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[Ruth Rendell]'s first novel, \"From Doon With Death\" (1964), introduced [Reginald Wexford], the stoic, scholarly detective from the fictional Kingsmarkham, a Sussex town with an exceptionally high murder rate. \"I don't get sick of him because he's me,\" she told Britain's Guardian newspaper in 2013. \"He doesn't look like me, of course, but the way he thinks and his principles and his ideas and what he likes doing, that's me.\" A woman of remarkable self-discipline, Rendell exercised for 30 minutes each morning before sitting down to write at 8:30.In 1997, Rendell was named a baroness, which gave her a seat in the House of Lords. She was outspokenly liberal and contributed 100,000 pounds (about $150,000) a year to charities.

[Ruth Rendell], as usual, gives us more than a mere mystery here. Her novel is a multilayered construction in which a case acts itself out amid nature's dark forces and the even darker forces that shape the psyches of the village inhabitants -- victims and perps alike. The Dade children -- Sophie, 13, and Giles, 15 -- along with their adult sitter, Johanna, have disappeared while their parents were away in Paris. Conventional wisdom would have it that they drowned, but [Reginald Wexford] isn't convinced.

In \"Simisola,\" [Reginald Wexford] is asked to search for the missing daughter of his physician, Dr. Raymond Akande, a black man with whom he also socializes. During the investigation, Wexford realizes that while he considers himself color blind in the matter of racial relations, he does treat people of color differently.

After starring in 23 books, Inspector Reginald Wexford is still solving crime in your latest, No Man's Nightingale, when he might be enjoying his recent retirement. At 83, you are doing much the same thing. Does Wexford still reflect your perspectives on life? I probably do use both, although maybe I shouldn't. I call these books \"the political Wexfords\" because they are about subjects I care about. It started with Simisola really, which was about racist behaviour. Then I tackled the environment, and then domestic violence in Harm Done. Wexford is a Liberal Democrat though, and I am a Labour party member, in fact a Labour peer, so I am further to the left than him. Having said that, my books are not political really, even though I call them that. I don't choose my villains and heroes for political reasons. I have found that if I stop to write down a plan for the story, it all goes away. So I just write it as it comes and then go over it with great care. Maybe The Murder at the Vicarage was in the back of my mind, you never know. I did read a lot of [Agatha Christie] a very long time ago. I don't read much crime fiction now. I mention Wilkie Collins in this book because a beautiful young girl's fate is to be decided in a letter. I read a lot of Victorian novels, so I suppose the comparison, especially with their neat endings, is often there. Collins was damaged as a writer by taking all that laudanum, but The Woman in White is a very good novel.

So, for almost 30 years, [Ruth Rendell]'s readers have experienced countless poisonings, stabbings, shootings, stranglings and violent deaths in her 42 books. Fifteen of them, including her new one, Kissing The Gunner's Daughter, feature Detective Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford, who works in the fictional English town of Kingsmarkham. Another 16 are chilling novels of psychological suspense such as last year's Going Wrong, about an obsessive lover. Six are collections of short stories. \"I felt I had to use a different name because the voice of the Vine novels is so different from that of the others,\" said Rendell, who has no trouble keeping the two voices separate. \"I know when I start a book whether I'm writing as Rendell or a Vine.\" Some would call Rendell a compulsive storyteller of another kind. When at her Suffolk home, she devotes each morning to her writing. The novels come in a steady stream, one or two a year, along with a number of short stories. And yet Rendell came to a career as crime novelist almost by accident, after a decade of marriage and motherhood.

Kissing the Gunner's Daughter is the 15th [Reginald Wexford] novel, and [Ruth Rendell] has hinted it may be the last as she's more interested in writing the suspense tales that come out under her own name and the crime novels she authors as Barbara Vine. That's sad news for fans of the homely, intelligent detective, but at least with this mystery, we're seeing Wexford at his very best. A fictional character couldn't ask for a grander exit.

[RUTH RENDELL] and [Barbara Vine] have become household names in Great Britain (\"I never use a credit card in stores, and I've gotten mail addressed simply, 'Ruth Rendell, England' \"), and her books have won a number of awards. Otto Penzler, founder of the Mysterious Press and the American publisher of her new book, calls her one of \"the greatest novelists writing in England today.\" That he and others often omit the qualifying word \"mystery\" before novelist indicates the way in which her books have transcended the traditional confines of the genre. Often, Rendell doesn't just write about criminals - she enters their minds, telling about events from the distorted view of the psychopath.

These answers will be found on the Arts & Entertainment network Monday night at 10, when the first hour of a three-part dramatization of Ruth Rendell's Shake Hands Forever is presented on the cable network's new Masters of Mystery series. (The subsequent episodes will be shown Feb. 12 and 19, in the same Monday-night slot.) \"Surely you Americans have heard of [Reginald Wexford],\" Rendell said, sounding slightly aghast in a recent telephone conversation from her home in the Suffolk district of England.

[Ruth Rendell] is all too willing to make life easy for Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford in \"The Babes in the Wood.\" In circumstances when an American cop would be arresting people and dragging them downtown for glaring lights and screeching questions, Wexford might just as soon go home for tea, leaving the suspects to stew (or just sleep) overnight. [Jeffery Deaver]'s \"The Vanished Man\" was one of the best novels I read in 2003, but one of my colleagues was disappointed by it. \"I like it when Deaver MESSES with me,\" he said, not using that verb. \"And he didn't MESS with me enough in this one.\" A very few of the tales are a little ham-handed by Deaver standards. Perhaps they're some of his earlier works, not quite salvageable even by Deaver, who is usually a painstaking rewriter.

An Unkindness of Ravens is a provocative addition to the series, being, in some ways, as unsettling as [Ruth Rendell]'s suspense tales. It begins harmlessly enough, with [Reginald Wexford] looking into the disappearance of a neighbor's husband. It first appears that Rodney Williams has taken off of his own accord. As a salesman for a local firm, Williams often travels out-of-town on business trips, and after meeting Williams' drab and cheerless wife, Joy, Wexford theorizes that Williams may be just another runaway husband.