel she is a genuine pain.  

Spade is attracted to women, but also repelled by them.  The only woman in the book he actually likes is his loyal secretary Effie Perine, who is always being described as "boyish" and desexualized.  (Maybe Joel Cairo might have been attracted to her.)  

Mary Astor as Brigid and Humphrey Bogart as Sam in The Maltese Falcon
Both are too old for their parts by a decade are more, as described in the book,
yet both of them are great in the film.

"You're a damned good man, sister," Sam tells Effie, rubbing her cheek.  This, incidentally, is another one of the classic hard-boiled tropes, the loyal secretary in love with her boss whom he never actually has sex with.  Spillane ripped this element off as well, making sure for good measure to satisfy his and his readers' sadistic urges by having Hammer's secretary get stripped and tortured.  (Brigid is "only" forced to strip before Sam in Falcon.)

My friend of a quarter century now (!), the brilliant blogger Nick Fuller, hates this book and deems Sam Spade a sociopath.  All I can say is Nick should meet Mike Hammer.  Or maybe not, I really wouldn't wish that crazy, murderous bastard on anyone.  I can happily abide the company of Sam Spade, however, and I love The Maltese Falcon.

Rocked Out: Some Lie and Some Die (1973) by Ruth Rendell

As I commented on a previous post, Ruth Rendell when she was publicizing one of her final novels, The Child's Child (2012), divulged that she had had a gay cousin who died in 1989 from AIDS complications, to whom she had been very close.  He was put through aversion therapy in the 1970s, she told an interviewer, "and it was so horrible he ran away....Of course I knew he was gay.  We were great friends as well as cousins."

Well, you know me, I found myself wondering, who was this person, this cousin of Ruth Rendell's who suffered so tragically from the warped attitudes of a bygone era (or perhaps not so bygone)?  I think the answer lies in two book dedications.  In 1970 Rendell dedicated her Wexford detective novel A Guilty Thing Surprised "for Michael Richards, my cousin, with love."  Three years later Michael shared the dedication of another Wexford mystery, Some Lie and Some Die, with the author's own son Simon:  

To my son, Simon Rendell, who goes to festivals, and my cousin, Michael Richards, who wrote the song, this book is dedicated with love and gratitude.

I presume this amorous couple is heterosexual, though it's hard to be certain.

The festivals to which Rendell refers were "pop festivals" (or rock festivals as Americans would say), where tens or even hundreds of thousands of fans (along with occasional Maoists and Hell's Angels) would gather in fields to hear their favorite bands play live.  Rendell published the novel in 1973, just four years after Woodstock in the United States and three years after the 1970 Isle of Wight Pop Festival in England, of which it is claimed that there was an even bigger attendance than Woodstock (supposedly some 600,000 people, though newspaper accounts at the time had it at more like 250,000).  

the magical mystery tour is 
dying to take you away

Singers and bands at the Isle of Wight Festival included Chicago, The Doors, Joni Mitchell, The Who, Sly & the Family Stone, Emerson, Lake and Palmer,  Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Jethro Tull, Donovan, Leonard Cohen and The Moody Blues.  A right nice lineup, isn't it?    

They even had Tiny Tim with his ukulele singing There Will Always Be an England and Land of Hope and Glory (so much for Communism).  Gentle Tim defended the hippies, telling reporters: "They're such kind people, I just love them.  They have their own way of life and I see no reason why they shouldn't lead it."  Ah, tolerance, it was a wonderful concept while it lasted.  

Conservative locals on the Isle of Wight, who were worried about Communists, bikers, druggos and hippies, were less than enthralled with the coming of the rockers, however.  The island's conservative MP Mark Woodnutt spent months futilely trying to thwart the festival from alighting on his isle's shores. 

the Honorable Mark Woodnutt
(regrettably not in his hippy outfit)

When the dreaded thing did come off in spite of him, Woodnutt, then 51, himself attended the festival, as he put it, "incognito in my hippy outfit"; and he later declared disgustedly to parliament that "the scene...was one of indescribable squalor and filth."  

Afterward McNutt was able to induce Parliament to pass an Act allowing the Isle of Wight's county council to have approval over local festivals numbering over 5000 people.  They promptly gave thumbs down to a festival the next year.  Not surprising with council members with names like Sinclair Glossop and William Rees-Millington!  Another pop festival was not held on the island for 32 years.  

Pop festivals continued in other parts of England, however, provoking more conservative consternation.  At an event the next year at Weeley in Essex (closer to Rendell's home turf), several Hell's Angels instigated "displays of public savagery," resulting in arrests and parliamentary condemnations.  

Ruth Rendell, being the trendy lady she was and only a smidge over forty, decided in 1972 that she would use such a festival as the backdrop for the murder in her next Wexford novel.  As she said in her dedication, her college-age son, who turned nineteen in 1972, was a regular festival attendee, so she probably learned a good bit about festivals from him directly and didn't have just to read about them in the newspapers.  I wouldn't be surprised if Simon had been at Weeley, at the least.  

not exactly flower power

Then there was Ruth's cousin Michael Richards.  How old was he?  Michael was the son of Rendell's aunt Ethel Margaret "Margot" Grasemann, who was fifteen years younger than her sole brother, Rendell's father Arthur Grasemann.  Margot Grasemann at age 23 married Reginald Richards in 1938, but I don't know when Michael was born to the couple: it could have been any time from 1940 to 1950 or even a little later.  In short he might have been ten or twenty years younger than his Cousin Ruth, who was born in 1930.  

In the latter case he would have been a contemporary of Ruth's son (Ruth married young), rather than Ruth, which would accord with someone being subjected to aversion therapy in the 1970s at the behest of concerned parents.  Of course we don't know that Michael was Rendell's beloved gay cousin, but the book dedications and Michael's participation in the composition of the song in Some Lie and Some Die certainly are suggestive.

Rendell later dedicated Shake Hands Forever (1975) to her four Grasemann aunts, including Margot, but in 2012 in The Child's Child, which draws on her schoolmaster father's family history, she names the worst of the gay schoolmaster protagonist's sisters Ethel, which was Margot's first name.  Margot had died at age 93 in 2008.  Was this Ruth's posthumous revenge on her aunt for her cousin's aversion therapy (i.e., diabolical electroshock torture)?  

the hills are alive with the sound of music

The song which Margot's son Michael Richards wrote for the novel is called "Let-Me-Believe," and the complete lyrics are given just after the dedication and just before a frontispiece map of the festival grounds.  The chorus runs 

So come by, come nigh,

come try and tell why

some sigh, some cry,

some lie and some die.

The song, like the map, is in the book for a reason, you may be sure, meaning it is pertinent to the tale.  Now, what is the tale, you may be asking, feeling the urge, Monty Python like, to say to me get on with it!  Well, let me tell you.  

American first edition of a novel
reprinted many times and still
in print today

When the novel opens, a pop festival is coming to Kingsmarkham, still policed by the redoubtable team of Chief Inspector Wexford and Inspector Burden in this, their eighth detective novel.  

Mike Burden, now an overprotective single father and still a conservative blockhead, is frankly hostile to the festival, carping about his fifteen-year-old son John's intense devotion to rock star Zeno Vedast, the festival's superstar headliner.

"I just don't understand this craze for pop music," rages Mike long after the started.  (Talk about shutting the barn door.)  "Why can't John play classical records?"  Oh dear.  Reg Wexford, the voice of mainstream liberalism, "tolerant of everything but intolerance," scoffs at this, as you might well imagine.  

"They're only a bunch of kids come to enjoy themselves," Reg amiably pronounces, adding "I'd like to be one of them...off to the pop festival."  Wexford even strikes up a friendly acquaintance with a young Marxist African prince (!) attending the festival, though he makes clear that he himself is not in sync with Marxism.  

One English reviewer of the novel carped that Wexford was becoming something of an all-knowing gasbag.  There may be some truth to this, but I'd still rather spend the course of the investigation with him than the somewhat aptly-named Burden.  

They are coming!

The case is an interesting one, much more so than the one detailed a few years earlier in A Guilty Thing Surprised.  That was a country house mystery, very traditional for 1970 and not very convincing.  Some Lie and Some Die actually is a country house mystery as well, I suppose, in that the rock festival takes place on the grounds of a diminished country house estate called Sundays.  Its owner, Martin Silk, is Wexford's age (sixty, we are told), but, unlike Wexford, he's not tolerant of youth, he's addicted to it--"one of those people who cannot bear to relinquish their youth."  

bobbies versus bikers at Weeley

Silk thinks that the young people can do no wrong.  He's hosting the festival, he tells Wexford, "because I love young people.  I love their music.  They've been hounded out of the Isle of Wight.  No wants them.  I do."

Wexford speaks to the crowd, urging them to behave, and gets roundly booed off the stage as "fuzz."  It all goes off pretty well, however, with the author especially approving of the environmentalist ballads (especially the one about the disappearing butterflies) of Betti Ho, "a little Chinese girl, as pretty and delicate and clean as a flower."  (Something like the Asian Joan Baez, I gather.)  

There's also a group called The Verb To Be, which made me laugh, this would be a rock group in a crime novel by grammar pedant Rendell, naturally.  But the big draw, of course, is Zeno with his super cool smash hit rock ballad "Let-Me-Believe."  

But this being a murder mystery novel, it's not long before a couple having sex in the abandoned quarry on the Sundays property discovers the brutally beaten body of a dead woman and goes screaming for help to Wexford who is one the scene doing concert duty.  However, it turns out that the woman--a certain London men's club cocktail waitress named Dawn Stonor who originally hailed from Kingsmarkham--was actually killed a few days' before the festival.  

Does this let the rock stars and their fans off the hook?  What about the denizens of the five recently built bungalows overlooking the quarry?  Wexford's investigation turns up some extraordinary facts indeed before an old photo finally allows him to pin culpability on the guilty. 

In A Catalogue of Crime Jacques Barzun called Some Lie and Some Die a good illustration of the "nice balance between police procedure and psychology that marks this author's best work," concluding: "The neatly restricted locale, small number of suspects in a brutal killing, and strong ending make this a classic tale."

I agree that this is a strong detective story.  The problem is an interesting one, the characterization good and colorful and the denouement--a variant on the classic drawing room lecture--effective, with the author's signature lecture on murder psychology from Wexford.  Why would the police need actual psychiatrists when they have Wexford?  I knew the things in the novel that were important, but I never quite pinpointed the correct sequence of events until Reg explained it all to me.  

Peter Capaldi as Zeno Vedast 
in Some Lie and Some Die

Ruth Rendell has always been more popular in the UK than the US (unlike her gal pal PD James, who achieved bestseller status in the States), and in the UK there was a Wexford television series (part of the larger Ruth Rendell Mysteries series) which ran for 13 seasons, from 1987 to 2000.  I don't believe this series ever ran in the US and, truth be told, it looks rather dreary to me, without the panache of the Inspector Morse series which ran over the exact same time span and the compelling presences of John Thaw and Kevin Whately as Morse and Sergeant Lewis.  Wexford and Burden look like decided also-rans in comparison, at least on television.  (On paper I personally much prefer Rendell to Morse author Colin Dexter.)

Some Lie and Some Die was adapted in 1990 and features former Doctor Who actor Peter Capaldi as Zeno Vedast.  I feel sure I have seen him in a number of things, but at the moment I can't recall them.  However I can say he is well-cast as Zeno.  He even sings a version of "Let-Me-Believe" in the episode.  To be honest it sounds like pale Pink Floyd, but he's a very credible performer.  However, the episode looks dully filmed on the whole.  Someone enterprising person on British television should give Ruth Rendell's books renewed looks, they offer good murder material indeed upon which to build a series.  

Now, let's look back at the Isle of Wight, 1970.

Died on the Vine: The Child's Child (2012), by Barbara Vine

By the time the 21st century rolled around, Ruth Rendell, who turned seventy as its dawn, had published forty-six novels and six short story collections over thirty-six years.  That is a lot of writing, but the seemingly indefatigable author kept on going, producing another score of crime novels and another short story collection in the fourteen years left to her.  There were nine non-series Rendells (the last published posthumously in 2015), six Wexfords and five Barbara Vines.  There was also, a few years after her death, yet another short story collection.  

Rendell's books continued to garner respectful notices in the 21st century, but gradually some carping from the critics set in, usually having to do with the aging author's failure to keep abreast with the trends of modern life.  For example, her series detective inspector Inspector Wexford, who finally retired from the force in his penultimate novel in 2011, continued to grouse about computers way past the point where this was believable.  Modern slang and grammar seemed increasingly to bother Rendell and she did tend to go on about "political correctness" (now replaced by "wokeness").  

This is okay, up to a point, and perhaps to be expected from an elderly writer (I'm not quite old yet, I like to tell myself, but I can't keep up with youth culture either).  One thing a writer can do to try to sidestep the problem is to write about the past and Rendell did some of this, though largely she kept writing about modern-day England, with noticeably slackening authority.  But a larger problem, I think, for a crime writer, is when their plotting skill declines.  I don't care what some critics say, plotting matters in genre fiction.  And looking back at Rendell's later books, a decade after death, I am afraid I think it's fair to say that the author's plotting skill largely left her (or she left it) in the new century.  

I enjoyed the nonseries Rendell thriller A Sight for Sore Eyes (1998), though it's a rehash of old themes, and I think Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (2001), though it's a rehash too and rather discursive, has its points. The Wexfords all are readable, though none of the late ones as mysteries are up to the standard of earlier efforts.  Of the five 21st century Vines I only like one of them, The Blood Doctor (2002).

The problem with the later non-Wexford Rendells, aside from a lack of temporal authenticity (this is a problem in the Wexfords too), is that the plotting is not very good and you don't have the Wexford milieu to force the author to provide some sort of actual mystery.  Things happen, but the narratives drag and the things that happen are not very exciting or suspenseful or mysterious.  The Vines lack the narrative complexity of earlier volumes, while the non-series Rendell thrillers do not thrill.  Really it seems as if Rendell largely had lost interest in even trying to thrill the reader.  

Books like Portobello (2008), Tigerlily's Orchids (2010). The St. Vita Society (2012), The Girl Next Door (2014) and Dark Corners (2015), seem more like novels of manners about quirky people (to put it mildly) trying to manage in London.  There may be a murder at some point, but it's not the author's real interest.  I first noticed this when reading her ostensible serial killer novel The Rottweiler (2003), perhaps the least exciting serial killer novel ever written.  Maybe Rendell had done murder thrillers so many times she just became bored with it.  

And if you like these mild manners novels of sorts, that's fine.  But for me they make me miss the days of The Lake of Darkness (1980) and A Demon in My View (1976) and even One Across, Two Down (1971) and Vanity Dies Hard (1966)--books that were short, to the point and, yes, suspenseful.  I think wordage often worked for the Vines, which at their best successfully imitate Victorian sensation novels, but wordage was an enemy of the Rendell thrillers, ultimately overthrowing them.  Frankly it finally overthrew the Vines as well.  

I abandoned Portobello halfway though and skipped briefly to the end.  It has a typical gallery of Rendell's obsessive-compulsives and outright wackos: the guy who sees spirits, the freeloading hooligan determined to get his girl back and, most infamously, the guy desperately addicted to sugar-free sweets.  (Yes, I'm talking about the notorious chocorange subplot.)  

I managed to finish Tigerlily's Orchids, which I thought was better, but it was still the same type of thing: the alcoholic woman determined to drink herself to death, the guy obsessed with the pretty Asian woman next door, etc.  It was like each year Rendell took a kaleidoscope and gave it a little shake, just enough for the familiar bits to settle in a slightly different pattern.  

There's a drowning in Ladbroke in the Grand Union Canal
which takes place in the main portion of The Child's Child
Was it murder???

After two previous tries I made a determined to attempt the finish The Child's Child, the final Barbara Vine novel, the penultimate book published during her lifetime.  When it was published in 2012 one book critic who dared dissent from the usual laudatory review chorus was Claire Black in the Scotsman, who boldly announced: "The Child's Child...just isn't very good.  There, I've said it."  I'm afraid Black is generally right in her assessment.  This take on Rendell is largely correct as well, I think.  

At first it seemed like this might be a real return to form after the blandness of The Minotaur (2005) and outright disappointment of The Birthday Present (2008), but, alas, this hope proved illusory.  Any return to form is but fleeting. The novel, over 100,000 words long I believe, interweaves present and past like the best Vines, but unfortunately not effectively.  In fact I should allow that there is no real interweaving, there's simply a modern-day framing story, set in 2011, placed around an ostensible unpublished 1951 novel, The Child's Child, which details events, based on real life, from 1929 to 1948 (?).  The novella gets two-thirds of the space, with a very brief modern-day coda following.  

What it all really feels like is two separate stories, although the modern-day story is rather artificially manipulated to make the three principals in it mimic the pattern set by the three principals in the novel within the novel .  Let's get to it, then, shall we?

The framing story is about the two Easton siblings, Andrew, age 30, and Grace, age 28.  Andrew is a publisher (that's how he comes across The Child's Child) and Grace is a graduate student working on a thesis about unwed mothers in literature.  After their grandmother dies the siblings inherit from her a large, lovely Victorian house in Hampstead and they go there to live together, dividing the house between them, though it only has one kitchen.  

Andrew barely exists as a character, besides that he's gay, and Grace makes a rather dull, pro forma narrator.  But along comes James Derain, a novelist published by Andrew's firm who also becomes Andrew's new boyfriend.  He moves into the house to live with Andrew, which soon becomes a problem.

You see, James is, as Grace rather clinically puts it: "One of those gay men who dislike women, all women.  I had never met one before, but I had heard of them.  I knew they existed."  Well, they certainly exist in this book, anyway.  I have never met one either, but perhaps they do exist, just like straight men who hate all women.  Grace does on to tell us that such gays "were the antithesis of those whose closest and best friend is a woman and of whom they are often fonder than they are of their current lover."  Apparently those gays go through lovers like bunches of grapes.  

Would you trust this guy?
Cary Grant in Suspicion (1941)

Whatever James is, he's a real pill though.  He's constantly rude to Grace and loves to lecture her about his hero Oscar Wilde, though he sanctimoniously denounces George Sand, whom incredibly he thought was a man until Grace corrected him, as dishonest for using a male pen name.  

To Grace he contemptuously dismisses the cruel historical treatment of unwed mothers as of no account compared with that which was meted out to gay man through the years.  Grace rightly can't stand this self-righteous, combative prick, and I can't blame her for that.  In fact I don't see how Andrew could stand him.  

Oh, wait, he's one of those fantastically attractive gays, like Tim Cornish in No Night is Too Long.  Rendell's straight woman in that book, sounding very much like a straight woman born around 1930, compared Tim to a "young Robert Redford."  In this book, Grace, born apparently in 1983, goes four times better with the Hollywood film star references by telling us that James resembles an amalgamation of Clark Gable, Cary Grant, James Stewart and Gregory Peck.  (Was Jimmy Stewart really that gorgeous? I thought he was more an Everyman type.)  I wish someone could AI this for me, cause I'm really wondering what such a person would look like.  Sounds like Demi Moore in The Substance.

I was born in the Sixties and certainly grew up knowing of all of these people (they were all still alive except Gable, who everyone knew anyway from Gone with the Wind and the famous film burn "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn"), but did young people born in the Eighties know them?  Grace explains that Andrew has a huge DVD collection of Golden Age Hollywood films, which I suppose may be plausible, Andrew being a gay man.  (Bette Davis will never die among the tribe.)  Yet I'm pretty sure Netflix was really hitting its stride by 2011 and DVDs were well on their way to obsolescence.  (I still have a bunch of them myself, but then I was 45 when this book is suppose to take place.)

Despite his apparent hatred for women, however, James, like Tim Cornish, soon goes bi on us!  How does this happen, you may ask?  Well, it seems that he and Andrew were out clubbing early in the morning and witnessed some neo-Nazi thug types beating to death one of their friends, Bashir al Khalifa, "a handsome young man from somewhere in the Middle East."  This presumably is a reference to the Jody Dobrowski Clapham Common gay bashing murder, though Rendell changed the ethnicity f the victim.   

Anyway, James, the silly bugger, has a nervous breakdown at the very thought of testifying at the murder trial and develops writer's block so Grace kindly tries to restore his confidence by having him show her how to use the internet (!!!).  She's just pretending she doesn't know, you see, to try to restore his masculine confidence, get it? Sounds straight out of Fifties newspaper advice columnist Dear Abby, someone else Grace and Andrew probably know of, although she officially retired in 2000.  

Here I have to quote Claire Black, where in her review she wrote: "No one of Grace's generation ever wonders about the impact of mobile phones on the way we communicate, nor would she ever need to ask about how a search engine works, even as a ruse."

EM Forster with his longtime lover
Bob Buckingham
who was also a married policeman

But this brings Grace and James closer together and the next thing they know they are, after having shared a bottle of sherry (Grace happened to have a bottle in the cupboard), passionately "making love" together, a lot like Tim Cornish and Isabel in No Night is Too Long.  Soon James is ruminating: "I suppose you could say I'm bisexual."

This struck me as rather implausible, given what we had known about James, but, you see, it's all just a necessary plot contrivance.  Grace gets pregnant from her and James' afternoon of passion and decides to keep the baby.  Informed of her indiscretion with James, Andrew pettishly moves out of the house (taking James with him).  He frostily tells Grace: 

I can imagine that you, Grace, fixed up a pretty little scenario in which your baby has a daddy and an uncle and looks a lot like all of us.  It might be a kind of Design for Living,a twenty-first century one Noel Coward didn't write, but in that comedy there's no infant.  

Burn!  Sounds just like your typical Gen Xer.  Okay, maybe not.  Maybe whatever generation was born back in the Edwardian era.  Only in the worlds of Ruth Rendell and PD James novels do Gen Xers talk like this, surely.  

Poor Grace sits down to read The Child's Child and sure enough she finds that it rather resembles her own situation.  The novel is about a fifteen-year-old west country middle-class girl, Maud Goodwin, who gets pregnant in 1929, leading her stodgy, conventional Methodist chapel parents to denounce her as an immoral girl and threaten her with the workhouse (and of course her baby would be taken away).  

Thankfully to the rescue comes Maud's decade older gay schoolmaster brother, John, who says he will live with her and her child and pretend to be her husband.  He plans to devote himself to a noble life of self-sacrificing celibacy, being conscience-stricken about having a gay boyfriend in London named Bertie, with whom he is very much guiltily in love. Unfortunately sibling love in a cottage turns into mutual loathing as John finds that he can't let go of Bertie and Maud, once male homosexuality is explained to her (lesbians never come up in the course of the novel), pronounces it utterly shameful, horrid and disgusting.  

This part of the book is much more interesting than the framing story, the characters from 1929, a year before Rendell herself was born, being far more credibly conveyed and the conflicts plausible (given the outre situation of siblings pretending to be husband and wife).  For a while it sustained my interest, but then, a little over halfway through this portion of the book, something happened to one of the principals--I won't say what to whom--and after that my interest slowly deflated, like air out of a punctured tire.  The second half of the tale, which must cover a dozen or more years, feels rushed, a rare criticism one can make about late Rendell.  The ending is underplayed, a common feature of later Rendells, a dying fall without any actual death.  

And never is the framing story really made to relate to the novel within a novel.  I couldn't help feeling that Rendell would have been better off just telling the story of Maud-John-Bertie as a linear novel without a frame.  That was actually a story here that could have used more colorful strokes of the author's paintbrush.  Some pictures are good enough that they don't need a frame.    

The second half of the framing story, which is really more of a postscript, could be said to provide a positive contrast with the central story which some people will like.  But my problem with that is since I never really cared about the characters in the framing story to begin with, I didn't have anything invested in the resolution of their story.  I did care about John somewhat and I briefly had hopes, soon cruelly dashed, for Maud and Bertie.

Come into the garden, Maud
Erm, I mean, Maurice!
(James Wilby as the title character
and Rupert Grant as Scudder
in the 1987 gay film Maurice, based on
EM Forster's novel of the same name)

John comes off as a gay saint, albeit rather a dim one.  Still, you feel desperately sorry for the poor dumb mutt.  However, Maud and especially Bertie are repellent, underdeveloped ciphers. People who think Rendell herself was a woman-hater will point to the egregiously dull Maud as case in point, but in fact there are several sympathetic women characters in the story, including Maud's grown-up daughter, Hope, and a broadminded schoolteacher named Elspeth Dean. The monstrous regiment of Mauds always seem to be termagants in fiction--perhaps a modernist backlash against Lord Tennyson?  

Another question: Was Rendell channeling some of her own bad relationship with her troubled Danish immigrant schoolteacher mother Ebba into this story?  Rendell unfavorably recalled her mother as "a very vague strange woman" who felt alienated from the people around her.  That certainly sounds like Maud as things transpire! It was Rendell's native English schoolteacher father, Arthur Grasemann, whom she loved, fondy recalling him as "sweet and caring" and a good parent.  

For much of Child Maud and John live together at a cottage in Devon, presumably not far from Plymouth, the home of Rendell's father, the son of a Plymouth dairy foreman and grandson of a cooper at a Bristol brewery.  In Child the Goodwins, elevated by the author to having their money come from a bookbinding business, live on the outskirts of Bristol.  Maud bitterly dismisses the local wealthy family, whom she believes snubbed her, as "basically brewers.  All their money comes from beer."  

John Goodwin is the lone son with three younger sisters, Maud, Ethel and Sybil.  Real life Arthur Grasemann was the lone son with four younger sisters, Dorothy Rosamund, Laura, Ethel Margaret and Phyllis.  John's mother is a Halliwell, the daughter of a draper, while Arthur's mother Ada was a Hockaday, the daughter of a drayman.  The alliteration of these real life and fictional surnames likely is not accidental.  A few years before Arthur married Ebba, he was best man at his best friend Charlie Gilbert's wedding in Cornwall, a fellow schoolmaster and London University graduate.  Charlie's bride Dorothy shared the same surname as sympathetic schoolteacher Elspeth Dean in The Child's Child.  

This was an intriguing matter to me.  I think Rendell clearly drew to an extent on some of her family's personal history.  In the book Maud's daughter Hope was born in December 1929, while Ebba Grasemann's daughter Ruth was born in February 1930.  Hope married, I think, in 1948, while Rendell married in 1950.  

Bertie--a clerk, we are informed, of the "lowest rank" (basically an Anglo chai wallah I suppose)--is yet another one of Rendell's loutish, lazy lower-class characters, though he's physically beautiful we're told. Be certain that his and John's tale is no Maurice.  Bertie may have lovely baby blue eyes, but he's no earthy angel like Maurice's lover Alec Scudder. 

Once again in her writing Rendell fetishizes proper grammar and punctuation.  One of the awful things about Bertie, apparently, is that in letters he puts circles in his "i's" rather than dots. Oh, the humanity!

In modern times, a fascist thug's girlfriend from the framing story demands of Grace about Andrew "Where's he gone to?"  This grammatical construction Grace primly refers to as "murdering the English language."  It's sure a relief to know that Grace's thesis won't have any sentences ending in prepositions.  That would bring me down--I mean, down it would bring me.  

Still there was definitely material here, I think, for a successful book.  Alas, as it stands it's a missed opportunity, though for me at least it was more interesting than The Birthday Present.  

In a 2012 interview Rendell said of her Barbara Vine novels that they "don't have any sort of mystery in them, they don't have any revelations, really.  They're just really about people."  This is true of late Barbara Vine, yes (as well as late Rendells, actually), but it's not remotely true of earlier Vines, which skillfully withheld shocking revelations and teased readers with sinister suggestions. 

It's all an old technique which mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart called "the buried story," deftly applied.  There actually is suspense for about half of the main portion of Child, but then the story is allowed to go flat and soften into a mild mainstream novel.  Ms Rendell meet Miss Reed.  

I have one poignant last note on this late Rendell novel.  I mentioned above that in it the grandmother of Grace and Andrew died, leaving them a house.  (One parallel between the two stories is that when Maud's grandmother dies, she leaves her five thousand pounds, or over half a million dollars, changing but not changing her life.)  Grace states that her grandmother died from a stroke at age 85: "A good age, as they say."  

When Rendell was publicizing this novel in late 2012 she was nearly 83 years old.  She herself would suffer a stroke a couple of years later in January 2015 and lie incapacitated for several months before passing away at age 85--a good age, as they say--in May of 2015.  In her newspaper interview she vowed to keep writing ("Octogenarian Author Has No Plans To Stop"), having just completed a new Wexford novel.  Sadly it would be the last Wexford.  

Of authors Rendell said in 2012: "I think you don't retire unless you are ill."  Her health, she declared, was "very good" and she planned to keep writing.  She managed two more novels, the last one published posthumously.  

So many of Rendell's books, I have noticed, feature elderly stroke victims.  (There are two in The Child's Child.)  Was there a family history?  Her schoolteacher mother Ebba Grasemann had multiple sclerosis and died at the age of 71 in 1963, shortly before Rendell published her first novel.  Her father Arthur, who unusually was nine years younger than her mother (they married when he was 28 and she was 37), died a decade later at the age of 73.  Did the author, in spite of her show of bravado, have a presentiment of the nature of her own death? 

Quoth the Ravens, "Nevermore!": An Unkindness of Ravens (1985), by Ruth Rendell

One intriguing aspect of these birds [ravens] is the collective noun used to describe a group of them: unkindness....there are several other collective nouns used to describe groups of ravens including conspiracy and treachery.

--Birdfact

It seems ravens then are tailor-made for a mystery novel, even without the association with Poe's famous gloomy poem, published 180 years ago this month.  Although even more fitted are their relatives, crows, as in a murder of crows.

In a review of Sheila Radley's detective novel The Chief Inspector's' Daughter, Kate Jackson at Cross Examining Crime commented that she hasn't much liked detective fiction from the 1980s (was this before she was born) and that this book certainly did not change her opinion of the stuff.  This led me to wonder whether the Eighties is the dull detective fiction decade?  

At the time, anyway, Sheila Radley was seen as one of the promising up-and-comers of English crime fiction, but I think it's safe to say that her star has considerably dimmed.  I myself, who was a teenager of the 1980s, reviewed this Radley mystery on my blog, along with the author's debut effort Death and the Maiden (actually published in the late 1970s), and of them I commented on how dated both books seemed. 

Growing up in the 1980s I certainly recalled the so-called greed decade as a more vibrant time than was depicted in the The Chief Inspector's Daughter, but then I was a teenager, Radley a woman well into her fifties, almost old enough to be my grandmother.  

Women of the World unite!
You have nothing to lose but your
feminine mystique. A radical feminist
notice from 1976, almost a decade
before Ruth Rendell published Ravens.

Of the novel I commented in my review: "All the stuff about women's lib seemed dated in a bad way and the big surprise, which wasn't as original in 1981 as the author seemed to think (and certainly isn't today), I could see coming a mile off."  

I also noted that there was much hysteria over pot smoking as well as some really nasty anti-queer sentiments expressed by her cops of gay men, without any real signal of disapproval of this from the author (who herself was probably a lesbian).  

Women cops are an anomaly, limited to serving coffee and consoling bereaved women and minding children.  Luddite male cops view computers with hostility.  Police forces are almost entirely lily-white.  People make calls at pay phones, compose letters with typewriters and watch TV on boxy, chunky sets. 

It all  barely seems different from the 1970s, a decade I can remember as well.  No one talks about music videos or new wave music, but I suppose 1981 was just a little shy of all that.  If the author had portrayed any of this, however, there probably would have been sneering references to it all, like when PD James in one of her detective novels at the end of the decade made a withering, completely gratuitous reference to a gyrating English "pop star,"  whom, she, anyway, didn't deem sexy at all, mind you!

The truth is writers like Radley and James, both of whom who could well remember the Second World War, didn't really have a clue what young people in the Eighties (this means people my age) were like, judging from their writing.  In James' case especially she was better when sticking to her middle-aged, white-collar, elitist white people, the kind with whom she was at complete comfort. 

the American first edition by Pantheon
one of the most striking jackets of the 1980s
in my estimation

I don't believe there were any really significant changes in her Adam Dalgleish crime fiction between her masterpiece, Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), and her last AD mystery, The Private Patient, published the year the US elected its first (and only) black president in 2008, aside from her introduction into the series of cop Kate Miskin, which never really amounted to much because Kate remains rather an earnest, dull, goody two shoes.  James was as out-of-touch, and hostile to, the modern era as ever Agatha Christie had been four decades earlier.  

How did James's sister Crime Queen, Ruth Rendell, a self-proclaimed socialist, fare on this matter?  

Rendell was a decade younger than James but only a couple of years younger than Radley.  She too had vivid memories of the Second World War, when she had been an evacuee.  But she strove to be rather more "with it," I think, in her books, taking a strong interest in morbid psychology, alternative sexualities and youth culture.  

Rendell set one of her early Seventies Inspector Wexford detective novels at an outdoor rock festival and even provided rock music lyrics, composed by a cousin, for it.  One might conceivably imagine Rendell at a commune in the Sixties wearing beads and puffing some marijuana, where with PD James that would be like imagining Queen Elizabeth snorting a coke line.

the British first edition

I was interested to go back and look at Rendell's seminal Eighties Wexford mystery, An Unkindness of Ravens, which, truth be told, I did not remember that favorably but honestly remembered very little about at all except that it is her so-called "feminism Wexford." From this point on Rendell organized her Wexford mysteries about some topical issue: feminism, nuclear energy, racism, environmentalism, spousal abuse, pedophilia, surrogacy and, in the first decade of the 21st century, female genital mutilation.  

So how does Rendell handle feminism and youth culture in Ravens?  Well, the answer is...somewhat ambiguously.  Her attitude to young people, with their dyed hair and decayed morals, seems to be on the disapproving side, though at least Rendell takes notice of Eighties social trends. 

Rendell hates television and "cathode culture" as Wexford calls it.  Although the "boob tube" had been around for three decades television was more of a presence in our lives than ever in the Eighties, getting to the point where there was something on every hour of the day, even if it was just infomercials at three in the morning.  

It often seems to come up here when I post about Rendell how she seems to have been a "man's woman," as several people, including myself, have put it, someone who identified with men frequently and could write from their point of view.  She once said she made her series detective a man because the default social attitude was that "men are the people and we [women] are the others."

Sure, there were spinster detectives, most famously Miss Marple and Miss Silver, but though Miss Marple was enjoying her heyday when Rendell published her first Wexford in 1964, Miss Silver's creator, Patricia Wentworth, had passed away three years earlier (though Miss Silver remained in print).  Police detectives were the thing, but even when Emma Lathen, say, created an amateur detective, John Putnam Thatcher, it was a man.  

Over 1959-66, PD James, Patricia Moyes, Sara Woods, Catherine Aird and Rendell all created male detectives to headline their series.  (Anne Morice in 1970 was a little more daring here, with her actress amatuer sleuth Tessa Crichton.)  Women investigators were much more often found in domestic suspense fiction, which Rendell also wrote for a time.  Her first suspense novel, Vanity Dies Hard, she later professed to despise, speaking contemptuously of it as I recollect as a "brave little woman" novel.  (It's definitely written according to women's magazine serial conventions, but I rather liked it.) 

However, when Rendell created a female cop, Hannah Goldsmith, she promptly became the most hated character in the Wexford canon I think, a walking model of "political correctness," an ideological construct coined by the Right in the 1980s which Rendell obviously bought into and which she clearly hated.  (The term has since been replaced by the politically correct Right with "wokeness.")

Of course just because a woman has a male detective in her mysteries, it doesn't mean she is an anti-woman arch traditionalist.  Wexford, in my view, reflects the author herself and definitely comes off, certainly by the Seventies, as a model liberal Englishman of the day.  (Even his reactionary underling, Mike Burden, thaws somewhat after he marries his liberal second wife.)  So what happens in Ravens when Wexford confronts a youthful radical Marxist feminist cell in his very own town of Kingsmarkham?  

I Want My MTV!
The blondish kid could have been me but parents watched a lot of television programs too.

Rendell published Ravens in 1985.  It was the mystery author's thirteenth Wexford detective novel, and the first one to take place entirely in England in seven years, since A Sleeping Life (1978).  (There were two partial travelogue mysteries, Put on by Cunning and Speaker of Mandarin, in the interim.)  

The formal mystery plot of the book concerns Wexford's and Burden's investigation into the disappearance of Rodney Williams, an actual neighbor of Reg and his wifely "stay-at-home" spouse Dora.  An apparent model family man, married with two children, Rod, it turns out, is (was?) in reality a cheating bigamist with another, younger wife and a daughter in the same area.  So much for Eighties "family values"!

Rod's Wife No. 1, the ironically named Joy, is a miserable, bored woman who spends most of her day compulsively watching junk television programs and popping a prescription pill or two.  She obviously didn't care about her husband, who was absent much of the time (he had two households to keep), nor does she like her teenage daughter, but she lavishes attention on her son, who is away at college.  The teenage daughter in turn evinces no concern with her parents' problems, her absorbing interest being her upcoming college entrance examinations.  (She wants to be a doctor.)

Rod's Wife No. 2, Wendy Williams (!), unlike Joy has a salaried job, but she is mostly interested in being a womanly woman and is very house proud and conventionally feminine indeed.  Neither one has any interest in feminism or rethinking relations between the sexes, despite the fact that both had been duped by a designing male.  

the American first edition
drawing on an image actually
described in the novel

Joy's daughter Sara, however, belongs to a militant feminist group with around 500 members, most of them high school girls like herself, called ARRIA (Action for the Radical Reform of Intersexual Attitudes), whose symbols are a raven and a harpyish figure, half-woman, half-bird.  To say that ARRIA is anti-male is something of an understatement.  Over the course of the novel there are several knife attacks on men by women assailants--could this be ARRIA terrorism?  Was Rodney Williams one of their victims?

As a mystery Ravens on a second reading seemed to me rather better than I remembered.  It's shorter than her books were soon to become, around 80,000 words, which generally is, I think, all to the good in a detective novel. 

It actually reminded quite a lot of a Freeman Wills Crofts detective novel, oddly enough.  It seems one of her more procedural novels and a great deal of time is devoted to the investigation of typewriters!  This took me right back to the Twenties, another link with the past rather than the future, with typewriters in the Eighties soon to be made obsolete by personal computers.  

Rendell actually manages a good twist on what for many pages seems a rather obvious outcome.  I was fooled, and I had read the book before!  Best of all, the twist is fairly clued.  If you don't see it ahead of time, like me, you will think, I should have seen that!  At this stage of her career Rendell was still interested in writing detective novels in the classic puzzle form. 

Was An Unkindness of Ravens the last of the great typewriter identification mysteries?

As a social document, however, this mystery has generated hostile attention from modern-day internet reviewers at goodreads, some of whom have denounced the novel in strong terms as not only anti-feminist but anti-woman (or is that the same thing).  Even the contemporary Kirkus review back in September 1985, which was probably written by a man, criticized "often-dated feminist themes" in the book, along with an overly Freudian solution.  On the other hand, the New Yorker deemed the novel a "suspense mystery of the highest order" that put "most of its like to shame" and the New York Times proclaimed it as "exciting as anything Ruth Rendell has written," revealing the author's "usual mastery of middle-class folkways.

One of the criticized elements in the book is the subplot about Mike Burden's second wife becoming hysterically upset when she finds out her baby will be a girl.  I think this is a bit of a misread hoever.  Jenny Burden herself is a liberal and as I understand her anxiety it's based on the notion that women cannot get a fair shake in life in a male world.  Yes, it's a defeatist attitude, but it's not really an anti-feminist one.  It still sees men as a problem, perhaps THE problem.    

Really Jenny's attitude is akin to those people concerned about climate change who don't want to have children because they there is no future for anyone in a sadly doomed world.  Additionally I know Rendell was quite interested in in postpartum depression (perhaps she went through it herself with her son in the Fifties), and Jenny's behavior seems related to the mental stress of her pregnancy.  . 

Ruth Rendell in 1985
Highly sinister!

For the most part, however, Rendell does portray women unsympathetically, but the wives she actually dings for being very traditionalist "wifey" women.  ARRIA would make the same criticisms of these two ladies as having been brainwashed by white hegemonic masculinity as the jargon goes. Many years later Rendell said that a woman has to be feminist to some degree, "unless she is sleeping."

On the other hand, Rendell obviously doesn't like the leftist jargon either.  It's a mainstream liberal perspective, I would say, not necessarily anti-woman per se.  Unfortunately I can't really talk about the outcome of the plot from an ideological perspective, cause, you know, spoilers; but I have to say that looked at purely as a technical construction the whole thing is pretty damn clever.

In an English newspaper interview in 1985, Rendell said that in her mysteries she liked to have "one climax, then a drop, another climax, then a twist right at the end, one last surprise--if possible in the last paragraph--so you sit right back and say "Wow, that's amazing."  

I'm not exactly sure how many, ahem, climaxes Ravens experiences, but it does indeed have a fine late twist, along with an ironic little surprise in the last paragraph.  This is the mark of a remarkable mystery craftswoman who takes plotting construction seriously.