A fabulous collection of some of Ruth Rendell's very best short stories. She has written many short stories over the years, and she is one of the very best. It's a real discipline, a highly skilled craft, to write a good short story, and Rendell really knows how to do it. With such a large collection of stories, some are bound to be better than others, but all of them a readable, and many are thought-provoking. This is probably the book I'd take to a desert island.


© Koplowitz 2010 ( )

Ruth Rendell's COLLECTED STORIES is an omnibus of three previously published collections: The Fallen Curtain and Other Stories (1976), Means of Evil and Other Stories (1979), and The Fever Tree and Other Stories (1982). Some of the stories have appeared individually and in other collections, all over twenty-five years ago. Many of them were first published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Few authors specialise in the short story today, and each of these twenty-seven stories convinces the reader what a consummate writer of this genre Rendell is. She explores a range of topics: the boy abducted by a Man, the false evidence that convicts a man of murder, a boy's distillation of a vegetable poison, death by knitting needle, the serial killer charged with a murder he didn't commit, the killer-for-hire foiled by his love of dogs, the woman who tried suicide once too often, and more. Most of the stories stand alone, but the five in Means of Evil and Other Stories all feature Reg Wexford and Mike Burden, Rendell's central characters from the much loved Wexford series. ( )