Vaidade Fatal

English crime novelist Ruth Barbara Grassman was born on February 17, 1930, in London. The daughter of teachers, she completed her secondary education at Loughton County High School in Essex.
She then began a career in journalism, working as a reporter and sub-editor at various regional newspapers. In 1950, she married her colleague Don Rendell and, becoming pregnant with her first and only child, left her job to retire to her home. For about ten years, Ruth Rendell used her free time from domestic chores to experiment with writing, trying various literary genres, eventually settling on the crime novel. Thus, she published her first book in 1964, titled From Doon With Death. In this novel, the writer introduced Inspector Reginald Wexford, a detective from the small town of Kingsmarkham, a character who gained great popularity from the start. Many other volumes followed, including To Fear A Painted Devil (1965), Vanity Dies Hard (1966), and Wolf To The Slaughter (1967).
During the 1980s, she began publishing crime novels using the pseudonym Barbara Vine to express a more psychological side of herself. The works published under this name were a significant sales success.
A prolific writer, she published around fifty crime novels, which critics have divided into three categories. One series is dedicated to Inspector Wexford, of which Kissing The Gunner's Daughter (1992) and Road Rage (1997) stand out; another to pathological psychology, marked mainly by works such as A Judgement In Stone (1977) and The Lake Of Darkness (1980); and the novels she wrote under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, among which A Fatal Inversion (1987) and King Solomon's Carpet (1991) can be mentioned.
Winner of several specialized literary awards, Ruth Rendell was appointed a life member of the House of Lords in the British Parliament, with the title of Baroness.