Old hand, sure hand

13 STEPS DOWN
By Ruth Rendell
Crown, 352 pages

Ruth Rendell is a byword in crime fiction, one of the acknowledged masters (or in her case, is it mistresses?) of psychological suspense. Back in the late 1980s, when thrillers were a major component of my reading diet, I’d gobble up Rendell’s mysteries like macaroons from Bizu. They were that good... and tasteful.

With her Inspector Wexford mysteries and her writing under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine, Rendell has more than placed her stamp on the crime fiction genre. Urbane, witty thrillers are her métier: whatever she lacked in terms of gore, mayhem, or plotlines with global repercussions, she more than made up for with taut, psychological studies into the minds of killers and criminals whose personality makeup were often of the type that they could very well be the person standing next to you as you board an elevator, or at the checkout line of a department store or supermarket. Rather than go for the glamorized terrorist or super gadget-supplied super secret agent, she would expose suburban crimes, give us perpetrators who lead ordinary lives, the law enforcement grunts who go after these wrongdoers, and present victims much like you or me.

13 Steps Down is very much in this Rendell tradition. The book centers on two characters with parallel obsessions. One strand follows the life of one Mix Cellini, your basic nondescript fitness equipment repair and serviceman. Mix’s life has two great overriding pursuits: learning all he can about 1950s serial killer Reggie Christie of Rillington Place, and stalking Nerissa Nash, a somewhat slightly less than super model, who is described as the poor man’s Naomi Campbell. The other main character is septuagenarian spinster Gwendolen Chawcer. She owns and lives in the house where Mix is letting a room at the top, and by some quirky coincidence, because of its proximity to Rillington Place, she actually encountered Christie back before he was apprehended, when she was in her early 20s. Her obsession is a certain Dr. Reeves, the young family physician of the Chawcers back in the ’50s. Living in some make-believe world of her own construction, she still sees Dr. Reeves as some missed opportunity to have fallen in love with and married, and reading about the death of Reeves’ wife, she begins to fantasize about his reappearing in her life and their living happily ever after.

One hallmark of Rendell’s writing is her succinct manner of familiarizing us with all her characters. Witness the following passage about fashion and commercial model Nerissa Nash. There’s a delicious blend of straightforward description and commentary. There’s the stirred-but-not-shaken, dry wit, the wry, tongue-in-cheek put-down. And her typical third-person narrator, marked by taking-us-into-her-confidence panache, which we as ready readers, so welcome: "Her life … was bounded by the body and face, hair – lots of it on the head and none anywhere else – clothes, cosmetics, aids to beauty, homeopathy, workouts, massage, sparkling water, astrology and having her fortune told … Of music she knew very little, of painting, books, opera, ballet, scientific advances and politics she knew nothing … She visited all the major capitals of the world, and seen of them only the studios and changing rooms of designers, the insides of clubs and gyms, the premises of masseurs, and her own face in the mirrors of cosmeticians."

Life in a Rendell book is a procession of thwarted dreams and aspirations, missed opportunities, and macabre outlets for the resultant frustrations. It’s her pitch-perfect exposition of how her characters react to the humdrum and ordinary that propel her novels forward. Reading a Rendell yarn is like going back to a time when novels and treatments became Alfred Hitchcock movies. While dark and ominous, Rendell refrains from bringing in the supernatural or the grand gesture. When the supernatural is hinted at or alluded to (as it is in 13 Steps Down), we’ll always get the rational explanation or her authorial put down. This happens when the hint of a ghost is brought in or in the case of so-called soothsayers and fortune-tellers.

Rendell may be a throwback to an earlier style of crime fiction. Rather than go for expletive-laden street jargon, excessive pulp elements or gore galore, there’s a gentility that belies the gruesome activity that’s actually going on. And then, there’s the mastery of the psychological elements that allow us to burrow into her characters’ psyches. While more bump-in-the-night than scream-at-the-top-of-your-lungs, there’s a richness of hue and detail that can’t be denied or ignored.