Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford

Yesterday was the birthday of British crime novelist Ruth Rendell (books by this author), born in South Woodford, London (1930). She wrote more than 60 books, under her own name and also under her pen name: Barbara Vine. Two dozen of her books featured Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford, a rural policeman who was overweight and a little sloppy, but also a happily married father of two. Readers loved him, and TV adaptations of the Wexford books were reliably popular with viewers. Rendell said she never got tired of writing Wexford, because she based him heavily on herself. “He doesn’t look like me, of course, but the way he thinks and his principles and his ideas and what he likes doing, that’s me. So I think you don’t get tired of yourself.”