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.  

Shiver and be Gay: No Night is Too Long (1994), by Barbara Vine

Readers of this blog will recall my posting last year about how I was fired by Otto Penzler (OP) from writing intros for Mysterious Press' classic crime fiction reissues because he saw and objected to a comment I made on a Lee Goldberg Facebook post about Otto's history of egregious sexist comments.  My grave crime was that I had commented that retrograde attitudes like the ones Otto expressed on women mystery writers back in the 1990s helped explain how a hideously homophobic book like Francis Nevins' Cornell Woolrich biography was published.  (Mysterious Press was the publisher.)  

As a result I was informed that Otto had decided I was accusing him of homophobia, which I really wasn't.  I was simply suggesting that he suffered from imperception, like, frankly, a lot of straight people back then.  (And the rise of MAGA over the last decade should dispel the notion that things have gotten all that much better since.)  

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the dreadful ravages of AIDS, even the best-willed, liberal straight people didn't necessarily pick up on what seems to me the blatant and rampant homophobia in Nevins' book. The Mystery Writers of America even awarded even the Edgar for best critical work in 1989.  So why would someone like OP have been any different, really, in his lack of perception?  

Like protagonist Tim Cornish,
this cover swings two ways

I bring this up not to pound on OP again, but rather because I finally read Ruth Rendell's 1994 Barbara Vine novel No Night is Too Long, which was much heralded three decades ago, when I was the age of the gay characters in the novel, as a "daring" take on the subject of homosexualty.  The review excerpts in my Penguin pb copy are ecstatic, even downright swoony, in their assessments of the book.  

While Joan Smith in the Independent panned the novel as contrived and false melodrama, we otherwise have in the opposite corner Harriet Waugh in the Spectator (a remarkable psychological thriller); Joan Bakewell in the Sunday Express (a dazzling structure of intrigue and suspense); Val Hennessy in the Daily Mail (Vine is writing at the peak of her powers); and John Mortimer, the lone male in the group, in the Sunday Times (Vine writing at her marvelous best).

The late John Mortimer, a noted QC and creator of the once much beloved Rumpole of the Bailey book series and television program and--rather surprisingly to me judging by soley by his looks--a notorious longtime ladies' man, selected No Night is Too Long as one of his 1994 books of the year.  

In Mortimer's review the author noted that in Night, which he lavishly praised as a "dark, watery masterpiece...suffused with sexuality," Rendell had daringly "written in the person of a young homosexual man."  Thirteen years later England's Daily Mail newspaper salaciously divulged that the subject of young homosexual men had hardly been an unfamiliar one to Mortimer. In the story on the celebrity author the Mail pantingly imparted to its readers that 65 years earlier he had sent "sexually explicit" letters to a beautiful male youth.  

John Mortimer in college 
around the time he conceived a pash
for Quentin Edwards

"Revealed," ran the DM headline on 12 October 2007, "John Mortimer's Romantic Letters to a Schoolboy Which Led to Him Leaving Oxford."  

It seems that back in 1942 Mortimer, then a precociously clever nineteen-year-old Oxford student, was going through what was euphemistically termed an aesthetic phase.  Sneered Richard Pendlebury of the Mail:"The brilliant young Mortimer minced about the quads in a velvet jacket with purple trousers...quoting poetry [TPT-!] and humming Noel Coward ditties."

This blithe velvet jacketed ditty hummer soon was knocked for a loop, however, when he"conceived a violent passion" for a gorgeous schoolboy two years younger than himself who was visiting Oxford with a friend.  

To this dreamy young object of his ardor and affection, with his liquid eyes, pert nose and beestung lip, the bespectacled, bookish Mortimer sent numerous randy "pash" letters. He even took him for a romantic ride for two in a punt on the River Cherwell. (Crime writer Hugh Wheeler of Patrick Quentin fame did so too back in the day--romantic punt rides seem to have been rather the thing for courting lads, whether gay or straight.)  

The two boys also attended ballet together and Mortimer gifted his beloved with a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets, the significance of which will immediately be obvious to any queer literary lad worthy of his violet quill. As MAGA would wittily say: "Ga-aay!"

all grown up
Mortimer at age 25

Mortimer's young inamorato was Quentin Edwards, who later himself became a prominent English QC and judge.  Like so many gay romances back in those days, the affair sadly took a somewhat tragic turn.  When Mortimer's racy, suggestive letters to Edwards were discovered at Edwards' school, the boy was expelled and Mortimer, who was accused of having "corrupted" him (or groomed him into gayness as would be said today), was sent down from Oxford, though he was ultimately allowed to take his degree.  

With his mother dead and his father far away in India, Edwards worked on a farm and at a factory before enlisting in the Royal Navy the next year when he turned 18.  He grew his famous side-whiskers to look older (and perhaps, one wonders, to discourage passes from sailors).  

All in all, things could have gone worse for them and both boys went on to live long, fulfilled lives, enjoy distinguished careers, take wives (and mistresses in Mortimer's case) and beget children.  

in the navy
a whiskerless Quentin Edwards
the object of
John Mortimer's youthful
wartime obsession

When all these details came out a few years before Mortimer's death at age 85 in 2009, both Mortimer and Edwards admitted that they indeed had had a mutual "crush" on each other but both of them denied that there had been any sort of active carnal element to their relationship.  Edwards, then 81, insisted: 

It was all about nothing!  We had been to single-sex public schools, where people form romantic friendships which are not really quite homosexual. I was not a homosexual, never have been, and neither, the truth is, was John....

For his part John conceded to having had "perfectly pleasant homosexual experiences" earlier when a schoolboy at Harrow, explaining colorfully that homosexuality simply had run rife there: "You could have any boy for a box of Cadbury's milk chocolate."  He himself preferred boyish women, to be sure, but women of any sort had been sadly unavailable in Harrow's same-sex environment.  

Diamonds and pearls, as rock star Prince once lilted, for a pretty boy or a girl.  If you don't have the pretty girl you settle for the pretty boy.  Just make sure you can offer the boys Cadbury's chocolate bars and the girls some nice pairs of nylons. (There was a war on then, don't you know,)  

John Mortimer died at age 85 in 2009, Quentin Edwards at age 85 the next year.  Edwards' 2010 obit in the Times described him as "instantly recognisable with his abundant side-whiskers, half-moon spectacles and rosy cheeks" and a flamboyant Wildean "dandy" with a "penchant for braces, silk scarves, rings, cufflinks, a pocket watch and hats for every occasion."  Never would the man do something half so vulgar as to don "a short-sleeve shirt, even on a sea cruise" but he did sometimes, like Lord Peter Wimsey or some foppish man-about-town murder suspect in Golden Age detective fiction, screw a monocle to his eye.  

Quentin Edwards later in life

These English boarding school same-sex romances often strike Americans as somewhat bizarre (and many would add immoral), but that's the English public school system, or at least so it was at one time, when the righteous English male establishment (half of which at times seems to have buggered the other half) simply shut its eyes to what was going on among its elite schoolboys and, worse yet, between its masters and boys.  

I go into this more below, but there is a section of No Night is Too Long, where protagonist Tim Cornish reflects on his schoolboy homosexual experiences, which must have struck very close to home for Mortimer when he was reading the book.  Indeed, I have to wonder whether Mortimer--who was a friend of Rendell's, anthologized her work and praised her tremendously in print (She is one of our most important novelists)--told Rendell something of his own schoolboy sexual experiences and she then drew upon this when writing Night.  

Was this the original striding
shadowy figure, used so much 
for crime fiction covers today?

Rendell herself told a newspaper interviewer in the 1990s that her novel was "about selfishness, about vanity, about a very, very good-looking man who thinks his handsomeness gives him the right to do anything."  

Rendell could have placed this ever so vain character, Tim Cornish, strictly in a heterosexual context, of course, but she chose to make him, at least initially, queer--whether asexual, homosexual or bisexual, it's not quite clear, though he ends up, apparently, heterosexual.  So you could say, riffing on Dorothy Parker, that the book runs the gamut of emotions from AC to DC.    

Rendell included queer characters in her books from her very first published one in 1964 up through at least her last Barbara Vine, The Child's Child, published in 2012, less than three years before her death.  Lesbians feature importantly in at least two of her novels, but she seems more to have favored with her attentions gay men.  

Gay men feature significantly in The Lake of Darkness (1980), No Night is Too Long and The Child's Child, all of which have queer protagonists.  Additionally other books, like A Fatal Inversion, have decidedly homoerotic elements, even if the queerness never breaks out into full flame.  

"I had a cousin who was gay and eventually died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989," Rendell divulged a few years before her death in 2015.  "He was put though aversion-therapy, which was pretty grim--this must have been in the 1970s, I think--and it was so horrible he ran away.  Of course I knew he was gay--we were great friends as well as cousins.  He was very unhappy and often very unpleasant.  It sours the character, that sort of thing."

We Can Work It Out
these are said to be rediscovered photos
of a same-sex wedding in
Philadelphia in 1957

Likely this too impacted Rendell's later writing about male homosexuality.  And she's absolutely right about this.  

Anyone subjected to the sort of thing Rendell's cousin was--or even much less--back in the 1970s or 1980s or even the 1990s would be apt to sour on life.  And to throw AIDS into the mix as well! It's all a terrible and tragic thing, all the lives that were sacrificed in those days, both to a mortal disease and a social taboo.  Nevertheless, some gay men managed to make lives for themselves and live happily as gay men.  It's a myth to think all gay men were miserably unhappy back then.  

Of course both the Rendells and Vines are filled with scores upon scores of unhappy, damaged people and the queer ones are no exceptions--indeed, far from it. Problematically in No Night is Too Long, at least for a gay reader, is the way the author seems to go out of her way to prevent the queer characters from being happy together.  Did Rendell believe such a thing as happiness was even possible for gay men in 1994, or was she influenced by the experiences of men like her cousin and John Mortimer to think otherwise?  

At one point she has her gay lovers, who are afraid to kiss in public (somewhat improbable it seems to me in 1994), speculate that same-sex marriage won't become a reality for 25 or even 50 years.  25 wasn't too far off the mark, I suppose, though 50 seems absurd, at least in retrospect (though again, who knows what MAGA will be hatching in the US).

Here in 2025 one would have had to have been born, I would say, by the early 1980s to have much recollection of the weird world for queer people--or anyone else--in 1994.  No social media to speak of, no emails and texts and Twitter and TikTok and you still got your culture filtered though print books and magazines and cable television programs.  In the US Friends premiered on TV only that year, while gay-friendly Will & Grace was still four years away, but a glimmer in a scripter's eye.  Its gay kiss scene came near the demise of the twentieth century in 1999 (see video immediately below). That same year the much more daring British gay drama series Queer as Folk premiered. That soon was remade in the US too.

There were independent gay films, of course, but those flicks never played in most of the country.  The most recent actual hit gay film was a tragic AIDS drama, Philadelphia (1993), which, while well-meant, just continued the association between gayness and death.  (Ruth Rendell's 1992 Inspector Wexford detective novel Kissing the Gunner's Daughter has an AIDS plot strand.)  

The next year Australia daringly gave us the trans/drag dramedy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but most of the world never knew of it, I suppose, until America remade it in 1995 as To Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.  (The original is much better.)  A year later America did the same thing with The Birdcage, a hit belated remake of the French gay drag farce La Cage aux Folles (1978) starring Robin Williams which made a scene-stealing stage actor Nathan Lane, who played Williams' drag-donning spouse, a film and television star.  

I don't recall there being a lot of social blowback to these films from conservatives, but then we didn't have social media to amplify rightwing outrage.  (There was just Rush Limbaugh rumbling on the radio.)  With social media still in its infancy by the end of the decade, television and films remained the major ways that most people, both queer and straight, learned about queer people.  

Just three fun-loving guys (?)
Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce and Terence Stamp in
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

Same-sex marriage was legal nowhere in the country until 1999 when the progressive state of Vermont ruled that the state's gay marriage ban was illegal.  In 2003 the US Supreme Court ruled anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional.  The United Kingdom enacted civil partnerships for same-sex couples in 2004 and legalized gay marriage a decade later, not long after The Child's Child was published. In the US the Supreme Court struck down gay marriage bans the next year.  In interviews about this book Rendell had called for the legalization of same-sex marriage, opining that gay men were still very much feared by much of the public.  "[N]obody really cares about lesbians, do they?" she remarked to her interviewer.  "It's [the] penetration [of one male by another male] that bothers them."  

So when going back and looking at Rendell's handling of queer matter in No Night is Too Long, one has to allow that the 1990s was a decade of transition that in some ways had more in common with the past than the present.  And the past is another country and the customs of that country may seem rather strange (ig not queer) to us today.  Or perhaps not--I think one really has to question whether a majority of the United States actually is genuinely committed to equal rights for queer people, not to mention women and racial, ethnic and religious minorities.  

However, I'm not really concerned here with conservatives, or traditionalists, or whatever you want to call them, but rather with liberals of good will, like Ruth Rendell.  And here I have to admit that I find Rendell's handling of queer characters in Night somewhat problematic. 

a sort of poison pen novel
Is the pen wielded by a dead man?
Or is something else afoot?  

No Night is Too Long is about a beautiful young man in his mid-twenties, Tim Cornish, the narrator of the bulk of the novel.  When the story opens Tim is living in near seclusion at his parent's beachside house in coastal Suffolk and suffering "fearful remorse" about someone he says he killed.  It doesn't help that he's been receiving a steady stream of subtly menacing letters,all of them postmarked from America, which allude to his heinous act.  

It's soon made clear that Tim's victim was Ivo Steadman, a distinguished and handsome paleontologist (he even had a black forelock that conveniently fell over his forehead) in his early thirties who taught at the university where Tim was a graduate student in creative writing and was Tim's lover for over a year.  It seems that on a cruise in Alaska that Tim and Ivo took together, something quite terrible happened between the the two, but what exactly?  

The Nineties being the peak of Rendell's wordy novel phase, where they typically ran over 100,000 words, it takes the reader rather a long time indeed to find out what exactly happened, unless the reader impatiently starts skipping pages.  You may well be tempted to skip.  I was.  

The first part of the novel, depicting Tim's wretched present, is very atmospheric, drawing on one of Rendell's favorite authors (and mine too), M. R. James, the great English ghost story writer, in depicting how Ivo is constantly appearing to Tim in his dreams and in his house (!) and on the streets and the beach (!).  It reminded me of the great horror film It Follows (2014).  It's also interesting reading about the beginning of Tim's affair with Ivo at university.  

There is some welcome humor in Rendell's depiction of  a presumably gay or asexual creative writing teacher (he wears his black cat draped around his shoulder like a stole, we are told) who is a maddening pedant with a a fierce hatred of contractions.  Rendell herself could get rather pedantic about grammar--she hated internet speak--so I suspect there's a bit of self-satire here.  

Edinburgh House in the Suffolk beachside town of Aldeburgh (center).
Ruth Rendell once owned it.  She based Tim Cornish's house in No Night is Too Long
on one of the houses next door, I think the white one with the bow windows.

You might call this the actual "gay" part of this long novel (about 135,000 words by my count), the part which gives the book whatever claim it has to being a gay mystery novel.  This is where we get Tim's thoughts on sex at his boys' public school, Leythe:

No one could have passed through Leythe without regularly taking part in sexual activity, and taking part in it as a matter of course.  You did it, and that was that....

Love existed, of course, or rather a lustful or sentimental obsession.  James Gilman, five years my senior, was in love with me, and wrote bad poetry to me.  Prefects were always in love with some first- or second-year, and in a few cases this idol was kept on his pedestal, the recipient of love-letters or even sonnets, his photograph on a study desk.  Mostly, though, he too was used in the way of all flesh.  

room with a view
an Edinburgh House interior
Could that be Ivo
coming up from the sea?

Rendell was still interested in clever plotting at this point in her career and you can be sure that if a character's name keeps cropping up they will eventually feature in the plot in some significant form or fashion.  Late in the novel James Gilman, who has become an attorney like the real life Quentin Edwards, notably appears when by letter he confesses to his wife:

When I was eighteen and Tim was thirteen I was in love with him,  I was deeply in love and it consumed my whole existence.  He wasn't in love with me, that goes without saying, but he was nice to me and compliant, he did what I wanted.  You understand me, I'm sure, I don't want to use the words.  He was nice to me for the favors I could do him and at Leythe fourteen years ago, believe, a first-year needed all the favours he could get.

Later on the letter James recalls, referencing Tim, "things he once said to me, injuries he did me, his callousness and kindness, his opportunism and gratitude."  The "love" which James had for this thirteen-year-old boy, he assures his wife, who I would think would be getting pretty worried by this point, "is long gone."  Well, okay, then, not to worry!  

Frankly, I found this more twisted than anything in the book.  When John Mortimer had his pash with Edwards (which may not have even been sexual), he was 19 and Edwards 17, but in Rendell's novel the two males are 18 and 13.  That's a rather alarming, I would say, but the participants take it as a matter of nature's rutting course and talk about it as if Tim could have been in any sense a consenting partner to what went on.  Tim at 13 is seen as the same "coquette" and tease as he was a decade later.  Can this be real?  I don't imagine most parents would take such a sanguine view of their 13-year-old being buggered at school by an 18-year-old (legally an adult).  Or would they have said, well, at least it wasn't the headmaster!

In 1982, back around the time Tim and James would have been having it off with each other at Leythe, Elton John cut a video for his tune Elton's Song, his first song, after a decade of huge hits, written specifically as a gay song.  I recall listening to this cut on his album The Fox, the first Elton John album I ever bought (I was 16 at the time) and thinking, wow, that's definitely gay, no room for doubt there, even if Elton otherwise did seem to be trying to get his queer arse back in the closet again.  

Don't ask, don't tell
don't hear, don't speak, don't see
Bronski Beat in 1985 publicity photo

Elton's Song is a plaintive piece about an awkward young schoolboy with a desperate crush on a devastatingly handsome and debonair older one (see video immediately above).  The two lads in the video actually look about the ages that Tim and James would have been, but the relationship is reversed: it's the youngest boy who is in love with the older one.  And of course nothing ever actually happens between the two of them, although in the song lyrics the younger boy passionately boy avows: "I would give my life for a single night beside you."  To me this seems much more believable than Rendell's scenario.  

Even this video apparently was deemed too controversial for television, however, way back in 1982.  You'll find a terrific analysis of it here.  Unapologetically gay English rock groups like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Bronski Beat soon followed, however, along with the very suggestive, albeit melancholy, lyrics of Morrissey, coyly sexually ambiguous front man for The Smiths.  The closet was too full for the door to get shut again, try as antigay activists like the late beauty queen and orange juice huckster Anita Bryant might. Elton had lit a rainbow candle in the wind and the light it gave would flicker but never go out.  

Getting back (finally) to Rendell's novel, as an adult her character Tim Cornish gets bored with his affair with Ivo and desires to dump him as he dumped Janes, but problematically Ivo now is madly and one might say violently in love with him.  Then in Alaska Tim falls in love with a woman, Isabel, and decides he's probably not actually gay, after all.  Such a fickle, fickle boy!

the 2002 film version 

The resolution of this triangle, which comes rather quickly and perfunctorily at the end of the lengthy  novel with a rather maddening twist of sorts, did strike me, like it struck Joan Smith, as contrived and passing implausible.  I would think modern gay readers would be intensely disappointed at the way Rendell vigorously swabs the deck of the love boat clean of the last speck of gayness in order to make way for heterosexual romance with Isabel, who herself comes off as a plot contrivance: the hetero ex machina, if you will.  

Indeed, when reading this novel I kept thinking how I would have "improved" it, which is always a bad sign, no doubt.  I guess you could say it's a queer curate' egg, gay only in spots.  

There is a 2002 film version of the novel and I would be interested in seeing what was done with Rendell's plot.  I notice that they made Ivo blond and and Tim brunett, which is precisely the opposite of the novel.  The actor playing Ivo was 34, the actor playing Tim was 27, so they did get the ages right, more or less.  

(UPDATE: I have now seen the film, which was scripted by the late gay playwright Kevin Elyot, who wrote a dozen scripts for the Poirot and Marple series around the same time, and the film ultimately takes a much more condemnatory, unsentimental view of Tim.  It completes the punches that Rendell pulls and makes for a more artistically effective, albeit bleaker ending.)  

beachfront at Aldeburgh

What interests me most now about this novel is whether John Mortimer might actually have helped inspire it.  I suppose that we shall never know now.  To be sure, there are many such tales about schoolboy same-sex affairs in England, so many that sometimes it does come off as a rite of passage before you move on to higher--i,e, heterosexual--love.  I left the novel feeling like this was Rendell's own view, that gay love is something lesser--more sexual, less spiritual, if you will--than straight love.  Gay sex in the book is frequently portrayed as near-rape--anal penetration, recalling what Rendell said, bothers people, don't you know--though not her, of course!

Or was this what she, or her publishers, thought her reading public wanted from her, just to dabble, like Tim, in gayness?  To write a real gay novel in that day was to go "niche," after all, to ghettoize oneself to the "gay mystery" section of the bookstore, if the bookstore even had one.  

Sex as rape?  The gay characters go roughly at it in No Night is Too Long

In any case, I regret to say that I personally found No Night is Too Long an unsatisfying and ultimately hugely disappointing novel, despite some good features.  I much preferred Asta's Book (1993) and The Brimstone Wedding (1996), the Vines which covered No Night is Too Long on both sides.  Not only are they more complex novels, dexterously skipping back and forth decades in time, but they are told through the perspectives of middle class straight white women.  

To be honest I think Rendell was more comfortable on this ground. It's not something the author had to write about vicariously.  She was quite capable of writing from the perspective of straight men, I will allow, but gay men?  I'm not so sure.  What I have read of her last Vine novel, The Child's Child, hasn't persuaded me.  

To be fair, here's another perspective on the subject, really quite fascinating, from a man who grew up queer in Waco, Texas and found reading Barbara Vine a revelatory, transformative experience.  Of course he was stuck in Waco, Texas.  But how pleased I think Ruth Rendell would have been to have known that she positively impacted someone's life in such a way.  

Interestingly before his Rumpole of the Bailey days John Mortimer wrote a one-act play called Bermondsey about a pub keeper who has had a male lover over the eighteen years of his marriage.  It was performed on stage in 1970 and then televised two years later with the actors Dinsdale Landen and Edward Fox in the roles of the male lovers.  In the play Landen and Fox (who rather was one in those days) shared an intimate full-on-the-lips kiss, the sort of thing that was still deemed too scandalous on American television in the Nineties.  It seems to have been a more positive depiction of a gay male couple than anything I have yet encountered in the work of Ruth Rendell or her alter ego Barbara Vine (see immediately below).  

For those keeping count, I think this is now the fourth Vine I have reviewed here at the blog.  There are fourteen Vines.  My favorites, ranked, are:

1. Asta's Book (1993)

2. A Fatal Inversion (1987)

3. A Dark Adapted Eye (1986)

4. The Brimstone Wedding (1996)

5. The House of Stairs (1988)

6. The Blood Doctor (2002)

The others I am not so hot on, though I still need to read The Chimney Sweeper's Boy and The Child's Child, the latter of which I have started twice now but never actually finished.  (At least it seemed better than The Birthday Present.)  Someday I need to reread Gallowglass, which seemed more of a "Rendell" than a "Vine" (as did King Solomon's Carpet).  More food for thought in all, no shadow of a doubt.  

Return within Thirty Days: The Birthday Present (2008), by Barbara Vine

Ruth Rendell published 14 Barbara Vine novels over nearly three decades between 1986 and 2014.  As perhaps can be expected with a highly prolific writer--in addition to the 14 Vines she published 52 novels under her own name, as well as seemingly countless pieces of short fiction--the Vines afforded diminishing yields of poisoned fruit over time.  Rendell banged out the first three Vine novels--A Dark Adapted Eye, A Fatal Inversion and The House of Stairs--in just three years between 1986 and 1988.  She was then at the height of her powers and it shows in this terrific trio.  Afterward, however, there was a perceptible overall decline in the books that grew steeper over time.

There was, to be sure, Asta's Book (1993), perhaps the best novel in the series and the best book Rendell ever wrote, and the moving, melancholy The Brimstone Wedding (1995), and even The Blood Doctor (2002), one which I know a lot of people hate but I rather admire.  After The Blood Doctor there came three last Vines: The Minotaur (2005), The Birthday Present (2008) and The Child's Child, the latter of which was published only about two years before the author's tragically crippling and soon-to-be fatal stroke (which occurred about a decade and one week ago).  

None of the books in this farewell trio, regretfully, are very good.  (Disclaimer: I've never actually finished The Child's Child.)  I remember reading The Minotaur a few years after it was published and being surprised how banal it was.  It was supposed to be a Gothic thriller and was really nothing of the sort.  The best Vines are celebrated for their dense but dexterous narratives, which move teasingly and tantalizingly back and forth in time, navigating treacherously shifting viewpoints and perspectives. Far less of that skill was present in The Minotaur, which mostly seemed a wearisome slog over a flat and dreary plain.  

The same is true, only more so, of the penultimate Vine, The Birthday Present, over 100,000 words of tedium, by and large.  It's not terrible like late Christie or Carr is terrible, just rather a bore.  And, in the end, that's worst thing you can say about a thriller.

Red Shoe Diaries
I have a feeling we aren't
in Kansas anymore.

The Birthday Present is one of those books which is all premise no plot.  This is the one about a Tory politician in the late-Thatcher/Major era (1990-97), Ivor Tesham, who fears being implicated in a sex scandal when his mistress Hebe--that's Hee-bee as in heebie-jeebies--Furnval is killed in a car accident during an "adventure sex" scenario which the two pretty pervs concocted for her birthday.  

Hebe was to be "kidnapped" by two men, blindfolded, handcuffed and gagged, carried to a house and dumped on the bed for Ivor's (and apparently her own) carnal pleasure.  All well and good, at least if you're a kinkster, but as mentioned there's a deadly car accident along the way and Hebe is killed along with one of her "kidnappers," while the other is hospitalized in a coma.  What will happen now to Ivor and his political career?!  

Well, not much, really, in the event.  The whole thing just seems to drag interminably.  It sounds exciting, adventure sex, bondage and all that, but it's really a damp squib.  Rendell is far too decorous--dare I say genteel and ladylike--to write about this sort of thing with real conviction.  It's like Agatha Christie writing about SM Clubs.  

For example, Rendell repeatedly says that in the kidnap car Hebe had a gag in her mouth and it's indicated that Ivor got this "gag" at a sex shop but then it's stated that Hebe had a scarf wrapped around her mouth.  Well, that's not the same thing, is it?  You wouldn't be buying a scarf at a sex shop.  Hebe's gal pal Jane Atherton (see below) is reluctantly titillated by a "dog collar" from Hebe's kink bag, but that's about as far as Rendell dares go with this.  (She also mentions the word "dildoes" once and she has Ivor say "fuck" about four or five times.)  

I wonder whether Rendell ever saw the infamous "gimp scene" in Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction, which came out around the time of the events detailed in Rendell's novel?  I'm guessing not, her grip on popular culture started noticeably to slacken from the 1990s onward.  Still The Birthday Present anticipated the novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which mainstreamed bondage for the Oprah set, by three years, so perhaps it seemed more venturesome at the time.    

It's no gag
(Bruce Willis in 1994's Pulp Fiction)
Rendell gets mildly kinky
in The Birthday Present

On the whole though Rendell seems more interested in exploring some of her favorite pet peeves with modernity, like people who address one familiarly by one's first name or, worse yet, by a diminutive.  There's an "uppish" window cleaner who does this who reads like a reincarnation of a character from a much earlier and better Rendell novel, The Lake of Darkness.  I don't care how many times Rendell proclaimed she was a socialist; I have my doubts and I stick to them with each read.  

It doesn't help that neither pervy Ivor, nor his dull sister, nor his even duller brother-in-law, who tells a good chunk of the tale, are remotely interesting characters. I'm afraid I just couldn't have cared less what happened to Ivor in this book.  

To pad things out and lend some interest to the narrative, Rendell introduces a friend of Hebe's, Jane Atherton, known as the "alibi woman," because Hebe used her to cover up her affair with Ivor from her doting husband.  By far the most interesting chapters in the book come in the form of extracts from Jane's diary from the time.  (The brother-in-law's portions of the novel are told retrospectively from the present day, i.e., about 2008.)  

Even the Jane portions lift the book only slightly, however.  The Hebe-Jane relationship was potentially interesting, being the classic Hot Girl-Plain Girl relationship (Plain Jane?) you often see in real life, where a hot girl likes to hang around a plain girl to shine even brighter against her dull background.  There was a pair of girls I knew in high school who were just like this.  Years later I met the plain girl again and I didn't even recognize here--she had utterly transformed herself into a hot girl who looked a lot like her old hot girl gal pal!  Now there's an interesting story.  But Hebe dies so early in the book, there's no exploration of this dynamic.

Although I've only ever seen one other review of Rendell's novel ever comment on this, it seems to me blatantly obvious that the Jane Atherton character was inspired by Barbara Covett in English mainstream author Zoe Heller's much-praised 2003 novel Notes on a Scandal, which was made into a superb Oscar-nominated film in 2006, merely two years before the publication of The Birthday Present.  You almost feel like Rendell must have seen this film and begun writing this novel the very next day, the impression is so strong.  

Scandal tells about the bizarre codependent relationship that develops between two women teachers, an older spinster type (Barbara) who narrates the novel and a younger married woman, Sheba Hart, who is having a torrid, ill-advised affair with one of her students.  In The Birthday Present Jane is much younger than Barbara, in fact about the same age as Hebe, but she is very similar to Barbara, a lonely spinsterish type with a soured attitude to life, while Hebe is very similar to Sheba--How similar are their names!--in the sense of being an attractive woman married to a dull husband who is engaged in risky sex with another man (or boy, really, in Sheba's case).  

Gone Girls
Sheba (Cate Blanchett) and Barbara (Judi Dench) throw down in
the superb, Oscar-nominated 2006 film Notes on a Scandal

Unfortunately, however, Jane is a dreary wet blanket mostly lacking Barbara's quirky character and sardonic narration.  Part of the perverse "fun" of Scandal is seeing Barbara taking control of events and gradually becoming the dominant partner in the relationship.  Jane, on the other hand, remains an embittered loser in life to the end.  Still, her story provides the novel with what narrative drive it has.  

The biggest problem here is that The Birthday Present feels like a Ruth Rendell non-series psychological novel masquerading as a Barbara Vine.  One could easily reimagine Present, retrospectively set in the 1990, as a Rendell actually published in the 1990s.  Shorn of 20,000 or so words and narrated in the present by Jane, this might actually have been a thrilling thriller.  As it is this "present" is one which most readers likely will want to return to the store within thirty days.  Save the receipt!

And Then There Were Nuns: The Religious Body (1966), by Catherine Aird

In 1966 at age 35 the late Catherine Aird published her debut detective novel, The Religious Body, putting her squarely in the midst of what might be called second wave crime queening in British detective fiction.  With Dead Men Don't Ski in 1959, Patricia Moyes slightly anticipated this newer generation of Sixties women mystery authors who were writing firmly in the style of their predecessors Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey and Gladys Mitchell (not to mention later-comers Margaret Erskine, Christianna Brand and Elizabeth Ferrars).  Moyes was followed by PD James and Sara Woods (1962) as well as Ruth Rendell (1964) before Aird came along two years later.  (Anne Morice popped in for tea a bit later in 1970.)  

All in all, it's a pretty formidable group of mystery writers, which surely gave comfort to readers of the day who were repeatedly being informed by smug critics, celebrating the merits of the likes of Simenon and Patricia Highsmith and John le Carre, that the classic detective novel exemplified by Christie and her sister monarchs was dying a rapid and deserved death.

Margery Allingham passed away neatly in the middle of 1966 (June 30), leaving behind an unfinished mystery novel later completed by her husband, while Sayers and Tey had both expired in the 1950s and Christianna Brand largely retired from writing detective novels after 1955.  However, all of the other ladies remained quite active players in the murder game.  In 1966, there appeared, in addition to Aird's The Religious Body, Christie's Third Girl, Marsh's Death at the Dolphin, Mitchell's The Croaking Raven, Erskine's The Family at Tammerton, Woods' Enter Certain Murderers and Rendell's Vanity Dies Hard. I think you can make the case that Aird's novel is is the best of the bunch.  

1985 sixth printing of the
US pb ed in Bantam's
"Murder Most British" series

The Religious Body concerns the murder of a nun, Sister Anne, at the Convent of St. Anselm in the village of Cullingoak in Aird's fictional county of Calleshire, which she presumably based on Kent, the county where she lived out her adult life.  At the end of Chapter 1 we learn that Sister Anne has gone missing and at the beginning of Chapter 2 we find that Inspector C. D. Sloan of the Berebury Division of the Calleshire Constabulary is investigating her suspicious death. (She was found huddled at the bottom of the cellar stairs.) 

Sloan is doubtfully assisted by young Detective-Constable William Crosby, who is "raw, perky and consciously representing the younger generation in the force." Detective-Sergeant Gleven was not available and only appears briefly in the book, but a young woman detective-sergeant named Perkins appears near the end in a significant select capacity.  

In the character of Crosby you can detect that despite being only 35 herself, Aird disapproved of the rising generation--another quality she had in common with Christie and her company!  Personally I rather like the lad.  

Sloan is overseen by Superintendent Leeyes, a pompous windbag fond of self-improvement seminars who contributes nothing of use to the investigation but is there to supply a bit of comic relief to the criminal proceedings--not that things ever get that dark in the book in the first place.  

Along with pathologist Dr. Dabbe this police trio appears in every book in the series, I believe--though none of them ever seem to change or even age over more than half a century!  Aird had a formula and she stuck to it.  In later books I find that the vaudeville comedian act of Crosby, Leeyes and Dabbe can get a bit tiring.  Sloan on the other hand, is a bit drabbe, shall we say, but that's okay--you might say he's tragic relief.  Someone has to play the straight man.  

The Religious Body actually is somewhat less formulaic than later books, with the comical digressions of later books much toned down.  For fans of some of the more serious crime queens who are new to Aird, the author's first few books probably are the best place to start.  And none better, indeed, than The Religious Body.

Rereading the novel I was struck by how it fits right in with Gladys Mitchell's two mysteries set at convents, St. Peter's Finger and Convent on Styx, which came respectively 28 years before and nine years after The Religious Body, in 1938 and 1975.  There is also resemblance to Mitchell's Spotted Hemlock (1958), which is appealingly set at neighboring schools, a female agricultural college and a men's college. 

In The Religious Body, a men's agricultural college adjoins the property of the convent.  In both the Mitchell and the Aird novels the penchant of the young college men for performing rowdy "rags" plays pivotal roles in the plots.  (Guy Fawkes Night takes place in the Aird novel.)  

St. Ethelburga's Convent, formerly in Deal, Kent

The convent building itself was converted from the former manor house of the diminished local great family, the Faines, who sadly now are represented solely by one winsome daughter.  By special dispensation she is soon to wed the headmaster of the agricultural college at her old home, now the convent.  

Aird lacks Mitchell's often bizarre, sometimes surreal, aspect, but in their mysteries both women convey a quirky, wry sense of the absurdity of life that appeals to many readers while putting off some others.  Me, I'm a fan on the whole, although both authors go overboard for me into dottiness occasionally. 

Suitable to her subject (nuns), Aird stays pretty serious for the course of the book, mostly poking fun, when she does poke fun, at the policemen's bemusement over the, to them, passing strange conventions of convent life.  There's a nun who holds the office of procuratrix, for example, and a sister named St. Bernard.  

Some of the cops and other characters express notions about nuns that seem very antiquated today--all to the effect that they must be failed women running away from real life and cruelly exploited by the Papacy.  The author's sympathetic portrayal of convent living challenges those notions, however.  (You might also be reminded of the beloved British television series Call the Midwife.)  St. Anselm's Mother Superior and her much younger underling, Sister Lucy, for example, are impressive characters.  Much of the book is rather sober by Aird's standards--in other words, this ain't The Flying Nun.  

The Flying Nun television series ran from 1967 to 1970 and starred Sally Field
who worked years to live down her cutesy ingenue image

It's all very impressively done and adds immeasurably to the appeal of the novel.  Gladys Mitchell had a sister who was a nun, but I don't believe that Aird, of Highland Scots ancestry, was even Catholic, so kudos to her for informing herself on the subject.  

Anyway, it transpires that Sister Anne was bumped off with the proverbial blunt instrument, the precise identity of which is cleverly hidden throughout most of the book.  Aird looks at both people inside and outside of the convent who might have had motivation to murder Sister Anne, who, it turns out, was actually an heiress to a valuable estate, which would go in turn to the convent.  (Nuns don't own property.)  There's a chapter devoted to a call which Sloan and Crosby pay on Anne's repellently cold and superficial mother, who never forgave her daughter for devoting her life exclusively to God.  

Some years ago Patrick Ohl, a young mystery blogger who later became a priest, in his review was pretty hard on this book, saying that Aird made a flub concerning blood coagulation and provided an ill-motivated second murder, but I'm inclined more to let the author off the hook for these alleged sins.  However, you could actually argue that both of the murders are insufficiently motivated. In classic detective novels the nicest people--and all of the people in this book at least seem nice--just will go and start plotting ingenious murders at the drop of a hat.   

I do think Aird provided some very good clues to the crimes, however, keeping the whole affair rolling along in an engaging way as a brain teaser.  Coupled with the strong atmosphere you have a real winner of a classic detective novel, rather along the lines, come to think of it, of PD James' later Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), memorably set at a nursing school--though admittedly Aird's book is a far lighter read.  Which some people no doubt will actually prefer!