However, Inversion is not a police procedural and legal authority appears in the novel only briefly, in snatches. When they discover human remains in 1986 while burying their dog in the old pet cemetery, they promptly ring up the police-and the hunt is on to identify the remains and to discover just how they came to rest there. Would Rendell have been familiar with this forgotten crime fiction series ( Sapper sapped, as it were), which produced four books between 19? Probably it's just a coincidence.Īnyway, with these opening lines Inversion opens like an vintage Alfred Hitchcock movie, but actually the body referenced in them is not a human corpse but rather the body of a euthanized pet, while Chipstead and his wife are the current dutiful, innocent owners of Wyvis Hall. He unhooked a raincoat from one of the pegs and, covering the body, reflected too late late that he would never wear that again.'Įven the surname Chipstead recalls thriller writer Sydney Horler's gentleman hero 'Bunny' Chipstead. Alec Chipstead looked round for something to put over it. 'The body lay on a small square of carpet in the middle of the gun-room floor.

This setting is classical and the opening sentence is a nod to the Golden Age detective novel:

The novel details events which follow the discovery of the skeletal remains of a young woman and infant child interred in a pet cemetary in the wooded grounds of Wyvis Hall, a Georgian country mansion in Suffolk. I may still prefer the Victorian density of Asta's Book, but Inversion is unquestionably terrific. Julian Symons judged A Fatal Inversion the best of the Barbara Vines, and he may well be right. I'd have to say that those five Vine titles are about as good as anything ever produced in the crime and mystery genre that I have read. The fourth Vine, Gallowglass (1991), Symons pronounced an example of a writer ' very much off form,' and he had nothing at all to say about King Solomon's Carpet (1991), the fifth Vine, which would have appeared, presumably, when he was writing Bloody Murder, though, like A Fatal Inversion, it won the Crime Writers Association's Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year.Īfterward followed vine's Asta's Book (1993), No Night Is Too Long (1994) and The Brimstone Wedding (1995), the first and last of which I think measure up to her first magnificent three. In the third edition of his mystery genre study Bloody Murder crime writer and critic Julian Symons had the highest of praise for Barbara Vine (aka the late Ruth Rendell), or at least her first three novels, that stunning succession of A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986), A Fatal Inversion (1987) and The House of Stairs (1988). He didn't want to remember any of this, he wanted to escape out of it to a blank screen.

A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine