End In Tears [Paperback]

I learnt my lesson with this Wexford book. Rather than swallowing it in one gulp, I paced myself over several, very enjoyable eveings, savouring the stunning complexity of the plot and its final, shattering denouement.

When a feckless, and frankly not very likeable, teenager is found with her head bashed in, Wexfords team, with some interesting new additions, swings into action. A connection is speedily established with an earlier incident in which a concrete block is droppped from a bridge onto a passing car and the attention is quickly jostled by a cornucopia of plots and sub-plots. The focus shifts rapidly yet intelligently between a soon-to-be dual murder investigation, the distress of the reluctantly childless, an unusal seduction technique and an intriguing note of disharmony on the Wexfords' domestic front.

I am hard put to decide which aspect of Ms Rendells' talent I admire the most; her protrayal of characters that provoke such fierce emotional responses in the reader, her ability to construct a series of complex and inter-related plots or her esoteric knowledge of the English Language!

Weeks later, 18 year old Amber Marshalson is killed walking home along a quiet road after a night out. Her father Graham has been up all night worrying, and eventually sets out to search the road he knows she’ll be coming home by. A shattering discovery is his to be made.

It’s only when the police find out that Amber was one of the people involved in the earlier road accident, driving a car very similar to that carrying the elderly victim, that they realise someone could easily have made a previous disastrous attempt on her life and, failing in that, has tried again with shattering success…

End in Tears is Rendell’s 20th Inspector Wexford novel. (It’s something indeed that they don’t make up even half her output.) These police procedurals of hers are not my favourite of her many fictional branches, but to many they constitute the most enduring and famous sections of her body of work. It’s easy to see why: while her other novels are dark, disturbing, twisted affairs of the head, the Wexford books are warmer and more welcoming things altogether. They do share a dark view of the human heart, true (this one particularly), but they come at it from the opposite angle. The crimes of the Wexford books, too, are more rational things; they're open to freer explanation, they make you less uncomfortable, make you feel less unsafe in your own skin. They offer the pleasures, then, of much detective fiction: they offer a world turned upside down then nicely righted again by the detective; they show an environment controllable, balanced, just. (Though even with the Wexford books Rendell rarely allows complete justice; that’s why they stand out, with their sometimes ambiguous, messy endings). They are more comforting – though it’s a mistake to think they are always entirely comfortable to read, either.

This isn’t to say, though, that the Wexford books don’t do anything new with the genre. Well, the sub-genre. She doesn’t have as free a rein for originality as in her other books, but within the sub-genre she puts herself in she pushes against the boundaries as much as any other writer of procedural mystery novels. In this respect she’s as good as P.D. James with imbuing the traditional detective format with a relevant, literary edge. Rendell’s books, though, are less discordant with reality than James’s, I find.

All of this is true about End in Tears. Fans of Wexford will love it: the focus is very much on him here. He’s the lens through which Rendell looks at society, his the mind she filters everything through. He’s as charming as ever, loveable but slightly gruff, cosy but hard. His daughter Sylvia has agreed to be a surrogate mother to her ex-husband and his new partner, which causes fractures not only in their relationship but also in that between he and his wife Dora. Without doubt, fans of Wexford who have grown impatient for him in the three years since the last book will find their hunger more than sated here. There are two new recruits to Wexford’s team as well, and Rendell uses these two very well to provide a nice dose of humour, in the way she has always done well: behavioural exaggeration. Detective Hannah Goldsmith is PC to a ridiculous degree, which makes her character at times quite ridiculous. The reader’s complicity with Rendell in being very fully aware of this would, in lesser hands, make the character little more than a humorous device, but for the fact Rendell fleshes her out in other, touchingly human ways.

Fans of mysteries, too, should love it. End in Tears is possibly Rendell’s most well-crafted mystery detective novel since Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter. Indeed, the kind of craft and plotting on display here is such to put other authors to shame. There are subplots and red-herrings a-plenty, and Rendell truly leads the reader down the garden path, all the while seeming to be taking them closer to the solution. This is a true master-class in reader deception, while still playing fair. Her writing as is good as ever (maybe even better, in fact, than in the past three novels written under the Rendell name), and there are about five scenes so powerfully written that they stand out to me even now, days and days after I finished the book.

End in Tears is a novel about children. More specifically, about babies. Children are where Wexford looks for the solution, and children are where he finds it (though in a completely different kind of way). Children and babies pop up all over the place, and it’s a book that says munch about the way they're treated in society today. It makes for a powerful novel.