Thirteen Steps Down

Rendell, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099474328 ISBN 13: 9780099474326

Publisher: Arrow, 2005

A classic Rendellian loner, Mix Cellini is superstitious about the number 13. Living in a decaying house in Notting Hill, Mix is obsessed with 10 Rillington Place, where the notorious John Christie committed a series of foul murders. He is also infatuated with a beautiful model who lives nearby - a woman who would not look at him twice.

Mix's landlady, Gwendolen Chawcer is equally reclusive - living her life through her library of books.

Both landlady and lodger are caught up in their own psychologically twisted parallel worlds. But when reality intrudes into Mix's life, a long pent-up violence explodes.

Review:

Like several of Ruth Rendell's other novels of suspense, Thirteen Steps Down is a book about a couple of murders waiting to happen. Mix Cellini is a half-educated mechanic specializing in exercise machines, who indulges himself in alcohol, self-medication, celebrity-stalking and an obsession with Christie, the Rillington Place murderer. What dooms Cellini, and his victims, is not so much any active principle of evil, as selfishness and a tendency to drift into things that does the job almost as efficiently.

The house where he rents an apartment is a wonderful example of the Bad Place; his eighty-something landlady Gwendolyn is another person who drifts, in her case into nostalgia and slow decay. Mix is a deeply modern monster, but Gwendolyn is one of the proofs that this is not just a bitch at modernity; Mix's potential victim, supermodel Nerissa, is charming, smart and blessed. There are a few too many coincidences here for Thirteen Steps Down to quite make it on to the list of great Rendell--her best books are more tightly constructed--but it is certainly a book which her admirers will want.--Roz Kaveney

Review:

"Ruth Rendell is back to her creepy best." (Daily Mail)

"Rendell's eerie capacity to comprehend disturbed criminal minds continues to astonish." (The Times)

"It's impossible to read the terrors abroad in her shabby streetscapes without total emotional involvement." (Sunday Times)

"One of her darkest and best." (Literary Review)

"If Ruth Rendell were not slotted into the category of writer of mystery novels, she would have won the Booker long ago" (Books of the Year, Evening Standard)