Baroness Rendell of Babergh: Novelist who under her own name and as Barbara Vine explored with compassion human nature’s dark side

Public reserve hid a sly sense of humour and warmth and concern for others

Rendell with a life mask of Handel in 2009 in the room in London where he died (Getty Images)

Baroness Rendell of Babergh in Aldeburgh, Suffolk – better known as the multi-award winning Queen of Crime Fiction, Ruth Rendell – repeatedly stressed her dislike of violence or torture in novels. She also commented that she could not imagine what it would feel like to kill someone – a startling statement from the writer who, in over 60 novels selling over 20 million copies in 26 languages, did more even than Patricia Highsmith to explore the murderous, psychopathic mind in an attempt to understand it.

“I do empathise with people who are driven by dreadful impulses,” she said. “I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden. I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel pity for my psychopaths, because I do.” Her friend and fellow crime queen, the late PD James, agreed: “No one has explored with greater sensitivity and compassion those dark recesses of the human psyche.”

That sensitivity and compassion was not always immediately obvious in public – she could appear reserved and, sometimes, chilly – but that reserve and coldness hid a sly sense of humour and a warmth and genuine concern for others. It also hid, she admitted, neuroses and anxieties that came from her childhood. Her view was: “I am neurotic, but I live with it.” She believed that therapy “might take away my ability to write.”

More than one critic hypothesised that there must be a connection between Rendell’s fictional dysfunctional families, characters warped by family secrets or sickness, and Rendell’s own childhood. But for years they remained hypotheses, as Rendell adamantly – sometimes angrily – refused to talk about her childhood. She relented later in life, but only a little, talking only generally about the trauma she suffered as the only child of an unhappy marriage.

Rendell photographed in 2005 (Reuters)

She was born Ruth Barbara Grasemann in 1930 in South Woodford, Essex. Her mother, Ebba Elise Kruse, was Swedish-born but brought up in Denmark. Her teacher father, Arthur, was English though his antecedents had been immigrants. His family disapproved of Ebba, a fellow teacher who had arrived in Britain at 14, speaking no English. His mother refused to go to their wedding. Perhaps Arthur’s mother disapproved because, according to Rendell, Ebba was “eccentric”, “fey” and “not at all practical”. Certainly, the couple were unsuited – Rendell’s father, for instance, had exacting domestic standards and Ebba was “not the domestic type”. The marriage, said Rendell, was “a great disaster”.

Rendell commented: “I think my father must have been very much in love, but he realised it wasn’t going to work.” In consequence, home life was a succession of tempestuous rows and hurt or threatening silences. This environment created fears and obsessions in Rendell that streamed into her fiction for the rest of her life. The insecurity brought on by first one then the other parent threatening to leave perhaps led to her later obsession with control – a need for routine and punctuality and a ferocious work ethic.

Rendell was educated at the County High School for Girls in Loughton, Essex but spent holidays, rather exotically, in Scandinavia, picking up a working knowledge of both Swedish and Danish. Her mother began to suffer from multiple sclerosis when Rendell was a teenager, although it was undiagnosed for some years. Her mother’s consequent clumsiness and tendency to fall over exacerbated the rows between her parents. These rows upset but also exasperated Rendell. “I felt people should – in the days when people didn’t really get divorced – at least put up a show of getting on in front of their child.”

Rendell idolised her father (she put some of him in Inspector Wexford) but was not close to her mother. She commented later: “I was not encouraged to grow towards her. That was very wrong. I think there were a whole lot of wrong things going on there.”

She had begun writing short stories for women’s magazines at the end of the war, when she was 15, but they were rejected. However, her writing skills were sufficient for her to get a reporting job, aged 18, on the local Chigwell Times.

She worked there for four years, until in 1952 she resigned before she was fired. She had written a report of the tennis club’s annual dinner without actually attending, thus missing the crucial fact that the after-dinner speaker had dropped dead mid-speech. She had already met her future husband, Don Rendell, who was a parliamentary reporter on the Stratford Express. They married when she was 20. Rendell’s paper had a tied cottage – “a nasty little house” – in the back streets of Leyton. They lived there until he left the paper, when they moved in with Ruth’s squabbling parents, who did not make them welcome.

Within months the Rendells bought a “dreadful”, cramped house and took a lodger. When they had their son, Simon, in 1953, they were living in one room of the house.

Throughout the 1950s, at home with Simon, Rendell wrote two unpublished novels. In 1964 John Long published her third, From Doon With Death, which introduced Reginald Wexford, Chief Inspector of the fictional southern England town of Kingsmarkham. Rendell, who was 34, was paid an advance of £75.

Her second novel the next year was not another Wexford but a stand-alone thriller, To Fear A Painted Devil. This established a pattern of alternating Wexford with non-Wexford novels, although she sometimes wrote both in the same year.

By 1974, 10 years after her debut, she had published 13 novels. A year later she divorced her husband and, apparently, embarked on an affair (another absolute no-go area in interviews). Two years later she remarried her husband and they remained together until his death from prostate cancer in 1999. She never publicly discussed the reasons for either divorce or remarriage.

In the 1970s she really hit her stride with both Wexford and her stand-alone novels, which increasingly dealt with psychopathic characters. Her short story collection The Fallen Curtain (1976) won an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The same year’s A Demon In My View won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award.

She was keen to push the boundaries of the genre. In 1977 her novel, A Judgement In Stone, had a first line that broke pretty much every rule of crime fiction, revealing who, what and why (well, sort of): “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read and write” (the illiterate Eunice is enraged because her employer communicates by written notes).

Rendell quickly began to attract awards. In 1981 she received an Arts Council National Book Award for genre fiction, a British Arts Council bursary and, for The Lake of Darkness, the British National Book Award. Two years later she received the Popular Culture Association Award. In 1984 it was a Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Silver Dagger Award for The Tree of Hands and an Edgar Allan Poe Award for The New Girlfriend.

In fact she was deservedly weighed down with awards all her life. She won a record four CWA Gold Daggers and in 1991 received the CWA Diamond Dagger, its outstanding-contribution-to-the-genre award. In 1996 she was named Commander of the British Empire and a life peer. A year later she began serving in the House of Lords as a member of the Labour Party.

By now Rendell and her husband were living in a 450-year-old farmhouse in Suffolk with a lake and a cottage in the grounds. She lent the cottage to writers to work in. Her friend Jeanette Winterson was one of the first people to use it.

Rendell published 13 Wexford and non-Wexford novels between A Judgement In Stone and 1986’s Live Flesh. She was writing more and more psychological fiction, focusing on obsessives and psychopaths far removed from Kingsmarkham. In 1986, with A Dark Adapted Eye, she began writing as Barbara Vine. The name paired her middle name with her grandmother’s maiden name but it wasn’t just another name: “it’s another identity.”

A Dark-Adapted Eye featured an incident inspired by a real event from her childhood. In 1942, when she was 12, she and her mother were evacuated to the Cotswolds. Although in the same village, they were billeted separately because her mother was with her school, and stayed at the vicarage. The pregnant maidservant drowned herself in a pond, something Rendell never forgot.

This first Barbara Vine novel set the template for those that followed – often written from the criminal’s point of view, dealing with family secrets and concealed crimes and sociopaths. Between 1987 and 1998 they were A Fatal Inversion (a Gold Dagger winner), The House of Stairs, Gallowglass, King Solomon’s Carpet, Asta’s Book, No Night Is Too Long and The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy (1998).

She also produced numerous Wexford and non-Wexfords in this time. She was so prolific because of her regular routine. It never varied, even when she entered the House of Lords. She would get up at six, exercise, have breakfast, work from 8.30am to lunchtime then spend the afternoon in the Lords.

The TV adaptations of the Wexford novels began in 1987, with George Baker as Inspector Wexford. The Ruth Rendell Mysteries ran in 48 episodes until 2000. Rendell admired the way Baker had made the character “more, and better, than the author intended.”

Needless to say she was never short of ideas. “Something happens. I read something or somebody tells me something and the idea is started.” She planned the novels but didn’t always stick to who she thought the killer was, often changing her mind as she approached the last chapter. “If I can hide him from myself, I feel I can hide him or her from the reader.”

After a long illness, her husband died in 1999 from prostate cancer. “I’m afraid he didn’t go to a doctor in time… in spite of my urging him.”

All her novels were rooted in social and political issues as much as psychology, family and the environment forming the criminal mind. Everything from immigration to domestic violence, genital mutilation to the environment, was explored in her novels. As a Baroness she introduced into the House of Lords the bill that would eventually become the Female Genital Mutilation Act of 2003.

In time the non-Wexford Rendells and the Barbara Vines were all equally dark, equally psychologically complex. Wexford retired but still appeared in The Vault (2011). Her most recent Barbara Vine novel was The Child’s Child (2012).

Her belief that contemporary society is fundamentally amoral appealed to European film-makers. Claude Chabrol filmed A Judgement in Stone as La Ceremonie (1995) and The Bridesmaid as La Demoiselle d’Honneur (2004). Another Frenchman, Claude Miller, filmed Tree of Hands as Alias Betty (2001) while the Spaniard Pedro Almodovar adapted Live Flesh in 1997.

She was a generous donor to charities. She was vice-president of housing charity Shelter, and supported a number of children’s charities. In the last couple of years she admitted she thought about death every day. “I think we ought to think about it. I suppose that what I really think is that it would be humiliating to be afraid of it.”

But she never stopped writing. “I don’t feel that I churn anything out, ever,” she said. “If I did, I would stop. I am quite happy to go on doing what I am doing now for the rest of my life. I don’t see why I shouldn’t.” She was working on a novel when she suffered a stroke in January.

Ruth Barbara Grasemann, author and politician: born South Woodford, Essex 17 February 1930; CBE 1996; cr. 1997 Life Peer, of Babergh, Aldeburgh; married 1950 Donald Rendell (divorced 1975; one son), 1977 Donald Rendell (died 1999); died 2 May 2015.