Ruth Rendell wrote more than 60 novels, from the Inspector Wexford crime series to the darker, more psychological thrillers written as Barbara Vine.

Her first novel, From Doon with Death, the first to feature inspector Reginald Wexford, was published in 1964 and a short review appeared in the Observer’s Criminal records column. Two years later the paper noted that new story Vanity Dies Hard was a “very feminine book,” and that “Mrs Rendell keeps the top spinning as nicely and disturbingly as ever”.

Reviews of Rendell’s books regularly appeared over the following decade but it wasn’t until the late 1970s that longer features about her began to be published. In 1978 Lesley Adamson interviewed her for the Guardian:

In 1986 A Dark-Adapted Eye appeared, Rendell’s first book to be published under the name Barbara Vine. She gave another interview with the Guardian to promote A Fatal Inversion:

TV adaptations of the Wexford stories began and in 1988 Polly Toynbee spoke to Rendell, a year after she had been long-listed for the Booker Prize - an event that itself made the news. (She also made the longlist for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010).

In October 2006 Rendell gave an insiders view of life at 76 to the Guardian Weekend magazine: ‘I’m fit, I’m lucky, I do as I please. But...’