Maxima Library

This latest gem from the British master concerns the wreckage wrought on a variety of Londoners by a womanizing con man who speaks in rhymes. Here, as in A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999), Rendell’s genius is to create characters so vivid they live beyond the frame of the novel. She pushes the ordinary to the point of the bizarre while remaining consistently believable. Araminta “Minty” Knox, the fragile center of the plot, is a 30-something woman, alone and obsessed with hygiene, who works in a dry-cleaning shop. All the world is a petri dish for Minty, who sees germs everywhere, which she attacks with Wright’s Coal Tar Soap. She is equally tormented by the ghosts she imagines, her domineering “Auntie” and the man who took her virginity. Other characters hover on the borderline between transformation and disaster. Tory MP “Jims” Melcombe-Smith, in bed politically with the “family values” crowd, is simultaneously courting a gay lover. Working-class Zillah Leach, bored with her small children and smaller bank account, schemes to marry up, even at the risk of committing bigamy. This is not a whodunit in the sense of Rendell’s Inspector Wexford novels, but a study of crime’s origins and especially its consequences as they ripple out beyond the immediate victims. The plot is intricate but brisk, and Rendell nails her characters’ psychology in all its perverse logic. She has a travel writer’s sensitivity to setting, to the architecture, cemeteries, birds and vegetation of contemporary Britain. This is a literary page-turner, both elegant and accessible.

No suspense collection is complete without this anthology. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the stories in this volume represent many of the biggest names in detective and suspense fiction: Ellery Queen, Harold Q. Masur, Celia Fremlin, Jack Ritchie, Patricia Highsmith and Bill Pronzini are only a few of the prize-winning authors in this amazing volume.

The Portobello area of West London has a rich personality – vibrant, brilliant in colour, noisy, with graffiti that approach art, bizarre and splendid. An indefinable edge to it adds a spice of danger. There is nothing safe about Portobello…

Eugene Wren inherited an art gallery from his father near an arcade that now sells cashmere, handmade soaps and children's clothes. But he decided to move to a more upmarket site in Kensington Church Street. Eugene was fifty, with prematurely white hair. He was, perhaps, too secretive for his own good. He also had an addictive personality. But he had cut back radically on his alcohol consumption and had given up cigarettes. Which was just as well, considering he was going out with a doctor. For all his good intentions, though, there was something he didn't want her to know about…

On a shopping trip one day, Eugene, quite by chance, came across an envelope containing money. He picked it up. For some reason, rather than report the matter to the police, he wrote a note and stuck it up on lamppost near his house:

'Found in Chepstow Villas, a sum of money between eighty and a hundred and sixty pounds. Anyone who has lost such a sum should apply to the phone number below.'

This note would link the lives of a number of very different people – each with their obsessions, problems, dreams and despairs. And through it all the hectic life of Portobello would bustle on.

Stealing things from people who had upset her was something Polly did quite a lot. There was her Aunt Pauline; a girl at school; a boyfriend who left her; and there was the man on the plane…Humiliated and scared, by a total stranger, Polly does what she always does. She steals something. But she never could have imagined that her desire for revenge would have such terrifying results.

A classic Rendellian loner, Mix Cellini is superstitious about the number 13. Living in a decaying house in Notting Hill, Mix is obsessed with 10 Rillington Place, where the notorious John Christie committed a series of foul murders. He is also infatuated with a beautiful model who lives nearby – a woman who would not look at him twice. Mix's landlady, Gwedolen Chawcer is equally reclusive – living her life through her library of books. Both landlady and lodger inhabit weird worlds of their own. But when reality intrudes into Mix's life, a long pent-up violence explodes.

La octogenaria Gwendolen Chawcer, una solterona que jamás logró escapar a la posesiva personalidad de su padre, vive entregada a la lectura compulsiva y a la fantasía de un viejo amor imposible en St. Blaise House, la mansión victoriana de la familia en el barrio londinense de Notting Hill. Pero tan melancólica y plácida existencia se ve alterada cuando, haciendo caso al consejo de unas amigas, decide alquilar la planta de arriba de la casa.

Su nuevo arrendatario, Mix Cellini, es un mecánico de máquinas de fitness con una fijación: los crímenes que John Christie cometió sesenta años antes en el número 10 de Rillington Place, apartamento del horror a escasa distancia de St. Blaise House. Gwendolen no tarda en descubrir tan siniestra obsesión, pero ignora que ésta irá adquiriendo tintes cada vez más macabros cuando Mix se enamore perdidamente de la modelo Nerissa Nash.

Con Trece escalones, Ruth Rendell presenta con su maestría habitual un retrato perturbador y perverso de dos personajes tremendamente dispares pero a la vez hermanados por sus neurosis románticas. De paso, la gran dama de la novela de suspense psicológico incide en temas tan espinosos como el culto a los grandes criminales de la historia o las ansias de celebridad que caracterizan a nuestra sociedad.