![]() It was not until my third novel, The Burning Air, that I charted my own territory, a thickly-wooded valley in remote Devon. Meh.) My second, The Sick Rose, took place partly in Kensington. ![]() ( The Poison Tree, incidentally, is a novel about obsessive love and youthful privilege – sound familiar? – I tried so hard not to mimic A Fatal Inversion, but have been told by more than one reader than in doing so I inadvertently captured the spirit of another Vine classic, The House of Stairs. ![]() When I wrote my first novel, The Poison Tree I set it on the edge of Queens Wood in Highgate. Naturally, when I left my home in metropolitan Essex to move to the capital – the same, one-way journey Rendell herself made at a similar age – these were the streets I sought. There is a swathe of London, from Portobello in the West to Crouch Hill in the north and most of the land in between, where it is hard to walk very far without treading in her characters’ footsteps. Some locations she returned to time and again Highgate, Maida Vale, Regent’s Park. 1 The novel won the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger in that year and, in 1987, was also shortlisted for the Dagger of Daggers, a special award to select the best Gold Dagger winner of the awards 50-year history. ![]() She captured that strata of London, where rich and poor, bored and desperate, live cheek by jowl in the mansions and bedsits, squares and estates of our capital. A Fatal Inversion is a 1987 novel by Ruth Rendell, written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. Sense of place is hugely important to my novels, and Rendell was a psychogeographer before the term was coined her stories are indivisible from their settings. ![]()
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