Ruth Rendell
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"Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh", Order of the British Empire/CBE, is an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries.

Rendell's best-known creation, Chief Inspector Wexford, is the hero of many popular police stories, some of them successfully adapted for TV. But Rendell has also generated a separate brand of crime-fiction that explores deeply into the psychological background of criminals and their victims, many of them mentally afflicted or otherwise socially isolated. This theme is developed further in a third series of novels, written under her pseudonym "Barbara Vine".

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To be a classic, a novel should be original.

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I've had two proposals since I've been a widow. I am a wonderful catch, you know. I have a lot of money.

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While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.

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I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.

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I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.

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Unusual thing: a European thriller writer whose work holds up as literature.

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I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.

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I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel sorry for my psychopaths, because I do.

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London underground took me on a tour of all the hidden places, the disused shafts and staircases... that was very interesting.

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