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She expects to finish the 23rd Wexford any minute. ‘I’m retiring him but bringing him back as an adviser — because I cannot let him go on because he’s too old.’ The inspector was 52 when the first in the series was published in 1964, so if he aged in real time that would make him 98, the most ancient policeman in the world. There was a scare recently that she was killing him off. ‘Wexford death rumours have been going on for years,’ Rendell says dismissively. In the past she has said that she is ‘not so much creating a character as putting myself as a man on the page’, so perhaps it would be like killing herself off.
On the cusp of her ninth decade, does she think much about the past? ‘Not a great deal. My memory’s very good and it’s still good. My short-term memory is not as good as it was but since I learnt so much in my youth I could still recite poetry and huge chunks of Shakespeare in a train for hours.’ Foiled again! Rendell is a walled city in interviews. Very friendly and lovely, but a walled, Teflon-coated city. She is expert at shutting down lines of inquiry, misinterpreting questions, fobbing you off with digressions. ‘I suppose I’m a believer in not telling everyone about everything,’ she has said. She has hinted that she thinks too much talking might sap her writing, like Native Americans believing the camera steals your soul.
She grew up in South Woodford, became a writer on the Chigwell Times, married her fellow journalist Donald Rendell at the age of 20 and had a son. Wexford began in 1964 with her first book, From Doon with Death. In 1975 she and Donald Rendell divorced, only to remarry a couple of years later. Since his death in 1999 she has lived alone. She has another house in Suffolk, but in London her life is one of routine: she gets up early, writes for three hours a day, has a strict exercise regime, is phobic about being late. Her son, Simon, lives in Colorado and she has two grandsons; they are coming over for ‘the great birthday’.
The Barbara Vines, regarded as her most ‘literary’ novels, feature loners, charismatic predators, characters with pasts. Rendell was an only child and her parents, both teachers, were at war. ‘Well, but they were very ill suited,’ she says, as though there it ends. Was it awful to live with? ‘Yeah, it was horrible. It was. But people didn’t divorce. Children want it to be harmonious and they don’t want terrible silences but you have to take into consideration that some people are very ill suited from the first. Living together doesn’t make any difference, does it? I don’t know what the answer is, because living in communes doesn’t work either.’ I imagine she takes pride in nothing much about human nature surprising her.
Her publishers are throwing her a birthday bash at the Lords. She is a working Labour peer, spending four afternoons a week in the Upper House. ‘When I first went in I thought, I can’t believe I’ve let myself in for this. But then you get to love it, it’s beautiful and you know everybody and everything in it.’ She has many chums there and can see her friend and fellow crime writer P.D. James, a Tory peer, on the other side. She goes on, ‘I think we should have an entirely elected house, but if that happened I wouldn’t of course stand for it.’
But how then to decide who is selected for the Lords, who for the Commons? She is vague on the whys and wherefores, sounds almost as though she’s talking herself out of it. ‘I’m afraid I think they would put up the brightest and best for the Commons and the second best for the Lords. And probably for the Lords they’d be older. And what would happen to people in the Commons who would traditionally go to the Lords when their time in the Commons is finished? I don’t know but I know all this is being thought of.’
Although she is always referred to as a crime writer, many of her books do not fit into the genre. ‘Well thank you for that, because I don’t think so either. But there’s nothing to be done about it. It helps to sell.’ Her latest Ruth Rendell title, Portobello, is a social comedy about a cross-section of human life in a small patch of west London. ‘In my novels, there’s a lot of petty theft. Stealing odd bits and thinking of kidnapping a cat. Someone is always going to get hurt by it. Jewellery, computers. Well, it wouldn’t matter if someone stole my computer because I put everything on a memory stick immediately and carry it about in an obsessive way.’ She beams. ‘And stealing money — well, money is so very very important to people. To say it doesn’t matter is a ridiculous thing and an example of extreme insensitivity.’
There is such a pause that the question asks itself. How important is it to her? ‘Not as important as it used to be. You know what I think? Partly that’s because we pay such enormously high taxes. I don’t mind that, I think it’s right — I never say I can’t bear these taxes, I’m going to go and live somewhere else. But when you know that whatever money you make, half of it is going to go, you start thinking well, never mind.’ But doesn’t it annoy you when your taxes are misspent? ‘If you know something is hopeless, you don’t mind so much.’
She got her peerage in 1997, in that glad confident morning. How does she feel about Labour’s reign? She is silent. ‘I don’t think I want to say. Not that my opinions are of much value but some people think they are — I’m only going to say I hope we will get back in, but that’s it, really.’ And what about the prospect, at the start of her eighties, of maybe a ten-year Tory stint? ‘Well of course I might not see the end of it, eighty’s very old,’ she says brightly.
It’s time to go. She propels herself off the tight green sofa and sees me out to the hall, where I struggle into my coat and cast around for detail. A tiny leatherbound volume perched on a shelf. If I were one of Rendell’s petty thieves I’d find a way of slipping it into my pocket. And then I catch her watching me speculatively, and beat a retreat.
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