With twenty-two books written over eighteen years, Ruth Rendell has established a double eminence in two separate categories of crime fiction: the classic puzzle, with a stable background and a recurring cast headed by a mildly eccentric detective and his more conventional subordinate; and the novel of pure suspense, in which a blundering innocent and a haunted psychopath become fatally entangled in a paranoid atmosphere of cross purposes and sinister coincidence. In both fields success is difficult, but for opposite reasons: the first has been so thoroughly mined, by a brilliant team stretching from Agatha Christie to P. D. James, that its resources are in danger of being exhausted; and the second, pioneered by the lone figure of Patricia Highsmith, is all the more daunting because comparatively unexplored. Combining a masterly grasp of plot construction with a highly developed faculty for social observation, Ruth Rendell's remarkable talent has been able to accommodate the rigid rules of the reassuring mystery story (where a superficial logic conceals a basic fantasy) as well as the wider range of the disturbing psychological thriller (where an appearance of nightmare overlays a scrupulous realism)….

Put On By Cunning continues the chronicles of Kingsmarkham, that murder-prone Sussex village protected by Chief Inspector Wexford and Inspector Burden, as neatly paired a couple in their way as the two Ronnies. When first met in 1964 (From Doon With Death) Wexford was fifty-two years old, "thickset without being fat"; six years later (A Guilty Thing Surprised) he "looked more mountainous than ever"; by 1972 (Murder Being Once Done) a thrombosis had been diagnosed; and in 1979 (Means Of Evil) he is described as "a tall, ungainly, rather ugly man who had once been fat to the point of obesity but had slimmed to gauntness for reasons of health". He has a rather irritating addiction to literary quotations (often reflected in his creator's oddly unmemorable titles) which he exchanges competitively with his nephew, Detective Superintendent Howard Fortune of the Kenbourne Vale CID, but which tend to go over Burden's head. He is happily married to the understanding Dora, although in 1975 (Shake Hands For Ever) he only just resisted infidelity with the frankly sensual Nancy Lake. His eldest daughter Sylvia is married with two sons; in 1978 (A Sleeping Life) she briefly left her husband as a feminist protest, but soon returned. The younger daughter is his favourite: Sheila Wexford of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who has played Jessica at the National, and starred in a revival of Maugham's The Letter, and is now a household name after appearing for five years as Stewardess Curtis, the most beautiful of the air hostesses in the successful TV serial Runway.

Twenty years younger than his chief, Burden is prim, handsome, a natty dresser. After his adored wife Jean died in 1971 (No More Dying Then) and he was left to bring up John and Pat alone, everyone thought he would marry Jean's nice sister Grace; instead, he had a passionate affair with an equivocal waif named Gemma Lawrence. This experience left him a little less prudish than before; and since his second marriage, to Jenny Ireland, whose brother Amyas works for the publishing firm of Carlyon Brent, he is slightly less of a philistine. There are even signs in Put On By Cunning that he may one day be able to match some of Wexford's more accessible literary references. Other developments of a domestic nature revealed in the new novel include Sheila's wedding to a rich young businessman named Andrew Thorveton and Dora's decorous reunion with a former admirer, Rex Newton.

Why does one dwell so obsessively on these trivial marginalia which have nothing to do with the substance of Ruth Rendell's work? Partly because to reveal only a minor detail of the central plot is to risk spoiling the fun of potential readers by inadvertently defusing a surprise (in thrillers all material is classified and any comment can be a leak); and partly because obsessive dwelling on trivial marginalia is an indulged pursuit of the registered addict. Of the book itself, there is little more to say than that the scene shifts twice away from Kingsmark-ham, to California and to the South of France; that the plot is as elaborate as usual; and that I had the satisfaction of failing to guess its solution.