Ruth Rendell was a leading member of the generation of writers who took crime fiction and turned it into literature.
In a career spanning 50 years, she wrote more than 60 novels, as well as serving as a Labour member of the House of Lords.
Her most famous creation was Inspector Wexford, who appeared in 24 books.
But she also wrote more than two dozen standalone novels, and a further 14 under the pen-name Barbara Vine – an amalgam of her middle name and her great grandmother’s maiden name.
Ruth Barbara Grasemann was born in 1930, in South Woodford in Essex, the only child of Ebba Kruse, who had been born in Sweden and brought up in Denmark, and Arthur Grasemann, who was English.
Her childhood was reputedly unhappy, but she rarely spoke of it in interviews, just as she refused to talk about the mystery of her marriage and divorce. She wed Don Rendell, a journalist, in 1953; the couple divorced in 1975 but remarried two years later. They had one son.
Rendell herself started out as a journalist on a local Essex newspaper, but resigned after filing a story about an after-dinner speech in which she failed to report that the speaker dropped dead halfway through – she hadn’t been there.