Word: wexfords
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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British Author Ruth Rendell writes two kinds of novels: the continuing adventures of two shrewd and dogged suburban policemen, Wexford and Burden, which delight her fans, and dark journeys into the deranged psyches of outwardly normal people, which fascinate her but sell far fewer copies. The first group fits comfortably into the mystery genre. The second resists pigeonholes. The books feature no heroic detective and no gathering of suspects for a summing up. Sometimes the precise nature of a crime remains known only to the perpetrator. The lure to the reader is not to see justice done but to understand...
...Rendell fans, it may be a bit disappointing to learn that neither book features sly, plump, kindly old Reg Wexford and stern, judgmental, middle-aged John Burden. Live Flesh rests instead on a daring premise: a released convict's obsessive determination to make a friend of the policeman whom he shot and paralyzed while resisting capture. The policeman and the reader are alternately encouraged to believe in this felon's capacity for rehabilitation and disillusioned by his consuming selfishness. Complicating the uneasy relationship is the criminal's growing attraction toward the woman whom the policeman means to marry and cannot...
Duke Hruska II Wexford...
...Wexford...
Knowles ends the story with the trite implication that the Hitlers of tomorrow are the school boys of today. Watching Wexford calmly graduate from Devon after effectively disrupting the last remnants of its peace. Hallam muses, "He's an incipient monster, and I can't stop him. For the last dozen years we've seen in the world how monsters can come to the top and just what horrors they can achieve. And these monsters were once adolescents...