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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 6, No. 7 |
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reviews the latest thriller from the English Queen of Mystery THE ROTTWEILER |
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Imagine 'Tales of the City' with a serial killer upstairs
of TheColumnists.com
All hail the Queen--Queen Ruth, that is. She never lets you down when it comes to mystery novels, thrillers or whatever you want to call the books she keeps writing, two or three times a year.
Yes, Ruth Rendell has done it again with her latest, "The Rottweiler" (Crown, $25), which was published late last year in America. It's not so much a mystery as it is a serious novel about contemporary English characters whose lives somehow become entangled in one sort of crime or another.
If a Yank had written a book called "The Rottweiler," no doubt it would be about a sick urban dude who trains a ferocious mutt of the breed Rottweiler and sics it on his enemies until the cops track him down and finish him and the dog off in a massive shootout, most likely after a car chase.
But Rendell's novel has no dogs in it, not even an Old English Sheepdog. The title is the nickname given a serial killer because he left bloody bite marks on his first victim, the kind a Rottweiler might have inflicted. Turns out that was a horrible mistake and this serial killer has never even given one of his victims a hickey.
Rendell has no peer anywhere in the world when it comes to spinning story webs around endlessly fascinating characters. This time she sets the bar even higher than usual, creating a rooming house full of absorbing characters, then letting us gradually figure out one of them is the serial killer they call The Rottweiler.
I love these characters for their quirky realism. For instance, there's Inez, who runs a London antique shop on the ground floor of a multi-story building she rents out to various roomers. Inez is living one of those lives full of what is often described as "quiet desperation." Unlucky in love, she finally found a broken-down TV actor who turned out to be a great husband...until he died suddenly. Now she spends each evening quietly rerunning the episodes from his detective TV series on her VCR and dreaming that he's there with her again.
As I surrendered to Rendell's advances and was drawn into her story, I couldn't help but start thinking of Inez as the sort of landlady of a "Tales of the City" rooming house, where nobody normal need apply for tenancy.
One of her tenants, for instance, is Will, a tall, handsome, 20something guy who also happens to be mentally challenged. Will works as a day laborer in construction, lives alone in his apartment and pretty much minds his own business and stays out of trouble. He would really like to move in with his aunt Becky, a single woman who feels responsible for her dead sister's retarded son, but she wants a man of her own--and doesn't think she'll ever attract one if she lets Will move in and sit around her place each evening, eating pizza and watching TV cartoon shows.
Will has his own master plan. You see, he recently saw this movie about a treasure being buried in a back yard on Tenth Avenue. He went back and saw it again and made sure nobody dug up the treasure. So, now he wants to find wherever Tenth Avenue is in London, dig up the treasure and buy a big house to live in forever with his auntie Becky. Right.
Then there's Ludmila, a Russian lady of indeterminate age, who has been married so many times that she can't even remember how many wedding rings she's collected. She has permitted her latest boy friend, good old Freddy Perfect, to move in with her and, essentially, leech off her indefinitely. Freddy troubles Inez because he loves to chat with her on his way in and out of the building, generally picking up valuable objects in her antique shop and finding new and offbeat ways to break them.
Jeremy Quick is another tenant--a quiet fellow who works with computers and is hoping to marry his longtime girl friend named Belinda that nobody has ever seen. They're waiting for Belinda's ailing and elderly mum to die, so they won't have to set aside a room for her.
Finally, there's Zeinab, a gorgeous young Muslim girl, who's Inez' assistant in the store. Zeinab doesn't live in the building, comes to work later every day and spends much of her free time hocking the expensive gifts given to her by two older men who both are engaged to marry her. She switches engagement rings whenever one of them sets foot inside the store, so as not to let on that she's about to give her hand in marriage to two different guys simultaneously. Neither swain knows about the other--and, in fact, even Inez isn't aware that Zeinab is really a girl named Suzanne who already is living with a third guy who has fathered the children nobody knows she has.
Sound confusing? Well, it isn't. Not a bit. Welcome to the world of Ruth Rendell, who loves to toss all kinds of ingredients into her story blender, then flick it on and let 'er rip.
Read between the lines of Rendell's gripping storyline and you'll understand she's telling you something very real--and perhaps frightening--about contemporary society and how very little we sometimes know about the people whose lives we're part of nearly every day.
And, yes, this all actually weaves its way into a mystery. Once you know who the serial killer is, Rendell doesn't let you relax. That's when she begins to let you get closer to the killer, so you can ponder what drives the killer instinct, ultimately setting you up for the climax when somebody decides to blackmail the killer and all hell really breaks loose.
I highly recommend "The
Rottweiler." It's as good a novel as you'll read in any
literary genre these days. And not one you'll soon forget.
©2005 by Ron Miller. The book cover design by Bradford Foltz is courtesy of Crown Publishers. This column first posted on Jan. 24, 2005.
Ron Miller is the author
of "Mystery! A Celebration," official companion book
to the PBS "Mystery!" series. He writes about TV mysteries
for MYSTERY SCENE magazine as well as for Dark Corridors. His
new mystery class, "Ron Miller's Carnival of Mystery,"
is scheduled this May at the Academy for Lifelong Learning at
Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.
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