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New Book Corner

Rendell, "A Spot of Folly."


Ruth Rendell wrote a million crime novels before dying in 2015; people said she was a literary genius, and her fans included Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, and Ian Rankin. A few years after her death, her publishers collected ten of her tales—“tales of murder and mayhem”—and repackaged them as a collection, “A Spot of Folly.”

As far as I know, you can’t easily get this book in America. You have to search for a European edition. It’s worth the search.

Folly is Rendell’s main theme, basically always; she is deeply interested in the silliness of human behavior. Even a ghost story, in Rendell’s hands, is a chance to comment on “folly.” Here’s an example, a three-sentence tale from the start of the anthology:

Alone in the four-poster, she glanced up from her book and saw in the mirror a little old woman sitting beside her. She shut her eyes, looked again, saw an empty bed, neatly made with fresh linen. The hotel staff, summoned by her screams, found no one, not even herself.

This story gives us a hotel staff who will almost certainly conclude that a conventional abduction has occurred, or that the screams have just been imagined (folly). The story also gives us a character who (foolishly) fails to trust her own eyes; the seconds our protagonist spends blinking and revisiting her mirror are seconds she could—more wisely—spend in “fight or flight.” Another writer might have the protagonist do battle with the supernatural, and even turn out triumphant, but Rendell just coolly kills off her human in three brisk sentences. A spot of folly. We’re all much more vulnerable than we think we are.

Rendell never won a Booker Prize—though she came close, with “A Guilty Thing Surprised”—and I think the main reason for this is that her stories are just too enjoyable. Things happen in these tales; we aren’t relying on slow internal monologues or quiet epiphanies. People die. People shoot one another. At the same time, there are beautiful sentences. (Notice how the weak, tossed-off dependent clause—“summoned by her screams”—seems to match the futility of the actual gesture, the screaming, in the ghost story quoted above.) 

Twisty plotting and real intelligence/acuity: the best of two literary worlds. If you can get your hands on this book, it’s recommended.
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