Ruth Rendell Special Issue

On 2 May 2015, one of Britain's best-loved authors Ruth Rendell died. Rendell has very often been described (alongside P. D. James) as the "Queen of Crime," and despite her dislike of the term, it has been applied to Rendell countless times.1 Massively popular and with worldwide sales of approximately 20 million (amazon.com), Rendell routinely topped the bestseller lists. Yet despite the fact that Rendell is a "queen of crime" and a worldwide bestselling author, the 2010 Wiley Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction does not mention her anywhere in its entire 573 pages, and this is not an unusual state of affairs. Charles Rzepka, in the otherwise excellent book Detective Fiction, affords Rendell one slight mention (228), whereas Peter Messent in The Crime Fiction Handbook names her just twice in lists that include other crime writers (34, 62). The mainstream media and the reading public have valued Rendell for decades, but academic critics do not seem to respect her in the same way, and she is often passed over in the academic discussion of crime fiction. The guest editors of this special issue believe that Ruth Rendell is one of the most important contemporary women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and this special issue both celebrates and critically responds to her work

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