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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 27 |
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Two skeletal remains,
long hidden, baffle cops
of TheColumnists.com
Turn Ruth Rendell loose on a mystery involving skeletal remains, long buried, that are turned up by a dog trained to sniff out truffles and you just know you're in for a deeply satisfying mystery novel.
But when you add in a second dessicated corpse found in a locked room of an abandoned cottage pretty close to the first burial site, that's an iron clad guarantee England's empress of mystery is going to lure you deep into her web of deceit and criminal endeavors.
Rendell is matchless in her realm of mystery. She can do it all--thrillers, psychological puzzlers, Hitchcockian edge of your seat suspensers and good old fashioned detective stories. The new one, "Not in the Flesh" (Crown, $25.95), is her 21st detective novel featuring Chief Inspector Wexford--a sleuth quite equal to the task of warming up two of the most confounding of cold cases he's ever tackled.
Rendell is especially good at weaving tangled webs of intrigue, which is what you usually get when you have to start unravelling a mystery that goes back decades and not just a few months. She is also brilliant at concocting odd and interesting characters for Wexford to meet along the way.
For instance, there's a nasty piece of work named John Grimble, who inherited the tract of land where the dog sniffed out a dead body. He wanted to develop the land for a housing tract, but the authorities limited him to just one house because all the neighboring landowners protested his plans. He is an angry, vengeful man who had already begun digging a large trench to service the site with utilities when the planning people said "no" to his project. The skeletal remains were found in that trench, which Grimble had filled in not long after it first was excavated.
Who dumped a body there? Was it somebody connected with the controversial project? Wexford has a lot of digging to do--in the history of squabbles between lots of people whose paths crossed that land at one time or another, including itinerant farm workers who used to camp there during fruit harvest season.
The other remains found nearby may be linked to yet anothre strange character--a best-selling novelist who's dying of cancer and lives with his wife--and his ex-wife--in full view of the land where both sets of remains were turned up. As fate would have it, one of the writer's most popular books is about to be made into a movie and its female star is going to be none other than Inspector Wexford's actress daughter.
Ruth Rendell very comfortably straddles almost all the genres of mystery. And you can see that quite clearly in "Not in the Flesh." The connections between all the suspects in these crimes constitute the basic foundations of an old-fashioned "puzzle" mystery, but Wexford is not nor has he ever been one of those quirky English sleuths of the "golden age." No, he's a modern police detective and his approach to solving his cases is realistic and accurate, giving the story also the feel of a police procedural.
But Rendell also loves to link contemporary issues to her mysteries--and that's why Wexford is also involved in trying to stop a family of immigrants from Somalia from having their young daughter circumsized in the traditional manner of their homeland, even though the barbaric practice is illegal in the United Kingdom.
So, what you have in "Not in the Flesh" is a constantly evolving mystery story that should satisfy those who like both the old and the new schools of mystery. Moreover, Rendell just happens to write some of the best dialogue of any writer in any genre anywhere. To top it off, she always keeps you guessing until the end. You may figure something out correctly before the end, but don't go slapping yourself on the back too early. She always keeps you from going on a self-congratulory spree by pulling a few surprises out of her hat.
I'm almost never let down by a new Rendell mystery and "Not in the Flesh" maintains that ongoing tradition with oak leaf clusters.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The cover illustration is courtesy of Crown Publishing. This column first posted July 7, 2008.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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