Ruth Rendell, The Girl Next Door, passes away at 85

Ruth Rendell, one of Britain’s best-loved and most admired authors, who delighted fans for decades with her dark, intricately plotted crime novels, has died at the age of 85.

Rendell had been admitted to hospital after a serious stroke in January. Her publisher Hutchinson announced the death of the Inspector Wexford creator on Saturday.

“It is with great sadness that the family of author Ruth Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE, announce that she passed away in London at 8am on Saturday 2 May, aged 85. The family have requested privacy at this time,” the statement said. Rendell wrote more than 60 novels, including the psychological thrillers she wrote as Barbara Vine, with her debut, From Doon with Death, introducing the world to Wexford in 1964.

Rendell landed that first £75 publishing deal from Hutchinson after around a decade of life as a mother and housewife; she had been a journalist on the Chigwell Times, but resigned after it emerged that her report of a tennis club dinner had been written without attending the event, meaning she missed the death of the after-dinner speaker during his speech.

Her novels, from A Judgement in Stone, which opens with the line “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read and write”, to last year’s The Girl Next Door, which sees the bones of two severed hands discovered in a box, cover topics from racism to domestic violence. They have, her friend Jeanette Winterson has said, been “a major force in lifting crime writing out of airport genre fiction and into both cutting-edge and mainstream literature”.