Rendell, Ruth Barbara (1930– )

English novelist and short-story writer. She is the author of a popular detective series featuring Chief Inspector Wexford, of which Harm Done (1999) was the 17th. Her psychological crime novels explore the minds of people who commit murder, often through obsession or social inadequacy, as in A Demon in my View (1976), Heartstones (1987), The Keys to the Street (1996), A Sight for Sore Eyes (1998), and Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (2001). Many of her works have been adapted for television.

Lake of Darkness (1980) won the Arts Council National Book Award (Genre Fiction) for that year. She also writes under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, and books published under that name include A Fatal Inversion (1987; winner of the Crime Writers' Association Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction), Asta's Book (1993), The Brimstone Wedding (1995), and Grasshopper (2000). The Blood Doctor (2002) is a psychological novel based on the diaries of Lord Henry of Nanther, Queen Victoria's physician. Her subsequent novel was The Rottweiler (2003). She also published Piranha to Scurfy and Other Stories in 2000, a collection of gothic ghost stories. She was made a baroness in 1997.