Books: Dark Journeys Live Flesh

British Author Ruth Rendell writes two kinds of novels: the continuing adventures of two shrewd and dogged suburban policemen, Wexford and Burden, which delight her fans, and dark journeys into the deranged psyches of outwardly normal people, which fascinate her but sell far fewer copies. The first group fits comfortably into the mystery genre. The second resists pigeonholes. The books feature no heroic detective and no gathering of suspects for a summing up. Sometimes the precise nature of a crime remains known only to the perpetrator. The lure to the reader is not to see justice done but to understand the way a dangerous person apprehends the world.

To create these tales Rendell has spent quite a lot of time thinking about unpleasant people. The central character in Live Flesh, Rendell's 31st book of fiction in 22 years, is a rapist, mutilator and murderer. A Dark-Adapted Eye, Rendell's first under a new pen name, Barbara Vine, imagines a murder preceded by intimations of incest, infanticide and homosexual child molestation, all within the bosom of an apparently conventional and loving clan.

For Rendell fans, it may be a bit disappointing to learn that neither book features sly, plump, kindly old Reg Wexford and stern, judgmental, middle-aged John Burden. Live Flesh rests instead on a daring premise: a released convict's obsessive determination to make a friend of the policeman whom he shot and paralyzed while resisting capture. The policeman and the reader are alternately encouraged to believe in this felon's capacity for rehabilitation and disillusioned by his consuming selfishness. Complicating the uneasy relationship is the criminal's growing attraction toward the woman whom the policeman means to marry and cannot sexually satisfy.

A Dark-Adapted Eye belongs to the genre of old murders reconsidered. But the question of who did what to whom and why is teasingly left unresolved. Nonetheless, the reader is almost certain to become enmeshed in the story of domineering, possessive Vera Hillyard, her malicious older son, her seemingly illegitimate younger son, and the devoted sister who secretly seeks to escape Vera's grasp and instead provokes a murder.

Given the remorseless nature of her writing, Rendell, 56, is surprisingly coy about her attempts to comprehend the workings of the criminal mind. "I do research," she says in crisp British tones. "But not in the conventional sense." She does acknowledge that her son Simon, 32, a social worker who has emigrated to Denver, "was a children's officer and has been rather a help with psychopaths and with case histories, especially of children in care." She disclaims firsthand acquaintance with crimes and sounds positively appalled when discussing readers who write in with suggestions they have concocted: "I am always hearing from little old ladies living in quiet places with their even older mothers who say they have a plot they want me to do. It's usually cannibalism or something unspeakable to do with children. Why do I write about such things? Not because I am working out any impulses. My work and my daily life are two separate compartments of my mind."