Ruth Rendell was the bestselling author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries, most notably her Inspector Wexford series. Ruth was born in 1930 in England to an English father and Scandinavian mother. Ruth had two Christian names, Ruth and Barbara. She used Barbara for her pseudonym “Barbara Vine”, with Vine coming from her great-grandmother’s maiden name. She noted that although it isn’t unusual to have two Christian names, she was called by each of them equally growing up. “Ruth was my father’s choice of name for me, Barbara my mother’s. Because Ruth was difficult for my mother’s Scandinavian parents to pronounce, her side of the family called me Barbara, and since this sort of duality was impossible in one household, my father finally started calling me Barbara too.”
She added that she tended to “divide friends and relatives into the ‘Ruth people’ and the ‘Barbara people’ and although having two names didn’t make her into “two people” she noted in an introduction to two of her Vine books that she did have two aspects of personality with Ruth being “tougher, colder, more analytical, possibly more aggressive” and Barbara being “more feminine.” She noted, “It is Barbara who sews.”
After graduating high school Ruth became a journalist. She worked on the Chigwell Times at age 20 and within a few years was a top reporter. But it quickly became clear she had more of a penchant for fiction. In one instance at the paper, she wrote a story about a deserted house and invented a ghost which prompted the homeowner to threaten to sue. On another assignment, she skipped a local tennis club’s dinner and wrote a story based on the pre-prepared speech, “thus missing the fact that the after-dinner speaker died in the middle of his speech!” She quit the newspaper before she was fired.
While at the newspaper she met Don Rendell and married him. She had a son and wrote several unpublished novels over the next ten years while she worked as “a mother and housewife.” That changed in 1964 when her first Inspector Wexford novel, Doon with Death, was published. She said that, “I’m pretty sure that even if one of the non-thriller novels had been signed, I would have ended up on the same literary pathway.”
She divorced her husband in 1975 and then remarried him two years later. When asked why, she said that after they divorced she found she couldn’t live without him because “He was the sort of man with whom you could go on a 200-mile car trip and never have to say a word.” They remained together until he passed away in 1999.
She won numerous awards throughout her 50-plus year writing career. She received three Edgars from The Mystery Writers of America, several Golden and Silver Daggers from the British Crimewriters’ Association and a Cartier Diamond award in 1991. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1996 and a life peer as Baroness Rendell of Babergh, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk in 1997. She also sat in the House of Lords for the Labour Party for many years. She was a generous benefactor and donated large amounts of money to housing charities and children’s charities among others.
Ruth was a prolific writer and wrote over 70 works, selling millions of books around the world. She continued writing until her death in 2015. She noted that writing was “essential to my life. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t write.”
