Word: wexfords
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...moral confidence. The Hearts and Lives of Men -- surely a Victorian novelist would have come up with a livelier title -- is nonetheless set in modern times, specifically the fast-track London art world of the '60s and '70s. It covers 23 years in the lives of Clifford and Helen Wexford, an attractive, careless pair who marry, remarry, have messy affairs, manage to lose track of their little girl for a 14-year span -- and still retain the reader's sympathy. Perhaps because the author is a longtime feminist, Helen, who finally conquers her passive instincts and makes an independent life...
...Mysterious Press; 281 pages; $15.95) under the pseudonym Patrick Ruell. He discerningly depicts the slow emergence from submission to self-respect of a woman who discovers after her husband's death how little she has known of his real life. Ruth Rendell, roughly half of whose novels feature Detectives Wexford and Burden, won an Edgar this spring under the pseudonym Barbara Vine for the one- off saga of family madness A Dark-Adapted Eye. She may be a contender for another under her own name for Heartstones (Harper & Row; 80 pages; $10.95), a medieval enameled miniature of a novella...
...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...
...started a historical novel, a romance novel, a Jewish novel although I am only a little bit Jewish, some straight novels. A publisher rejected my comedy-of-manners novel with a nice note saying, 'Do you have any more?' So I gave him my first mystery novel, featuring Wexford and Burden, had it accepted and rewrote it all over Christmas one year...
...detectives, who have appeared in 13 novels, are the mainstay of a popularity that has seen more than 1 million copies of Rendell's books printed in English; she has also been translated into 14 other languages. Still, Wexford and Burden are fast becoming the bane of her career. Whenever Rendell makes a public appearance, readers are apt to tell her that they could do with fewer explorations into the midnight of the mind. Says the author: "It is very difficult for the creator of a series character to realize that he is very much more real and important...