Rating: 6/10
- Plot: A plain, respectable housewife is found strangled in a wood, and among her books are inscriptions from a passionate, unknown admirer called Doon.
- Clues: Literary and fair: the inscriptions, the choice of books, a name that isn’t what it seems.
- Reveal: Neat and humane, though its central surprise now looks dated.
Margaret Parsons, a quiet, conventional woman in the Sussex town of Kingsmarkham, disappears one evening. Her body is found in a wood nearby. She seems to have had no enemies and no secrets, until Chief Inspector Wexford finds a collection of expensive books on her shelves, each inscribed with lines of love poetry by someone signing as Doon.
This was Ruth Rendell’s first published novel and the start of Reg Wexford, who would appear in two dozen books across nearly fifty years. Here he is less developed than he became: shrewd, a little gruff, and paired with the prim young Inspector Mike Burden, whose disapproval of the dead woman’s mysterious past is part of the book’s texture.
The real interest is in Margaret. Rendell slowly reveals a woman who had a hidden intellectual and emotional life, and the question of who Doon was becomes a story about suppressed feeling in a narrow, respectable world. That theme, the violence hidden in ordinary lives, would become Rendell’s great subject.
The weaknesses are those of a debut. The prose is plainer and the pace more pedestrian than in her later work. Several suspects are sketchy. The central revelation, which hinges on a secret that would have been shocking in 1964, is handled sympathetically but no longer surprises.
The 6 reflects a quiet, well-made debut rather than a major novel. Its importance is in what it began. Rendell’s later Wexfords, such as A Sleeping Life and Road Rage, and her psychological novels, like A Judgement in Stone, show how far she went.
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