Posted 5 months ago
The Vault
Having never before read one of Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford novels, my only context for The Vault was as a sequel to the excellent non-Wexford novel A Sight for Sore Eyes. That novel, while billed as crime fiction, was a gripping psychological examination of generations of British families spanning class boundaries, threaded together with a series of meticulously plotted crimes. I would recommend it fully.
Rendell wrote and set The Vault (released this year) ten years after its predecessor, bringing Wexford out of retirement to investigate the crimes of the previous novel, whose perpetrator was known to the reader but not to any of the book’s characters—at least, none left alive.
It makes for a far more conventional, and far less interesting, piece of detective fiction. Presumably beholden to the behavior and likeability of Wexford as established in dozens of previous works, Rendell plods along, mired in a plot whose generalities the reader has already experienced and whose particulars feel gratingly like Greatest Hits prose for longtime fans.
It doesn’t improve my literary reservations about series that span many books, and to some extent of genre fiction itself, which so often seem beholden to clichés and restrictions both self-imposed and external.
Having read a non-Wexford novel of Rendell’s immediately before this makes it plain to me that Rendell is capable of amazing feats of observation and human insight when her primary responsibility is to truth and illumination, and not serialization. I intend to seek out more of such work from her. Of course, it’s always possible old Wexford was just having an off day.
