History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 9/10

• Plot: Decades after her aunt was hanged for murder in 1950, a woman revisits the family history for a writer’s book.
• Clues: Hidden in family memories, letters and small domestic details.
• Reveal: Quietly devastating, recasting the relationships between two sisters.

Faith Severn’s aunt, Vera Hillyard, was hanged in 1950 for murdering her sister Eden. Years later, a writer preparing a book about the case approaches Faith. As she remembers her childhood with the two sisters, the story of what happened, and why, gradually emerges.

Ruth Rendell adopted the name Barbara Vine for a new kind of crime novel, slower, more psychological and more concerned with the past. This first Vine book won the Edgar Award and is often considered her finest work.

The novel is a portrait of a middle-class English family in the 1930s and 1940s, full of social pretension, rivalry and secrets. Vera and Eden are complex, and their relationship is the core of the story. The revelation of the truth depends on what Faith, as a child, did not understand.

Rendell’s prose is precise and subtle. The atmosphere of wartime England, with its repressions and anxieties, is vivid.

The weakness is the slow pace, especially early on. Readers expecting suspense may be frustrated by the book’s patience.

The 9 reflects a masterful psychological crime novel that reinvented the genre for literary readers. It is one of the great British crime novels of the decade.