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There is a longstanding connection between “curiosity”, “desire”, and “sexuality”. This connection can be found in texts as diverse as works of scripture like the Hebrew Bible and the Quran as well as in contemporary works of critical theory. Miguel de Cervantes explored such a connection more than four centuries ago in El curioso impertinente, an exemplary novella embedded in the 1605 part one of Don Quixote. Through a comparative reading of Cervantes’s El curioso impertinent, Pedro Almodóvar’s 1997 film Carne trémula (itself a free adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s 1986 novel Live Flesh), and Luis Buñuel’s 1955 film Ensayo de un crimen, this essay analyzes the intersection of curiosity and desire—inflected through the lenses of both Girardian and Lacanian theory—in order to explore the fundamental role not just of curiosity in early modern Spain, but also in the representation of modern (and postmodern) sexuality.

Mystery novels and academic geography have not often intersected. Yet crime fiction can incorporate spatial relationships and real-life regional characteristics. In recent decades mysteries have been freed from the long tradition of presenting elaborate puzzles, and now they feature human interactions in realistic settings. Writers like Ruth Rendell integrate place into their character development and plot lines. Rendell depicts changing urban landscapes in late-twentieth-century England and effectively explores contemporary British culture.

As Rendell acknowledges, dead babies, miscarriages, and illegitimate mothers haunt her work. In A Dark-Adapted Eye - a compelling tale about the murderous relationship between two sisters, Vera and Eden - one of the minor characters, Anne, comments on the news that a maid has drowned herself after discovering that she was pregnant and a separate incident of the recent disappearance of a baby. \"Have you done Macbeth at school?\" she asks her friend, Faith, the narrator of the book. \"Macbeth is full of babies and milk It's really strange that a play like that which is full of horrors should have all that babies and milk stuff, isn't it?\" That final sentence is good summation of the disquieting power of the [Barbara Vine] novels, books described by Ian Rankin as \"consistently better work than most Booker winners put together\". [Anthony Clare] made a link between Rendell's preoccupation with \"the obsessive, the psychotic, the psychopathic\" and the family \"as a place of secrets, untruths, distortions and defilements\". Her childhood is off limits to interviewers, she has said - \"No, I don't want to do that, not doing that, never describe my childhood, no, I'm not going to talk about that,\" she told one journalist - but today she has decided to offer a little. In 1975 the couple divorced, but reunited and remarried two years later. This remains one of the central mysteries of Rendell's life. She told Anthony Clare that although she knew the reasoning behind the decision the subject was decidedly off limits. How does she deal with the question today? \"I don't really talk about it,\" she says. \"No, I think I'd rather not talk about it.\" Why is it off limits? \"It's private,\" she says. \"I don't really want to talk about it and then get more and more questions asked. No, I think I've said enough about that really.\" She told Clare that one day she would perhaps write her autobiography so as to prevent the revelation arising in an unauthorised biography. \"Well, there isn't going to be one,\" she tells me of the planned autobiography. \"They can [write a biography] after I'm dead, I don't really care, but I don't think they will. I suppose they could ask my son, but he wouldn't tell them anything he didn't want them to know.\" Ideally, she would like to die while writing. \"Of course, one doesn't get the chance - people don't have deathbeds now, do they?\" she says. \"They get either drugged or given palliative care as they gradually disintegrate.\" She has pledged her support to a private member's Bill to legalise assisted suicide in this country. So would she, if the situation arose, opt for Dignitas? \"I suppose if I say I support [the Bill], I would do that,\" she says. \"The way I'm going on, it won't be long, will it?\" she jokes as she coughs. \"But I am very strong, very well and all my aunts lived into their nineties. You can't tell what may happen to you, but I don't see myself going to Dignitas. I just don't see it happening to me.\" *

From Girl on the Train to Girl in the Spider's Web -- a look back on a year that lived up to the hypeVote: What was your favourite book of the year?Best of culture in 2015: see this year's cultural highlights, chosen by the Guardian's writers and critics In [Ruth Rendell]'s absence, that manuscript was shepherded to publication by Val McDermid, who was on strong form herself in Splinter the Silence (Little, Brown), a case that takes co-investigators Jordan & Hill into an increasingly violent world. Belinda Bauer, another writer who follows in Rendell's footsteps, confirmed her star status with The Shut Eye (Bantam), in which a grieving mother is contacted by a psychic who may be a psychopath. Dark Corners may not be the last we hear of Rendell's characters, given the tendency for crime narratives to be continued posthumously by other hands. If these transactions are to happen -- and the practice raises considerable ethical and technical challenges -- then it is hard to imagine a better ghostwriter than David Lagercrantz, whose The Girl in the Spider's Web (MacLehose) convincingly extended the life of the late Stieg Larsson's great character, Lisbeth Salander.

From Girl on the Train to Girl in the Spider's Web -- a look back on a year that lived up to the hypeVote: What was your favourite book of the year?Best of culture in 2015: see this year's cultural highlights, chosen by the Guardian's writers and critics In [Ruth Rendell]'s absence, that manuscript was shepherded to publication by Val McDermid, who was on strong form herself in Splinter the Silence (Little, Brown), a case that takes co-investigators Jordan & Hill into an increasingly violent world. Belinda Bauer, another writer who follows in Rendell's footsteps, confirmed her star status with The Shut Eye (Bantam), in which a grieving mother is contacted by a psychic who may be a psychopath. Dark Corners may not be the last we hear of Rendell's characters, given the tendency for crime narratives to be continued posthumously by other hands. If these transactions are to happen -- and the practice raises considerable ethical and technical challenges -- then it is hard to imagine a better ghostwriter than David Lagercrantz, whose The Girl in the Spider's Web (MacLehose) convincingly extended the life of the late Stieg Larsson's great character, Lisbeth Salander.

\"No one had ever been afraid of Dermot before, or not to this degree,\" [Ruth Rendell] writes, \"and it gratified him to have caused someone this amount of fear without violence or even the threat of it.\" It is power that thrills Dermot, who first expects to live in Carl's house for free and then begins to make greater demands on him. As a churchgoer he believes that he occupies a higher moral ground than [Carl] and even suggests that his landlord should not live with his girlfriend Nicola. \"I don't call it living in sin, that would be to go too far,\" he tells him, \"but it is - to put it plainly - wrong.\"