Go to Home Page

BARBARA VINE
DCI Wexford    Ruth Rendell Psychological Mysteries    TV & Film Adaptations   Home Page  Authors Menu
YEAR
 TITLE
1986
A DARK ADAPTED EYE: Like most families they had their secrets and hid them under a genteely respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that Vera Hillyard and her beautiful sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the fifties was not kind to women who erred…so they had to fight it out behind closed curtains using every weapon they had.  O-R87
1987
A FATAL INVERSION: The long hot summer of 1976. In a haphazard way Adam Verne-Smith collects around him a group of young people at Wyvis Hall, a big old country house in Suffolk. With the carelessness of youth, Adam, Rufus, Shiva, Vivien and Zosie hardly ask themselves or each other what they are doing, why they are there, how they are to live. They scavenge, they steal, they pawn and sell the family heirlooms. They exist. Within the charmed circle of the invisible walls that divide them from the village, London, their families and their own future lives, their group splinters, reforms, cracks - each individual struggling to survive as the heat - wave mercilessly continues. Ten years later, the bodies of a woman and a child are discovered in the bizarre animal cemetery by the new owners of Wyvis Hall. Which woman? Whose child? As the police make their inquiries, Adam Verne-Smith senses that the arm of retribution is to grasp him at last. Rufus and the others have their own reasons for fear, as the events of 1976 unfold. O-R87
1988
THE HOUSE OF STAIRS: Dark and impenetrable as the bloodstone, the brooding, sensual atmosphere surrounding Cosette breeds desire, mistrust, conspiracy. After the sudden death of her wealthy husband Cosette, pampered and much-loved, buys a large, dilapidated house in London, just as the sixties are drawing to a close. Her young cousin Elizabeth, curiously isolated, comes to stay; it is she who now recalls the story of The House of Stairs: the much-balconied, many-windowed five-storey house with its exquisite grey garden. To it, with the added lure of Cosette's bounty, are drawn all manner of hangers-on, most of them careless young people dazed by life, love and drugs. Bell Sanger seems at first to be just one of the many, but then there was always something different, something more than just her total frankness, that set her apart. Ever more sinister questions begin to surface: what happened to Elizabeth's mother and what is it Elizabeth fears so greatly? Why was Bell imprisoned, and what is the secret of her past she zealously keeps hidden - perhaps even from herself? Can the uncanny resemblance between Bell and a Bronzino portrait have any connection with the dying heroine in Henry James's The Wings of the Dove and her resemblance to the portrait? Life, it is said, imitates art, but surely here it must just be a coincidence? O-R88 RR06/13
1990
GALLOWGLASS: 'The Prince,' said Sandor to Little Joe, 'was an old man when our story begins. ' 'Sander is good, even excellent, at story-telling. Sandor is wonderful, too; dark, thick short hair, with marvellous hands, long and thin, like a woman's - a great smile. Once you've seen Sandor, no one else will do.' Little Joe - loving, eager to please and learn - is ready to listen. The power of the educated over the simple is horribly clear in this disturbing and unusual relationship. As Sandor's motivation - both for rescuing Little Joe and then for weaving his spell of words - becomes clear, the darkness surrounding him is too much for them both and for the beautiful ex-model sequestered in her Suffolk mansion by an obsessive husband. The author draws these diverse personalities into a tight conflict of loyalties. A net of love, of fear and greed and desire, closes around them in a Suffolk landscape so exquisitely rendered as to heighten painfully the contrast between man and the natural world. Barbara Vine shows us the world as it is, and also through her writing we sense how it might be; her powerful moral vision, while showing us the worst, gives us back a knowledge of how to act for the right. O-R90 RR92
1991
KING SOLOMON'S CARPET: Jarvis lives in a big old house with a bell tower, overlooking the Jubilee line. He loves the tube with all its secrets - its hidden tunnels, its mysterious 'ghost' stations, its spectacular incidents and frightening accidents. The house was once a school, but now he lets out rooms. People gather there from the tube. There is Tom, the lost busker, and Jed, who keeps the hawk and uses the trains in the night hours; Jasper and the truant boys riding terrifyingly high above the tracks; and Alice, who wants to forget the baby she has deserted. Then there is Axel, who is an enigma. Axel hates the Underground - he goes down there simply to remind himself how much he hates it, riding around, formulating his plan. In King Solomon s Carpet this group of people are brought together, the diverse strands of their lives woven into a story that enthrals from its first moment. The chillingly unusual and the seemingly ordinary combine to create a tale of disconcerting complexity and sinister charge. It is Barbara Vine's awesome gift to make the familiar seem shocking and oppressive. Experiences of breathtaking power lie in wait for the reader. Straight out of nightmare, they are made alarmingly real. This is Barbara Vine's dark vision of London in which apparently unconnected events are relentlessly drawn together. O-R91 RR93 RR07/11
1993
ASTA'S BOOK (aka ANNA'S BOOK): Barbara Vine's latest triumphantly gripping tale spans three generations, from early beginnings in the East End to present-day London. It is 1905. Asta and Rasmus have come to Hackney from Denmark with their two little boys. While Rasmus travels abroad on business, Asta keeps her loneliness and isolation at bay by writing her diary in this strange house in a strange land. These diaries, published over seventy years later, will, by an act of chance, uncover the truth of an unsolved crime and much else besides. As Asta's granddaughter reads the diaries they reveal to her unknown facets of the woman she thought she knew. Passing reference is made to a Mrs Roper, who lived near Asta in east London. Coincidentally, a documentary film is underway about an unsolved murder from the turn of the century - that of Lizzie Roper - and the subsequent disappearance of her daughter. Will this fragmentary evidence throw light on one of the century's most notorious trials and even solve another puzzle: who was Asta's daughter Swanny and what was the mystery of her background? In Asta and Swanny, Barbara Vine has created two of her most enduring characters to date. Using the conventions of true crime, murder mystery and autobiography to create a deft interplay between past and present, she lifts aside each layer of time's concealing patina on a superbly wrought journey into the hidden corners of others' secrets and the consequences when those secrets are dragged into the light. O-R93 RR08/12
1994
NO NIGHT IS TOO LONG: 'The truth is that we only care about someone's pain when we like him or when we don't know him personally and have no reason for liking or disliking. I observed Ivo's pain but I didn't care about it .. .' In a silent, ghostly house overlooking the grey expanse of the North Sea, a young man sits down each evening to write his confession: a confession he will never be able to complete. For Tim Cornish, once a favoured graduate of England's most prestigious creative-writing course, even the wildest flights of imagination cannot provide an escape. Two years later, he waits for his crime to be discovered. And he knows that redemption will never be his ... Yet Tim's adult life had begun so promisingly. A chance meeting during his first year at university. A sudden flaring of passion, a stolen kiss. Within a month of meeting palaeontologist Ivo Steadman, Tim had moved into his flat. Was it here that love turned to disgust? 'He loved me, therefore I loved him no longer ... '. Or was it later, on a wide empty sea somewhere at the edge of the world? Ivo spent his summers lecturing on the cruise ships in Alaska. It was Ivo's idea that Tim should join him; Ivo's mistake that left Tim dangerously alone. For in Alaska Tim met someone else; someone who loved him ... and someone he could love. From that moment, Tim was able to find the strength to end a night that had already lasted for ever and to begin his sentence in hell. With the haunting power of a Greek tragedy, Barbara Vine unfolds a gripping tale of love and death - and the death throes of love. And with unerring surgical precision, she exposes the fears that lurk in us all. O-R94 RR97
1995
IN THE TIME OF HIS PROSPERITY: Novella
1995
THE BRIMSTONE WEDDING: Unlike the other residents of Middleton Hall, Stella is smart and elegant and in control. She keeps her secrets to herself, revealing nothing of her past. Only Jenny, her young care assistant, seems aware that her heart harbours a dark, painful mystery. And only she can prevent Stella from carrying it to the grave. As the women talk, Jenny slowly pieces together the answers to many questions that arise. Why does Stella seem so afraid of driving? Why has she kept possession of a house that nobody, not even her children, knows about? What happened there that holds the key to a distant tragedy? As Jenny uses the house to meet her lover, she discovers untouched items - a painting, a burnt dress, a decaying car. But only when Stella leaves Jenny her tape recorder, into which she has recounted the true events of the past, can the truth be finally - and shockingly - revealed. In this compelling mystery, in which past and present are skilfully interwoven, Barbara Vine demonstrates once again her masterly control of both character and narrative. O-R96
1998
THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER'S BOY: 'Gerald Francis Candless, OBE, novelist, died July 6 aged 71 ... Candless was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, the only child of a printer and a nurse, George and Kathleen Candless, and grew up in that town. He was educated privately and later at Trinity College, Dublin, where he obtained a degree in classics ... '. The obituaries for Gerald Candless, who had died of a heart attack just days before he was due to have a bypass operation, were respectful. He had been, after all, an admired and popular writer, the subject of students' theses and once a candidate for - if not ultimately the winner of - the Booker Prize. His sudden death at his home in north Devon on the cliffs overlooking the sea was a loss to literature as well as to his family and friends. The trouble was, as his daughter Sarah soon discovered when she embarked on a memoir of him, very few of the facts so confidently printed in the papers were true. Incredible though it might be, and fearful though she was of the effect her discoveries would have on her mother Ursula and her rather emotional sister Hope, it seemed that her father had taken on a different identity at some point in his life ... that he wasn't Gerald Candless at all. But if he wasn't Gerald Candless, who was he? And what terrible thing had driven him to conceal his real identity even from his wife and children? O-R98
2000
GRASSHOPPER: Clodagh was nineteen when her parents packed her off to college and a relative's house in north London, two years after the death on the pylon, the worst thing that had ever happened to her. They blamed her for it, everyone did, and that was why they were sending her away. Maida Vale was unexpected. Not the suburban mock-Tudor houses of her imagination, but mansions like Italian palaces and the towers of a Victorian metropolis. And not the kind of people to look after a lonely and wayward niece. It was obvious to Clodagh from the first that her aloof, academic cousin and his sitcom-star wife saw themselves as being exceptionally helpful in lending her their dingy basement flat. They knew nothing of her claustrophobia, that she felt free only in the wide open fields of her Suffolk home. It was hardly surprising that she fell into the arms of Michael Silverman, or Silver, as everyone called him. He was generous and kind and thoughtful too. In his flat at the top of his parents' house he played host to a strange crew of young drop-outs whose pleasure was to range the roof tops. It was a happy, heady time until the moment when, on a trek fifty feet above the street, they looked into a window and saw a scene that was to lead to a tragedy as great as the death on the pylon. A kind of mirror-image of Barbara Vine's great London Underground novel King Solomon's Carpet, Grasshopper is set, strangely but compellingly, on the roof tops of Maida Vale and its environs. Against this wonderfully evoked landscape, the lives of a group of young people become entwined in the haunting atmosphere of a vintage Barbara Vine novel. O-R00 RR08/11
2002
THE BLOOD DOCTOR: Blood is going to be its theme ... Blood in its metaphysical sense as the conductor of an inherited title and blood as the transmitter of hereditary disease. Genes, we'd say now, but not in the nineteenth century when Henry Nanther was born and grew up and achieved a kind of greatness, not then. It was blood then. The First Lord Nanther dearly hoped to be the subject of an admiring posthumous biography. Having built a name for himself as Queen Victoria's favoured physician - expert on blood diseases and particularly the royal disease of haemophilia - he fastidiously set about recording the details of his eminent life, carefully cataloguing every significant letter, diary and medical essay that he'd written, apparently offering himself up as an open book. But when the present Lord Nanther begins to research the life of his great-grandfather, he soon realises there is little of interest in his ancestor's dry-as-dust account. Indeed he begins to suspect that these old records conceal more than they reveal as he comes upon mysteries and anomalies in almost every decade of his great-grandfather's personal life. Why did he prefer to marry a lowly solicitor's daughter rather than the upper-class girl who offered him entry into the social world he appeared to crave? What was the true explanation for the appalling tragedy that befell his fiancée? And why did his apparently successful life end in such pain and sorrow? As Martin Nanther begins to catch glimpses of  'some monstrous, quite appalling things' in the blood doctor's past, so he realises that Henry died a guilty man – carrying a horrific secret to the grave. Set against the current reform of the House of Lords, which Martin Nanther witnesses at first hand with a kind of fascinated detachment, The Blood Doctor weaves effortlessly between the past and the present, public life and private life. The result is a superbly satisfying novel about ambition, obsession and bad blood. O-R02
2005
THE MINOTAUR: Kerstin Kvist didn't quite know what to expect when she took up a job with the Cosway family at their odd, almost grand, house, Lydstep Old Hall, deep in the Essex countryside. All that mattered to her then was the fact that it was near London where her boyfriend lived - she'd come over from Sweden to keep their affair going. The family turned out to be even odder than the house: living at home with the widowed Mrs Cosway were her three unmarried daughters, in thrall to the old lady; but there was also a mysterious fourth daughter - a widow herself and apparently quite rich - who came and went infrequently, with ill-disguised contempt for the others. Even more puzzling, and increasingly upsetting for Kerstin , was the position of Mrs Cosway's son, John, a sad, self-absorbed figure in his thirties who haunted the house. 'There's madness in the family,' offered one of the daughters as way of explanation, but Kerstin had trained as a nurse and knew it wasn't right to be administering such powerful drugs to a vulnerable figure like John. Then, just as she was beginning to get some inkling of what was going on in the house, a stranger with a glamorously Bohemian aura moved into the village, and his presence set the Cosway family on a path to self - destruction. In Barbara Vine's new book a sympathetic middle-aged Swedish woman remembers her strange and horrifying stay at an old Essex house almost forty years before, at a time when the sixties revolution hadn't quite reached rural England. Compelling in its depiction of the secrets within an apparently respectable family, The Minotaur is Barbara Vine on top form. O-R05
2008
THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT: Mention his name and most people will say, 'Who?' while the rest think for a bit and ask if he 'wasn't the one who got involved in all that sleaze back whenever it was ... ?'  It's late spring of 1990 and a love affair is flourishing between Ivor Tesham, a thirty-three-year-old rising star of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, and Hebe Furnal, a stunning North London housewife stuck in a dull marriage. What excitement Hebe lacks at home, however, is amply compensated for by the well-bred and intensely attractive Tesham - an ardent womaniser and ambitious politician. On the eve of her twenty-eighth birthday, Tesham decides to give Hebe a present to remember: something far more memorable than, say, the costly string of pearls he's already lavished upon her, involving a fashionable new practice known as 'adventure sex'. A man arranges for his unsuspecting but otherwise willing girlfriend to be snatched from the street, bound and gagged, and delivered to him at a mutually agreed venue ... Set amidst an age of IRA bombings, the first Gulf War and sleazy politics, The Birthday Present is the gripping story of a fall from grace, and of a man who carries within him all the hypocrisy, greed and self-obsession of a troubled era. O-R08
2012
THE CHILD'S CHILD: When their grandmother dies, Grace and Andrew Easton inherit her sprawling, book-filled London home, Dinmont House. Rather than sell it, the adult siblings move in together, splitting the numerous bedrooms and studies. The arrangement is unusual, but ideal for the affectionate pair—until the day Andrew brings home a new boyfriend. A devilishly handsome novelist, James Derain resembles Cary Grant, but his strident comments about Grace’s doctoral thesis soon puncture the house’s idyllic atmosphere. When he and Andrew witness their friend’s murder outside a London nightclub, James begins to unravel, and what happens next will change the lives of everyone in the house. Just as turmoil sets in at Dinmont House, Grace escapes into reading a manuscript—a long-lost novel from 1951 called The Child’s Child—never published, due to its frank depictions of an unwed mother and a homosexual relationship. The book is the story of two siblings born a few years after World War One. This brother and sister, John and Maud, mirror the present-day Andrew and Grace: a homosexual brother and a sister carrying an illegitimate child. Acts of violence and sex will reverberate through their stories. The Child’s Child is an ingenious novel-within-a-novel about family, betrayal, and disgrace. A master of psychological suspense, Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, takes us where violence and social taboos collide. She shows how society’s treatment of those it once considered undesirable has changed—and how sometimes it hasn’t. O-R12/12