57. Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell

Ruth Rendell is one of the grande dames of British crime fiction and I have had her on the non-urgent hunting list for a while.  I've been trying to make regular visits to scour S.W. Welch's in its final days and noticed quite a few Rendells in the thinning mystery shelf.  I quickly googled "best Ruth Rendell" and got this one so I bought it.  Time period, cover design and page count all looked right up my alley so this got bumped my priority list for a long weekend vacation trip the Eastern Townships.

Unfortunately, it begins with two potential strikes against it for me.  First the crime and the culprit are revealed in the opening paragraph.  She implies that there is still a mystery about what led up to the crime and how it was solved afterwards, but this made me worried that what I was going to read was more of a horror story then a detective story, which turned out to be true.  An upper middle-class family of four is shot to death in their home by their live-in maid.  

The second strike which is also laid out in the opening pages is that the maid, Eunice Parcherson, is illiterate and this was the motive behind the murders.  I can imagine that illiteracy is an incredibly powerful social stigma (and even those words feel like I am putting it lightly).  I am pretty ignorant about how illiteracy would impact somebody socially and I am hoping that Rendell did her research before making it the defining characteristic and drive for a brutal murder.  I don't feel like I really learned any more about it from this book.  The idea is that this working class woman not only isolated herself socially because she couldn't read, but that her illiteracy actually deadened her feelings and sensitivity to the human world.  While she does have heightened memory and quick practical learning skills, she has never learned empathy or the basics of emotional human interaction. Ultimately, it is even suggested that Eunice is not even human but an atavistic, pre-human creature.  This just strikes me as utterly false.  I would imagine that illiteracy might even heighten the emotional senses as you have to rely on so many non-written clues to get around in the world.  

The construction of the Eunice character also feels deeply classist and biased, as the implication here is that lack of education (of which not being able to read is the most extreme form) is what creates the monster.  To be fair, Rendell is quite ruthless with almost all her characters and she is equally nasty about the well-educated, pretentious and un-self-aware family.  One gets a sense, nevertheless, that Rendell would not trust anybody who doesn't love a library.

So as I sense from the beginning, Judgement in Stone is really a horror story about a family unknowingly trapped in their home by a sociopathic illiterate whose flaw will drive her to homicidal mania.  Reminiscent of In Cold Blood, the trigger that will transform Eunice from a cold, removed repellent presence who is kept on because of the excellence of her house work into a homicidal maniac is her friendship with town gossip and religious maniac Joan Smith.  This latter character who starts out quite rich also ends up being somewhat simplistic, basically just going insane in the end.

I'm spending a lot of time critiquing the premise.  The actual execution is quite well done.  The portrayal of the family and the town is extremely well done so that the reader is quite able to sense the environment both physical and social and really know and quite sympathize with the family (especially the two children).  Rendell expertly expels any illusions one might have about moving to the English countryside. The town is dominated by the worst kind of British social constraints and a rapid and condemning gossip network.  I grew up with a watered-down version of this on Vancouver Island in the 80s where there were a lot of middle-class British expats and it's just the worst.

I'm just not a fan of horror. I have enough low-level anxiety and dread in my own imagination that I don't enjoy reading about it all.  But if that is your thing as it is for many, I can see how enjoyable this book would be. The idea of having the live-in help who does a really excellent job (it is a big house and Eunice's labour turns it from a deteriorating, stress-creating environment for the wife to the ideal aristocratic household) but makes you at first vaguely uncomfortable and then more and more creeped out until finally the masters are psychologically beholden to the servant is a really great one touching on so many social issues.  It's deeply uncomfortable and the tension and dread increase until the almost mild but psychologically explosive pre-climax (before the actual violence) when Eunice's greatest fear of having her illiteracy exposed happens.

I can understand the critical praise the book gets, just know you are not getting a mystery but a social horror/crime novel.  I do feel the portrayal of the antagonists is still simplistic enough that it deserves some critique even for fans of those genres.

Postscript:  I just learned that Rendell has an entirely separate series of straight-up detective books starring Inspector Reginald Wexford.  Those are what I should probably be looking for.