Dark Corners by Ruth Rendell

I almost wish I hadn’t read Dark Corners. I went through a massive Ruth Rendell phase in the late 1990s/early 2000s (at that time the TV adaptations of her work were still running and her books were easy to pick up in charity shops as well as libraries).

What I found so special, and what influenced me, is the way she wrote about ordinary people with a dark twist. She seemed to suggest that evil wasn’t something abstract or other, but something that lurked in all of us, that pushed, we might also commit extraordinary acts.

She also had great craft. If she mentioned a dog barking on page 27, you could be sure that this was not incidental, even though you might not notice it on a first reading, that everything was there for a reason, primed. And I loved her prose. People underestimate her prose because you almost don’t notice it. It is not literary, intended to be weighed and savoured and interpreted, it’s so light and beautifully wrought that in reading it you become inseparable from the story. It’s not true that prose style doesn’t matter in commercial fiction. There are too many thriller writers whose clunky wording and tired phrasing make them unreadable for me.

Dark Corners reminds me why I stopped reading Ruth Rendell’s books over a decade ago – they started to feel too detached from reality. The turning point for me was one of the Inspector Wexford novels, The Babes in the Wood, where a woman reports her children are missing and they get a junior officer to do some desultory paperwork and leave further enquiries till the morning. The most casual watcher of 24-hour news would know that would never happen.

In Dark Corners, Carl at 23 has just got a publishing deal and inherited a house in Maida Vale. By any standards, he is extraordinarily privileged. But when he sells some slimming pills to a friend and she dies, even though he has not committed a crime, he fears publicity and this sets in chain a series of events that have profound consequences.

It’s not a bad set up, but the characters all feel strange and unconvincing. Carl (remember, he’s 23) allows himself to be blackmailed because he is afraid of the story being printed in his local paper! What person of his age reads, or even considers the existence of, their local paper? If he’d feared trolling on social media that might have been more believable, but as a struggling writer he’d be just as likely to welcome the attention. He’d be Instagramming his anguish, while his agent would be lining up interviews where he talked movingly of his remorse, while being photographed with a stack of hardbacks behind him on this bookcase.

There are other examples that seem to belong to another era. A couple of his contemporaries introduce themselves to him as ‘Mr and Mrs’ because they think it will make them seem ‘respectable’. Worse, the flawless plotting is notably absent. There’s a subplot which is equally implausible and which is not resolved by the end of the book. The trademark prose is still there (thankfully it was at least an easy read) but I found myself skimming just to get to the end.

I picked this up because it was Ruth Rendell’s last book but it is not one I’d recommend. Because there are so may, it’s hard to have a favourite. The standalone suspense, the Wexford series, the novels she wrote as Barbara Vine, all have their own character. That’s how I want to remember her.

View Dark Corners on Goodreads

Read more: I haven’t picked a favourite but here’s a good list to start an argument –  Top 10 Ruth Rendell Novels from Dead Good Books