The First Time I Realised I Liked Being Disturbed By A Book

It was a home office, technically a library, and far larger than anything I had ever seen inside a house. I had accompanied my dad as he wrapped up some work, leaving me free to wander, completely mesmerised by the sheer size of it all. Shelves upon shelves of books, all of them big people books. At nine, I hadn’t heard of a single one.

Until then, my experience of novels mostly meant Enid Blyton – you know what I mean: Famous Five, Secret Seven, the like. This was a different world entirely.

The book that caught my eye was From Doon with Death by Ruth Rendell. The cover was peculiar, to say the least: stark white, a red lipstick with a golden base, crawling with ants. It was slightly off-putting and maybe that was exactly why I reached for it (after climbing onto a chair, of course). I remember hiding it inside my shirt as we left. Is this an admission of stealing? Sorry, I meant borrowing (I’m so sorry, sir).

The book smelled rusty. The pages were old and yellowed. It felt serious, important, and slightly dangerous in a way I didn’t yet have the language for.

At nine, I don’t think I fully understood what was happening beneath the obvious. But the tension, the atmosphere, the way ordinary people tiptoed around dark secrets, that was enough to hook me. It wasn’t the plot I loved. It was the world, and the quiet curiosity of why people behaved the way they did.

I didn’t know it then, but this was Inspector Wexford’s first appearance and my first obsession. After that came The Best Man to Die, Some Lie and Some Die, No More Dying, and No Man’s Nightingale. Outside the Wexford series, I found myself returning again and again to Vanity Dies Hard and The Tree of Hands. I read all of these as a child, barely understanding them, yet completely intrigued nonetheless (Yes, all from the same library).

I also didn’t have access to the internet until I was a teenager, so books were my primary window into the world. Rendell’s novels offered a very particular kind of insight, into emotions, motivations, and moral discomforts I hadn’t yet encountered in real life. They were adult in ways I was thankfully too young to fully grasp, but somehow that didn’t matter. Timing matters, they say. And when you read matters too.

I reread those books multiple times before adulthood, and my perspective changed every single time. By then, I had already ventured back into that same library to “borrow” more. Hard Frost by R.D. Wingfield became another constant reread. Stephen Fry was another discovery from those shelves. Looking back, it’s slightly mad that I even thought to reach for those books, with the adult themes, adult lives, and adult failures, but I suppose curiosity has always done most of the deciding for me.

I mostly knew her earlier work, roughly from 1964 through the early 1980s, simply because those were the books I had access to (the holy library grail), and I can’t say I minded. Rereading them at different stages of my life made them feel new every time.

As an adult, Ruth Rendell’s books felt familiar, but I finally understood what had always been there: the coldness, the toughness, the quiet aggression, the almost clinical, analytical nature of her writing. Then there was Barbara Vine – the more feminine voice, the deeper interiority, fewer murders perhaps, but no less atmosphere. I didn’t discover Vine until my late teens, and it was fascinating to realise how Rendell had split these two sides of herself so deliberately. Different names, different lenses, but the same unsettling attention to human behaviour. Imagine my surprise when I found out she was also Barbara Vine. WHAT!? The betrayal I felt. And then, begrudging admiration.

I remember once seeing her described, on the back of one of her books, I think, as the next Agatha Christie. I didn’t need the internet to disagree with that. Even as a child, I felt it immediately. Rendell is definitely better, I announced to people who had absolutely no idea who she was. I didn’t care. I knew where my loyalties lay.

I couldn’t have explained it at nine. I didn’t have the terminology for it then but the difference felt obvious to me. Not because Christie wasn’t good, but because they were doing very different things. Christie built puzzles that were elegant, clever, often cosy in their own way while Rendell was far more interested in people. In the uncomfortable ones especially. Her stories drifted toward the darker corners of human nature, toward the internal lives of psychopaths, loners, and those on the margins. The crime was often secondary. What mattered was why someone did what they did, and how ordinary lives quietly tipped into something worse.

Rendell didn’t seem interested in playing by the usual rules of the mystery genre. Her books felt quieter, more interior, less concerned with the reveal than with the slow accumulation of unease. So, I was oddly pleased to discover, years later (thanks to the internet finally entering my life), that Rendell herself resisted any attempt to crown herself as Christie’s successor. I agreed completely. Not because one is better than the other, no hate to Christie fans, but because they belong in different lanes. And Rendell’s was always the one I wanted to follow.

When I finally began reading about Rendell herself, I found her just as compelling as her work. She seemed like someone I would have loved to talk to; about people, about society, about the quiet absurdities of the world. There’s an anecdote about her having to resign from a job after writing a report on a dinner party she never attended, completely unaware that the after-dinner speaker had died midway through the event. What are the chances of that? Of course, the irony wasn’t lost on me. There was something oddly Rendell about it — a small, ordinary mistake tipping suddenly into something far more dramatic.

Rendell taught me something early on, long before I knew how to articulate it: a story doesn’t need to be fully understood to matter. Tension can linger. Empathy can unsettle. Subtle horror doesn’t announce itself. It waits. It’s not about solving the puzzle. It’s about noticing the humans in the spaces between.

And then there was the humour. Dry, subtle, unexpected.

“You’re supposed to be a detective. Well, detect.”
— From Doon with Death

It felt like a small revelation. Might be the moment I realised British humour might be my thing.

Looking back, I wouldn’t have known that picking up that book would shape the way I see stories, or people, but I still remember the smell of the pages and the shape of that library, even if it’s probably much smaller now than it ever felt to the nine-year-old version of me. And honestly, I’d still climb a chair for it. No questions asked.

(A random sketch of my future reading room. Consider this a placeholder dream.)