The Babes in the Wood: A Chief Inspector Wexford Mystery

There's still a cozy image of mysteries as something to curl up with in front of a comfy fire. The fire would have to be an inferno to dispel the chill of Ruth Rendell's writing. Not that the subject of the 19th Inspector Wexford mystery, The Babes in the Wood (Rendell's 60th book overall) is all that scary. The chill Rendell imparts comes from the cold precision of her view of human nature. There's a throb of misanthropy in Rendell's writing, which is rational and considered and unsparing and has the feel of a consistent vision. Her skepticism about humanity never lapses into the showy barroom bitterness of bad hard-boiled writing.

In The Babes in the Wood, two teenagers have disappeared along with the woman watching them while their parents are out of town. And it's typical of Rendell's chilliness that the grieving parents are presented mercilessly: The mother is a hysteric with only a tenuous grip on reality, and the father is a man whose main reaction to his children's disappearance is resentment at the time it takes away from his work. But they are not the only characters on whom Rendell's cold eye is cast. Icicles nearly hang off the prosperous middle-aged drunk who discovers one of the bodies of the missing and, at the behest of his model wife, keeps it to himself so as not to disturb their social schedule. There's also a fundamentalist cult who've given themselves forbidding Old Testament names and whose knowledge of God appears never to have been disturbed by the specter of love or forgiveness. The treatment of these dried-out Bible thumpers is a particular pleasure, given the contemporary tendency to invoke respecting the beliefs of others when speaking of even the looniest religious cult.

And then there's Wexford, the least affable of nearly all the recurring heroes of British detective fiction. He's an atheist still enamored of his wife, Dora, but clueless when it comes to what to get her for Christmas. He is frustrated with his oldest daughter, a woman whose foolishness impedes any love he feels for her.

For a book that has such disdain for fundamentalism, Rendell herself writes with something like the wrath of an Old Testament scourge, one whose fire and brimstone has been brought down to absolute zero. Floods threaten to engulf the countryside through much of the book (you can't get more biblical than that) and many of the characters make it seem as if the vengeance of nature would be a good idea.

It's hard to say why such a cold writer doesn't feel unpleasant or cheaply misanthropic to read. Some of it can be put down to Rendell's psychological acuity, but a great deal of what makes her a major novelist is her implicit moral vision. There's a principled disgust at work in her books, a disgust that expresses itself in reserved and piercing perception rather than outrage. She may not like what she sees, but you feel she has given it her full consideration. Another reason for the pleasure of reading Rendell may be less reputable — there's a certain relief in admitting, for a couple hundred pages or so every year, that people are often appalling.

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