'Not in the Flesh' by Ruth Rendell
BOOK REVIEW
A hound finds bodies instead of truffles, spurring Chief Inspector Wexford into action.
IN 1964, Ruth Rendell's first published novel, "From Doon With Death," gave us Reginald Wexford, a police inspector in Kingsmarkham, which the British author once described as "a sizable town somewhere in the middle of Sussex." He stars in a third of Rendell's more than 60 novels and appears in two short story collections.
The Wexford series boasts such masterpieces as "A Sleeping Life," "Simisola" and "Harm Done," which stand in any lineup of crime fiction classics. Perhaps inevitably, there are a few duds, including Rendell's 2006 Wexford outing, "End in Tears." But if not all are masterpieces, most are reliably satisfying contributions to one of the most interesting series in the genre's history. Her latest, "Not in the Flesh," falls into this category.
The 21st Wexford novel opens like an episode of "Law & Order," with a man discovering bodily remains unearthed by his truffle-hunting dog. "Man or woman?" asks Wexford, by now a chief detective inspector, when he arrives and sees the recovered bones. Another corpse is soon found nearby. Are the deaths related? Wexford starts digging into the lives of the families residing in nearby homes. In her sense of how family history molds future sins, Rendell is reminiscent of Ross Macdonald in his Lew Archer novels set in Southern California. But she has a sly wit that is conspicuously absent from Archer's melancholy empathy and outrageous similes. Wexford also is a more three-dimensional character than Archer.
Rendell has been documenting change in her imaginary Kingsmarkham for 44 years; "Not in the Flesh" continues to hold a mirror to British society. When a character worries that many immigrants in their midst may be carrying knives, Wexford observes, "That was what they called dark-skinned people these days, 'them Somalis,' as they had once indiscriminately called Asians "them Pakis." Rendell also weaves into the story Wexford's heartbreaking attempts to address the tradition of female genital mutilation within the Somali community of Kingsmarkham.
Like most writers, Rendell favors certain kinds of detail. In this novel, she demonstrates again that she enjoys describing weather, scents, eyes, skin coloring and beautiful women; that she is dismayed by environmental despoliation, extreme obesity, child abuse and neglect. "It always brought Wexford pleasure to come upon a good parent," she writes, "something that happened all too seldom."
