Reading the first of Ruth Rendell’s famous Inspector Wexford mysteries.

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Before we get to the regularly scheduled programming I want to stop and take a moment to acknowledge that this is my 2,000th post on MORE TO COME since I began this newsletter as a way to capture photos and memories from a family vacation back in 2008. To see pieces I wrote for earlier milestones, check out 1500 and counting from 2023, and The top one percent from 2020, which I wrote on the occasion of the 1,000th post. I’m clearly picking up the pace in retirement! Thanks, as always, for reading.

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Three short years ago my friend Oakley Pearson inadvertently put me on the path of reading dangerously (aka reading murder mysteries) when he gifted us a box of Agatha Christie mysteries. This past Thanksgiving he once again passed along a number of books, this time by the writer Ruth Rendell. In the spirit of the season, I opened the first of these gifts this month and began to read of a prim and proper wife whose unlikely and horrific death revealed a dark secret.

From Doon With Death (1964) by Ruth Rendell is the first of her twenty-four Inspector Wexford mysteries. Margaret Parsons is a timid housewife usually seen in plain dresses and sandals when she visits the nearby market or attends the local Methodist Church. Parsons is devoted to her garden, her kitchen, and her husband and they live a quiet and simple life in the Sussex village of Kingsmarkham. But now Margaret Parsons is dead, brutally strangled, her body abandoned in the nearby woods. Chief Inspector Reg Wexford, the big, gruff rural detective, is intrigued by the seeming disconnect between her life and death, and he works with his assistant and sidekick, Inspector Mike Burden, to uncover the truth. It turns out that the truth includes several dark secrets that those who knew Margaret Parsons want to keep quiet.

Rendell’s crisp writing and the description of Wexford and Burden’s often opposite but complementary investigative techniques moves the story forward. It is the nature of the death—the strangulation, but with no sexual or other physical assault—that pushes Wexford toward a fuller understanding of the victim and her murderer. When he discovers rare books in her attic, each passionately inscribed by a lover known only as Doon, Wexford has a key that begins to unlock the crime. A tube of lipstick, an unusual shade called Arctic Sable, leads him to connect the victim to some of the town’s wealthier citizens.

Rendell also has a sly sense of humor. Burden asks Wexford about the identity of Doon when they first encounter the name. The gruff Chief Inspector’s reply is pitch-perfect: “You’re supposed to be the detective. Well, detect!” When Wexford and Burden come across a young blonde girl at the home of a wealthy car dealer and his pretty, vivacious wife, he asks for her name and what she does for Mr. and Mrs. Missal.

“‘Inge Wolf'” [she replies]. “‘I am nanny for Dymphna and Priscilla.’

Dymphna! Burden thought, aghast. His own children were John and Pat.”

The ending does involve a number of twists and turns. I had figured out a key fact several chapters before Rendell has Wexford utter his discovery out loud. Nonetheless, the identity of the murderer is a surprise and a compelling end to this tale.

As I have found out in this dive into the murder mystery genre, there are many more writers, famous detectives, and plot twists than I ever could have imagined back in the day when my most difficult mystery to solve was with the occasional game of Clue as we worked to identify the killer, the place, and the weapon. “I suspect Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the candlestick” has come a long way.

More to come . . .

DJB 

Photo by Neffaa Adams on Unsplash