Introduction. A single middle-aged man lives alone in the top-floor flat of a London guesthouse, surrounded by an eclectic ensemble of co-tenants. By day, he is an upright, law-abiding citizen holding down an office job; by night, he is a psycho who roams the streets, stalking and murdering women. None of his housemates has even the slightes inkling of his secret proclivities. He himself does not know why he needs to kill, but is aware that he has a problem and reads up on what psychology has to say on behaviour like his, ultimately rejecting most of its theories. Then he makes the fatal mistake of trying to kill a young man whom, in the dark, he takes for a woman. This will be his undoing, as it will eventually lead to his identity being revealed and to his death by gunshot.  

The above could be a brief synopsis of Ruth Rendell’s 1976 novel, A Demon in My View. It could also perfectly well serve as a plot summary of her 2002 The Rottweiler.

 

Rendell is a prolific author. In a career spanning forty-five years she has produced, to date, nearly seventy novels, novellas and collections of short stories.  And though she writes in three different strands (two under her own name and one as Barbara Vine), her overall body of work can be said to explore one blanket theme: obsession, in its numerous forms and degrees, and the criminal behaviour to which it may give rise. Yet, despite her astounding productivity and the fact that her books tread roughly the same ground, critics generally agree that her ingenious plots, perceptive characterisations and bold experiments with form result in Rendell’s nearly always managing to differ and surprise.

The above-mentioned two novels, however, seem to bear so many formal resemblances that they merit close scrutiny and comparison. This paper will examine both books side by side in terms of setting, characters, plot development and overall atmosphere. It will seek to look beyond the surface similarities, establish what differences there are, and determine whether in the later novel Rendell is simply rehashing previously used material, or is elaborating and expanding on her major theme, taking it in new directions.

 

Settings and Characters. Both novels belong to Ruth Rendell’s stand-alone (i.e. non-series) strand of writing, which is to say they are what critics usually label psychological thrillers. A Rendell stand-alone novel typically starts off with several parallel story lines, introducing a number of central characters, often of different social status and dwelling in different residential areas, who live in ignorance of one another until their paths come to cross with disastrous consequences. The two novels under investigation, however, both focus on close (in the physical sense at least) communities, as each is centred on a guesthouse and its inhabitants, who are mostly aware of each other’s existence from the very start.

A Demon in My View is set in the rundown London district of Kenbourne Vale, where Victorian family houses have been converted into flats and are now ‘warrens for people, little anthills of discomfort’ (Rendell 1980: 11). At the beginning of the novel, the house on 142 Trinity Road has five occupants (the landlord lives elsewhere and only comes by to collect the rent). These are: fusty middle-aged bachelor Arthur Johnson, who has been in residence for twenty years and ‘keeps himself to himself’; constantly inebriated Jonathan Dean, who likes spouting literary quotations and playing his gramophone records really loud; his forlorn drinking partner Brian Kotowsky, ever lamenting the state of his marriage to wilful Vesta; and pretty Li-Li Chan from Taiwan, who seems to spend most of her time going out with or bringing home different young English men. This small menage of disparate characters will soon be joined by psychology student Anthony Johnson, whose arrival will set off a lethal chain of events. Apart from him, in the course of the novel the reader is to meet only two or three other characters who will seriously influence the plot development.

The Rottweiler, set in the more affluent London region of Marylebone, introduces readers to a much wider array of characters, as its focal point is the antique shop run by grieving widow Inez Ferry and the flats she rents out above it, though the residents proper are only four in number. Besides Inez herself, they include: quiet, well-mannered computer specialist Jeremy Quick; mysterious Ludmila Gogol, who favours imperial-style gowns and long cigarette holders, and who – just like Jonathan Dean in the other novel – plays classical recordings at maximum volume; and mentally deficient Will Corbett, a David Beckham look-alike with the mind of a ten-year-old. Along with this eccentric bunch, the reader also gets to meet: Ludmila’s Barbadian boyfriend Freddy Perfect, who is not actually a tenant but spends most days and nights in his ‘paramour’s’ flat; glamorous Zeinab, Inez’s assistant in the shop, who is the counterpart of Li-Li Chan from A Demon in My View not only in her exotic looks but in that she is stringing along a number of wealthy suitors; Morton Phibling, one of the latter, forever visiting the shop with florid, Arabian-mode proclamations of love; Zeinab’s own household, for she is certainly not the virginal innocent she claims to be; Will’s aunt Becky who, like it or not, is burdened with the care of her nephew; immaculately dressed and spoken teenager Anwar and his drugged-out friends, or partners in crime; and various other assorted figures, including two ludicrous police officers.

As seen from the above, The Rottweiler presents a much larger and more varied cast of characters than A Demon in My View, some of whom bear distinct surface resemblances to those of the latter novel. The greatest similarity between the households of the two books, however, lies in the fact that they both harbour what neither of their landlords, and none of their other tenants, suspect: a serial killer.          

Murderous Instincts. Prim, fastidious company clerk Arthur Johnson, who occupies the top-floor flat at 142 Trinity Road in A Demon in My View, is unmarried, childless and, for all we know, still a virgin at fifty. He dislikes sloth, dirt and disorder, canned or frozen foods, children, Indians and Africans, and various other distasteful aspects of life. He does love the dark, however, and in the dark he has amassed considerable experience in inflicting pain – and death. His first killing, at the age of twelve, was that of a mouse, which he shut up in a kitchen drawer and let run around until it was dead – an act that gave Arthur ‘a tremendous deep satisfaction that was almost happiness. It was dark and he was alone and he had enough power over something to make it die’ (Rendell 1980: 56). His next experiment was sticking a drawing pin into the stomach of a baby he had been left to sit, though lack of time prevented him from taking that action to a lethal end. From there on, he graduated to strangling two young women in the streets (after dark), earning himself the tabloid tag of ‘the Kenbourne Killer’.

Arthur Johnson is, in other words, one of Ruth Rendell’s rarer fully-fledged psychopaths. He is also one of her typical loners, who amaze and fascinate the author in that they lead a solitary existence without the social binds of family and friends which tie others down, and somehow ‘manage to get themselves into middle age or older never having been married or had children, living alone and coming into old age in surroundings that are getting more and more squalid’ (Brooks 2002: 16).

Such people in Rendell’s world usually go unnoticed by society, and that is especially true of Arthur Johnson, whose isolation is self-imposed and self-protective, and whose whole life is actually geared towards going unnoticed – and undetected (‘He deplored anything that might attract attention to himself,’ Rendell 1980: 28). With trademark irony, the author sends his way new lodger Anthony, who has come to write his Ph.D. in psychology, and whose readings on the mentality and behaviour of psychopaths perfectly describe his co-tenant; yet even Anthony fails to notice much about Arthur besides his prissiness and stuffiness, for Arthur is extra careful. His last murder was twenty years ago, and since then he has avoided going out when dark and has not violated the law in any way. In fact, he regards himself as a law-abiding citizen, as well as ‘a perfectly normal man who happened (like all normal men) to have a small peculiarity he was well able to keep under control’ (Rendell 1980: 15). He should know: aware of the criminality of his urges, he has read a lot of psychology and can now reject as nonsense the theories of experts that ‘men with his problem had no self-control, no discipline over their own compulsions’ (Rendell 1980: 22). Arthur’s peculiarity, or problem, consists in the desire to touch women and then strangle them – why, he does not know, but he believes it is the work of fate, which has saddled him with ‘a propensity that placed his life and liberty at constant risk’ (Rendell 1980: 50). However, he has found a way of curbing his primal instincts: a plastic shop mannequin awaits him, in moments of need, in the cellar of the house for regular acts of ritual strangulation under cover of darkness. She is his saviour, his therapy, and he takes special pride in devising this solution as he does not have to ‘fear or hide or sweat for such a killing; the law permits you to kill anything not made of flesh and blood...’ (Rendell 1980: 21) Otherwise,   

Ruth Rendell’s psychological thrillers are, more often than not, about murders waiting to happen rather than murders waiting to be solved. In A Demon in My View, the murders may seem to have stopped happening long ago, but then, thanks to one of the author’s sly plot twists, Arthur Johnson’s shop dummy goes missing from her cellar dwellings – and eventually, he will find himself going out into the dark streets again.

These streets also hold a fascination for Jeremy Quick in The Rottweiler, who ‘enjoyed absolute darkness’ (Rendell 2004: 129). Fortyish, handsome, and suave, he – like Arthur Johnson – occupies the top-floor flat of the house where he lodges. On his late evening walks, he is sometimes overcome by an irresistible urge to kill young girls, and so far has despatched of five. Unlike Arthur Johnson, however, this murderous instinct first visited him only two years ago, for reasons as yet unclear to him. Also unknown is why not just any girl will do: most of those five times the girls were coming out of clubs in groups of two or three, but it was only a particular one among them that he immediately knew he had to kill. His method is garrotting – for, in contrast to Arthur, although he has had sexual experience and was at a time married, he intensely dislikes both touching and being touched, having once even discovered, with a long-ago girlfriend, that ‘it was possible to have sex with a woman without touching her with his hands’ (Rendell 2004: 135). Respectively, Jeremy is thoroughly incensed when the sensation-hungry media start calling him The Rottweiler, even though there was a bite mark only on the first victim’s neck and that was later traced to her boyfriend: ‘He doubted if he was physically capable of biting into human flesh, for this was touching of the worst kind. He would vomit before he did so.’ (Rendell 2004: 138)        

Like Arthur Johnson, Jeremy Quick is aware that the urge which sometimes overpowers him is criminal, as he, too, would in principle consider himself a law-abiding citizen: ‘As a general rule, Jeremy abhorred stealing. It was the British vice, he often thought, common now all over the country’ (Rendell 2004: 125); his taking a small artefact from each girl he murders is an act he considers different from stealing, one ‘almost poetic, his sign, his benchmark, the way to know him’ (ibid). Jeremy does not seem to be fearful of the law, for he knows he is too clever to be caught, but like Johnson, for a short time considers never going out after dark in case the need to kill overtakes him; the opposite view, however, eventually prevails, that he ‘must not condemn himself to a lifetime’s curfew but instead go out and when temptation came, resist’ (Rendell 2004: 161). Resistance soon proves impossible, but by that time he has come up with an alternative way to more or less deal with his problem. That way is not to try and control his instincts by finding some substitute for the act of murder, as is Arthur Johnson’s form of self-therapy in A Demon in My View, but to come to terms with his desires, and deeds, or rather disassociate himself from them – by attributing them to an alter-ego.

Jeremy Quick is not, in fact, the real name of this character in The Rottweiler, but Alexander Gibbons. Jeremy and Alexander are two different men, who live in different houses in different city areas and have different lifestyles, views, and character traits. Alexander is your everyday social man who was once married, had a girlfriend, and is still doted on by his mother, while Jeremy is the loner, proud, arrogant and cunning, who came later to roam the streets and kill. As the man whose body both these personae inhabit reflects,   

If he killed again it would be in that name. Alexander Gibbons, himself, his mother’s son, the computer expert, the self-made successful man, would be innocent, clear, apart. It was that man who hoped his alter ego wouldn’t kill again [though he] knew that nothing could stop him. He knew it without anguish, accepting it as horribly inevitable, something he did while he was this other one living in this other place. 

Multiple/Split personality disorder (or, in today’s preferred term, Dissociative identity disorder) has by now become a staple in modern psychological thrillers, especially of the serial killer sub-genre, convenient as it is in both providing readers with completely unexpected perpetrators and explaining the latter’s psychotic actions. If it seems that Ruth Rendell has facilely embraced this cliche in The Rottweiler, however, that is certainly not the case; on the contrary, she is actually ridiculing its overuse in contemporary crime novels (and films). For Alexander Gibbons, like Arthur Johnson in A Demon in My View, has read a lot of psychology in his attempt to face, or exonerate himself from, his inexplicable urges and just like the authors of psycho-thrillers, he has deliberately created (or projected, in psychology-speak)  the murderous alter Jeremy.  Yet it is a fact that ‘all the time he never lost touch with reality so far as to believe that he was really two people, one who killed and one who was innocent. There was only one.’ (Rendell 2004: 149)

Thus, the two murderous protagonists of A Demon in My View and The Rottweiler, while trying to convince themselves they are ‘perfectly normal’ men, both recognise they are given to criminal behaviour, and have both made use of specialised literature on the subject to grapple with this fact. The outcomes, however, are radically different. Arthur Johnson wants to be able to keep his instincts in check, not because he believes he is doing anything wrong or to save potential victims’ lives, but simply to avoid legal punishment. Alexander Gibbons/Jeremy Quick, on the other hand, admits to himself that he cannot control his behaviour, and at times even considers taking his own life, contemplating that doing so would rid the world, and its women, of a lethal menace. ‘But Alexander didn’t want to die, not yet, though he often reflected that his death might be the only way out. All he wanted was for Jeremy to die.  (Rendell 2004: 148)

The reason why he has not so far killed himself is in fact the most salient point of difference between the killers of the two novels. Arthur Johnson’s main goal in life is self-preservation, and what he really wants is to secretly indulge his predilections, even if in a virtual fashion; Alexander/Jeremy’s greatest wish, in contrast, is to discover why he does the things he does, in the hope that, once attained, this knowledge may stop him from doing them.

Murky Motives. Ruth Rendell’s killers, even when taken aback by their violent compulsions, rarely question their underlying motives. The author, however, always does – and in her hands, so does the reader. Rendell has repeatedly stated, in interviews and profiles, that she is not interested in crime as such, but rather in what aspects of human mentality can drive people to commit crimes. Motive is what all her works focus on, no matter the strand of writing they come under, though this is particularly true of her stand-alone tales, which are mysteries of the mind rather than of detection, the perpetrator usually being known to the reader; as critics have rightly noted, her success ‘is rooted in the intimate and often delighted dissection of the murderous mind’ (Brooks 2002: 16). In 1995, Rendell published An Anthology of the Murderous Mind, featuring works by writers ranging from Sophocles through the likes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pushkin and Zola to present-day authors such as E.L. Doctorow and Philip Kerr (incidentally, the one extract she has included from her own work is from none other than A Demon in My View). ‘Murder itself is not interesting,’ she states in the introduction, stressing that it is the impetus to murder, ‘the passions and terrors which bring it to pass and the varieties of feeling surrounding the act that make of a sordid or revolting event compulsive fascination,’ (Rendell 1996: vii). Having listed the most obvious motives for murder such as gain, jealousy and fear, Rendell says it struck her, while compiling the anthology, that the most common motive in fact seemed to be the need for escape. Finally, she dwells on what she calls irrational murders, ‘the taking of another’s life for no reason even remotely acceptable to the ordinary person’. In some cases, she admits, ‘there seemed to be no motive at all,’ while in others ‘the unfortunate victim was a substitute or stand-in for a real or imagined offender’ (Rendell 1996: x).

The need to kill a substitute for a previous offender, and so to escape from the traumatising presence – be it only in the mind – of that offender, has long been recognised as the predominant motive of psychopathic serial killers (i.e. not those who commit a series of murders for reasons such as material gain, eliminating witnesses to the crime, detracting blame etc.). Since this is precisely the kind of killer featured in A Demon in My View and The Rottweiler, it is this motive, or combination of motives, that eventually surfaces in both novels – with significantly different treatment, however.

Profilers of serial killers, in real life as well as in the entertainment industry, look for traumatising experiences inflicted at an early age – and naturally, the first place they usually look is within the family. So does Ruth Rendell, in whose work dysfunctional families abound. ‘I'm inclined to think that most families don't work out, and that most trouble does begin in families,’ the author has said (Lyall 1995:9). And since, as history has shown, most serial killers are male, and the victims they target female, the offender they kill substitutes for is more often than not their mother – either as abuser or as silent witness to abuse.     

Arthur Johnson does not remember his mother, who gave birth to him without even knowing who the father was and vanished from his life when he was only two months old, leaving him to the cares of her sister. Auntie Gracie must have wanted to raise a child very much, as she paid his mother one hundred pounds to take charge of Arthur, and raise him she did – in a nice and proper fashion, according to her rules. No abuse there: it was a good upbringing she gave him, setting high standards, teaching him the virtues of cleanliness, diligence, discipline and respect for authority, and dispensing pearls of wisdom such as ‘If you keep yourself clean, Arthur, you won’t need clean underclothes more than once a week’ (Rendell 1980: 137) and ‘a man going to business without a briefcase is as ill-dressed as a lady without gloves’ (Rendell 1980: 27). True, she never let him play in the street, go into his bedroom before bedtime, or go to bed without leaving the door open, but Arthur knows it was all for the best: ‘He would do exactly the same by any child in his charge. Children had to be taught the hard way, and it had set him on the right path.’  (Rendell 1980: 24) And if she did not give him much freedom, even after he became eighteen and was pronounced by her master of the house, that was also as it should be, for a greater freedom would have been bad for him: ‘Look what he did with freedom when he had it – things which would, if unchecked, deprive him of his freedom altogether.’ (Rendell 1980: 78) No, Arthur is perfectly aware of all the good Auntie Grace did him (not least because she never missed an opportunity to remind him of it) and is to be forever grateful.

Which may be why, when he first comes across the shop dummy in the cellar of 142 Trinity Road, his first impulse is to cover up her nudity and dress her up in dead Auntie Gracie’s clothes, following which he ‘strangled her before he knew what he was doing’ (Rendell 1980: 21) – an act providing him with instant release, though from what he does not know and does not question. Thus, a complex relationship with the dummy begins, for she will come to play a dual role in his life: she will be his victim, to strangle again and again when the need strikes, but also his protectress, ‘his white lady, his Auntie Gracie, his guardian angel’ (Rendell 1980: 83). In other words, she is paradoxically to symbolise and replace both the women he wants to – and once did – strangle in the streets, and his dear Auntie Gracie who kept him from doing so simply by not letting him out into those streets. With typically dark Rendellian irony, Arthur never realises that he may actually want to strangle his Auntie Gracie, or that his stifling childhood under her care may have seriously contributed to his murderous urge. Not for a moment does he allow himself to suspect the rightness of his upbringing by this mother figure, and if any doubt does occasionally creep in, it only with regard to himself, in that he never really managed to reach the heights of perfection she laid before him ‘as fitting for one who needed to cleanse himself of the taint of his birth and background’ (Rendell 1980: 24).                    

There is no substitute parental figure in the life of The Rottweiler’s Alexander Gibbons, who has a loving mother proper and had a loving father, too, before the latter died. He has spent a considerable amount of time contemplating his family and his childhood, for – in between Kant and Nietzsche – he has meticulously perused the specialised literature and ‘from his extensive reading in psychiatry, he knew that it was in infancy that a trauma would occur’ (Rendell 2004: 133). He has considered various options, only to reject them all: it could not be that some male relative abused him, for his mother never let him out of her sight; neither did some sadistic nanny use to beat him up, for he never did have a nanny; and widowhood certainly did not make his mother take to neglecting him, for she adored him even more after her husband’s death. In contrast to Arthur Johnson, who does not realise he is killing a plastic surrogate for his Auntie Gracie, Alexander knows what the expected explanation for his (or rather, Jeremy’s) compulsion would be and,        

Alexander has even tried to tell himself that, like the two young men in Leopold and Loeb’s The Rope, Jeremy may kill out of sheer curiosity – to see what it feels like – but knowing that the play was written ‘before the psycho-investigation of the human mind had much impact on literature,’ he must admit that ‘it is doubtful if such a motive would convince today’ (Rendell 2004: 133). Thus, for a short while, in postmodernist style he takes over the author’s role in considering a motive readers could find plausible. Having rejected it, however, on the above stated grounds, he falls back on psychiatry and decides to try and establish whether he may be suffering from Repressed Memory Syndrome. ‘The Rottweiler’ now assumes another role, or another two roles: having already consciously split himself into two personalities, he now further divides himself into analyst and analysand, lying on a couch and both asking himself questions and trying to answer them. His quest for knowledge is a dual one, too, for he must find out not only Jeremy’s motive for murder, but also the trigger that sets him off – why it is that not every time he sees a girl he is driven to murder, why it is that there seems to be nothing in common between the girls who stir that impulse within him, and why it is that he is always walking behind them when the need to kill overpowers him. These facts Alexander has established by trial and error on his evening walks, and the conclusion he has come to on their grounds is that 

Eventually, with the help of reflection, introspection and one of Ruth Rendell’s trademark staggering coincidences – the bringing back on the market, by popular demand, of a discontinued product – Alexander/Jeremy does recover a repressed memory and arrive at the truth. And the truth is that, whatever he may think, his problem does have to do with sex, or more precisely with an act of female paedophilia and the discomfiture of a sexually inept teenager. The event of the memory does not come as any great surprise to the experienced reader of psychological thrillers but, as one critic notes, Rendell succeeds in providing a trigger for Jeremy’s murderous impulses which ‘verges on the baroque’ (Taylor 2004).

Sexual dysfunction is often at the core of psychopathic behaviour, and since the latter is the focus of Ruth Rendell’s work, it frequently plays a vital part in her novels. A Demon in My View and The Rottweiler are no exceptions, though the dysfunctions of their protagonists take different forms. Complete sexual repression, thanks to Auntie Gracie, drives Arthur Johnson to want to touch women and then strangle them – ‘There was only one thing he had ever been able to do to women and, advancing now, smiling, he did it,’ he reflects as he chokes his plastic dummy (Rendell 1980: 10). A forceful sexual seduction and the ensuing fiasco have brought about Jeremy Quick’s aversion to the human touch, and a particular physical reminder, bodily sensed if not consciously registered, drives him to garrotte certain girls. Both Arthur and Jeremy, however, are killing stand-ins for a real-life offender, whether never perceived as such or instinctively buried deep down in memory.       

Narrative Style, Atmosphere and Denouements. As has become clear, A Demon in My View and The Rottweiler examine the behaviour of two serial killers who differ in personality and in attitude to their criminal urges but kill out of basically similar core motives. Being in Ruth Rendell-land, they will eventually both slide down the road of mental disintegration and ultimately bring about their own destruction. The way in which Rendell as narrator handles her material in each case, however, the atmosphere she builds up and the final plot resolutions she provides make for a very different impact on the reader, and this is precisely where the quintessential difference between the two novels lies.

A Demon in My View features a small cast of characters, a very confined setting, and two central story lines revolving around the two main characters – old-timer Arthur Johnson and newcomer Anthony Johnson (‘the other Johnson’, as Arthur insists). The physical action takes place either in the house itself or in a few streets in its vicinity, in a neighbourhood where there is little else to do except, as one character remarks, ‘drink, dispute, make love’ (Rendell 1980: 42). Most of the action, however, is not physical, and the narrative is driven primarily by the mental processes and emotional states of the two protagonists; the other characters of the novel, with their sporadic appearances, serve to provide the milieu for the two Johnsons’ experiences.

In minute detail, Rendell lays out Arthur’s trepidations over whether Anthony’s arriving and taking the bottom-floor room, which looks out onto the cellar door in the yard leading to his beloved ‘white lady’, will impede his secret evening visits to her. When she disappears, Rendell takes the reader step by step down the road of rage, frustration, and growing violence Arthur inevitably sets out on, never to return to his facade of sanity and respectability. Meanwhile, Anthony Johnson is not without his worries either, having come to London not only to work on his thesis but to wait out the one-month ultimatum he has given his beloved, Helen, to decide if she will stay on in her loveless marriage or leave her husband and come back to him. Anthony’s is also a road of growing anxiety, desperation and eventually violent anger, as his namesake, in a fit of malice mingled with delusional panic, starts intercepting Helen’s letters and replacing them with forgeries of his own meant to put an end to the correspondence, and the relationship.

These two storylines, running in parallel in a taut narrative and delivered in a detached but increasingly grim tone, create a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere which grows from menacing to chilling as the anticipation of disaster heightens. Some relief is brought by the happy ending, or at least the possibility of a happy ending, to the love line: despite Arthur’s interventions, Helen does arrive in London with the intention of getting back together with Anthony. The novel does not end on this sweet note, however, but reverts to Arthur Johnson. Since he strangled one of the house’s tenants, failing to recognise her in the dark, and was beaten up by a long-haired youth he attacked, mistaking him for a woman, the world has been closing in on him – to the extent that he has now literally locked himself up in his room. On the final page, however, having been called to answer the doorbell, he inadvertently locks himself out – and gets shot down in a fit of jealous wrath by Helen’s husband, who mistakes Arthur for ‘the other Johnson’. This is an ending typical of Ruth Rendell’s psychological thrillers, which portray the world as ‘an amoral universe where there is no salvation, spiritual or aesthetic’, where justice rarely prevails and so, ‘rather than rout evil, she merely has it eat itself’ (Brooks 2002: 16).

Evil is probably not the term Rendell herself would choose, as she does not believe in it as a force. ‘Was Charles Manson evil?’ she asks in an interview. ‘No. He was mad, and if you're mad, you can't be evil because you cannot help what you do.’ (Simmons 2005: 4) Madness, then, certainly eats itself up – voluntarily, at that – in The Rottweiler, where Alexander Gibbons/Jeremy Quick is also taken down by a gunshot, an event that is of his own devising. This is the final great difference between the killers of the two novels. Once disclosure, by society and the law, threatens Arthur Johnson, he tries to burrow himself even deeper into his self-built protective cocoon, ultimately confining himself to a single room. Once Alexander has made his disclosure, as to what makes his killer alter ego tick, he realises that there is nowhere further to go – especially after he, too, by mistake attacks a young man who may now reveal his identity – and so stages, with the help of a toy revolver, a hostage situation which will get him gunned down by the police.     

‘Though I deal with violence, I want to leave readers feeling their sympathies have been enlarged,’ Ruth Rendell has said. ‘If I couldn't feel sympathy for all my characters, I wouldn't be able to write about them as I do.’ (Binding 1998: 31) In her psychological thrillers, the writer is expert at manipulating the reader to experience, if not sympathy, then at least empathy with her characters, even when they commit the most heinous crimes – for they are not demonic master criminals, but lost souls damaged by pressures of family, society, and their own instincts. Even Arthur Johnson, who initially inspires scorn, and then pity, finally evokes some degree of empathy as the reader comes to comprehend that there is no way he can change what he is or why he is what he is, and wishes him a merciful release. Jeremy Quick does not need the reader to wish it for him. Rendell says she cannot imagine what it would feel like to kill someone, because ‘afterwards you would feel so terrible that there would be no release for you,’ and committing murder would bring, besides guilt and shame, ‘the feeling of being unable to escape from this action, that one's trapped oneself.’ (Brooks 2002:16) Unable to escape this trap, Jeremy Quick has no recourse but to engineer his own death as the only possible release available to him.

The shooting of Quick is not, however, the final conclusion of the novel, unlike that of Arthur Johnson in A Demon in My View. From the very beginning, The Rottweiler differs in narrative structure from most of Rendell’s psychological thrillers. It actually starts out as a whodunnit, which is extremely rare for this strand of the author’s writing. Thus, the opening chapters introduce, in almost Agatha Christie-style, a wide array of characters from different walks (including geographical) of life, each of whom might be the culprit. Then, one third of the way into the novel, the killer’s identity is suddenly revealed to the reader, who is then drawn into Quick’s inner life and self-analytical forays. This is not to say, though, that from this point on the other characters are dropped – for, as from the very beginning, each has something to hide.

‘The English psyche, obsessed by secrecy, continually impelled towards disguises, has given rise to a curious phenomenon,’ writes critic Paul Binding. ‘Many of our greatest novels are concerned with the uncovering of deceptions […] in a world intent on obfuscation.’ (Binding 1998: 31) Like most of Rendell’s thrillers, A Demon in My View and The Rottweiler are about deception and self-deception, and the obsessive hoarding of secrets. The former novel takes readers on a harrowing journey as they witness one character, Arthur Johnson, fall apart in his desperate, and doomed, quest to guard his secret. In contrast, the latter one explores the theme of deception and delusion not only through the criminal and one or two other central characters he becomes involved with, but through all the characters presented – and they are quite a few in number. The typical Rendell stand-alone novel, as previously noted, follows a few main storylines (A Demon in My View has only two) which, at a certain point, come together in a major collision. The Rottweiler follows many more and though they constantly intersect, revolving around Inez’s antique shop as centre stage and the scare of a serial killer at large as narrative propeller, they then veer off in their individual directions, with the major collision only taking place at the very end. In this respect, the novel very much resembles a soap opera with characters coming and going and each one demanding equal attention; as one critic notes, this is ‘a kind of collective novel, where no character's story is more important than any other’ (Walker 2004). The killer’s search for the truth engages the reader no less than questions such as whether bereaved Inez will finally stop secretly watching the tapes of her long-dead husband’s TV series and try to get on with her life; how long the flamboyant Zeinab will be able to juggle two supposed fiances and a live-in boyfriend, complete with their two children; what will come out of a not too bright young woman’s attempt to seduce the even less brighter Will, who has no idea whatsoever of intimate relationships between the sexes – and so on and so forth. The additional subplots of a search for a buried treasure in the bowels of London, a robbery by a teenage gang of Inez’s shop, and a blackmail scheme born out of the latter event, bring extra diversion into an already panoramic narrative.   

Most notable – as compared to previous works by Rendell – is the style in which this tangle of tales is told. Characterizations are broadly sketched and overblown to Dickensian proportions, the narrative tone is light and humorous, and the result is actually not so much soap opera as sit-com. At times, The Rottweiler reads like a comedy of manners arising from the characters’ suspicions, deceptions and ensuing misunderstandings; at others, it shifts into social satire, as Rendell takes on various aspects of the modern world. The media, for instance, very well know that the bite on the first victim’s neck was not the killer’s work, but they find the lurid ‘Rottweiler’ tag irresistible; this, of course, immediately has the British National Rottweiler Society in an uproar, mounting a campaign to defend the reputation of their dogs as lovable friendly beasts when treated right; meanwhile, the biased and ham-fisted police quickly reject Jeremy Quick as a suspect because of his supreme self-confidence, and one of them, proud of his degree in psychology, fixates on the mentally challenged Will Corbett, finding his nervousness when interviewed extremely suspicious.

The combination of Rendell’s keen eye for realistic detail, the marked grotesqueness of her characters, the slapstick vaudeville of their interactions and the extravagance of her coincidence-born plot twists ultimately create an effect that is anything but what one would naturally expect from a contemporary psychological thriller. As one critic remarks, ‘so long as the Rottweiler stays in the wings, the plot advances as a black farce,’ (Stasio 2004: 26). Even Quick’s psychological self-investigations, though, are constantly mined for humor and verge more on the comic than on the tragic. 

It is worth noting that The Rottweiler, precisely because of this overall comic tone never before encountered to such an extent in Rendell’s work, reviewers are extremely divided in their opinions of the novel. Some pronounce it a failure or a let-down, others hail it as a bold experiment, but all seem to have been thrown into off-balance by it (tellingly, on its publication Rendell’s next stand-alone novel, Thirteen Steps Down, carried the blurb ‘back to her creepy best’). Peter Guttridge, critic and crime writer himself, admits, ‘I don't know how to explain the curious tone of The Rottweiler, other than to think it's her attempt at a comic psychological thriller,’ finally settling on the verdict ‘an entertaining oddity’ (Guttridge 2003: 17). Another reviewer, apparently profoundly unacquainted with Rendell’s work, states that the novel imparts a sense of well-being as, though there is a murderer about, ‘if you don't go out alone at night dressed like a hooker, you won't be apt to meet him,’ and concludes with the sweeping, and stupefying, statement that ‘No one gets hurt in Ruth Rendell's world […] Rendell is a tremendously popular novelist because nothing bad ever happens in her books.’ (See 2004: C03) Much nearer the mark is the critic who posits that the multi-cultural, multi-faceted and highly quirky world of The Rottweiler may serve as a microcosm not only of modern London, but of the increasingly weird world of the twenty-first century in general, ‘a place in which you don't need to have a serial killer in your midst to wonder what in heaven's name is going to happen next’ (Aubert 2003: D8).

The latter view does seem to sum up Ruth Rendell’s approach to her material in The Rottweiler, an approach greatly different in narrative structure, atmosphere and overall impact from the grim overtone of inevitable catastrophe in A Demon in My View. And, unlike in the latter novel, here Rendell does deliver an answer as to what in heaven’s name happens next. Once Jeremy Quick has been despatched, or has had himself despatched, the author picks up the multiple threads which open the novel and crisscross it throughout, and provides a where-are-they-all-now ending more typical of a Victorian realist novel than of a work of crime fiction. Life does go on, the message seems to be (at least until the next serial killer comes along) and some fare better, some worse – fates being allotted more in accordance with the fickle laws of nature than with any notions of merit or justice. With this ending, the writer attains a hyper-realism perfectly appropriate to the absurdity of the world as seen and presented by her in The Rottweiler, and further enhances the postmodernist feel of the novel, which, as one critic has it, ‘moves the naturalistic fiction that has been taken for granted as the desirable basis for British crime writing on to a different plane,’ and is ‘as experimental as any contemporary fiction’ (Jakeman 2003: 15).          

Conclusion. On the surface, Ruth Rendell’s A Demon in My View and The Rottweiler seem to tell a very similar tale. A serial killer, overcome by sudden murderous urges fuelled by a basically common underlying motive, is hiding out in an eclectic household of relative strangers, maintaining a facade of respectability by day and stalking women in the streets by night. Both killers have no idea why they are driven to violence but realise their actions violate the law, both read up on what psychology has to say about behaviour and try to find a way to deal with it, both eventually mistakenly attack teenage boys instead of young women, and both end up being shot down. A handful of minute particulars in the two novels also come quite close, such as that the killers rent the top-floor flats of the houses they live in, and that some of the remaining characters in one novel appear to be, in certain respects at least, twin counterparts of those in the other.

These formal resemblances, however, only serve to accentuate the serious differences between the two novels. A Demon in My View explores the tragedy of a psychopath seething with thwarted, suppressed desire and trying to view his deadly compulsion as a minor individual peculiarity; The Rottweiler investigates the tragicomedy of a serial killer armed with copious knowledge of serial killers and searching for the cause of his own criminal behaviour. Respectively, the overall tone of the two novels differs considerably, the former being laden with a grim, oppressive atmosphere of escalating madness, the latter going for humour, albeit dark, and developing the killer story as just one thread in a panoramic farcical narrative.    

The fact that the two novels were written over twenty-five years apart should be taken into serious consideration. It is as if Ruth Rendell has taken her original story of the late 1970s, retained a few basic elements, and transposed it into the increasingly bewildering world of the twenty-first century to see what happens. What happens is that, in the constantly shifting and changing modern world, nothing is as it seems or as expected and one should be ready to accept anything life serves up, including a serial killer for a neighbour. Whether this transposition of an old story into new times is a conscious or unconscious act on the part of the author is immaterial, as the resulting version is vastly different from the original; in fact, if one takes it that there is a common underlying story, then the two novels present two reverse sides of it, like the two sides of a coin. These two sides are reflected in both content and form, for The Rottweiler not only delivers a verdict on modern times, but also offers a comment on present-day literary conventions: with its quirky narrative structure and prevailing comic mood, it certainly defies the norms of the increasingly popular serial-killer subgenre of contemporary crime fiction.  

 

Aubert 2003: R. Aubert. The Killer inside Him. The Globe and Mail (Canada), 6 December 2003, Section: Book Review, p. D8.

Binding 1998: P. Binding. Death in Little Venice. The Independent, 29 March 1998, Section: Features, p. 31.

Brooks 2002: L. Brooks. Dark Lady of Whodunnits. The Guardian, 3 August 2002, Section: Guardian Saturday Pages, p. 16.

Guttridge 2003: P. Guttridge. Review: Books: Crime Round Up. The Observer, 2 November 2003, Section: Observer Review Pages, p. 17.

Jakeman 2003: J. Jakeman. Reality Bites as Crime Fiction Goes Postmodern. The Independent, 30 September 2003, Section: Comment, p. 15.

Lyall 1995: S. Lyall. Mysteries, of Course, But Ruth Rendell Also Sees Real Evil. The New York Times, 10 April 1995, Section C; Pg. 9.

Rendell 1980: R. Rendell. A Demon in My View. Arrow Books, London.

Rendell 1996: R. Rendell. Anthology of the Murderous Mind. Vintage, Random House, London.

Rendell 2004: R. Rendell. The Rottweiler. Arrow Books, London.

See 2004: C. See. Your Average Everyday Murders. The Washington Post, 12 November 2004, Section: Style, BOOK WORLD, p. C03.

Simmons 1995: C. Simmons. Ruth’s Life of Crime. The Sunday Mail (QLD), 26 November 1995, MAGAZINE, p. 4.

Stasio 2004: M. Stasio. Beware of the Dog. The New York Times, 12 December 2004, Section 7; Book Review Desk; CRIME; p. 26.

Taylor 2004: C. Taylor. Woman with a Loaded Gun.  http://www.powells.com/review/2004_12_03.html

Walker 2004: F. Walker. Book Reviews: Ruth Rendell – The Rottweiler.

http://www.mysteryinkonline.com/2005/01/rendell_ruth_th_2.html