Xtra Diary: Crime novelist Ruth Rendell - “My characters sometimes try to take over a plot and I have to crush them,”
Published: 21 May 2010
Great writing is no mystery
WHAT does it take to write great fiction?
A certain iciness of persona, according to Ruth Rendell, who was treating an audience at West End Lane Books in West Hampstead to a reading from her new novel.
Portobello is set around Portobello Road and the Westway in Westbourne Grove.
“My characters sometimes try to take over a plot and I have to crush them,” said the novelist, who lives in Maida Vale.
“You have to remember what Graham Greene said about authors of fiction: ‘There’s always a little splinter of ice in them.’ He meant that you could be at the deathbed of a dear and close friend or relative and you would be taking down notes.”
Ruth, who also writes under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, spoke about how she got the idea for her London novels, including King Solomon’s Carpet, about the London Underground, and The Keys to the Street, set in Regent’s Park.
“A plot will originate in some idea or soundbite,” she said. “Portobello started with the fact that in the street the trees always got signs stuck to them about some poor missing cat or dog.
“One day there was a notice pinned on a tree saying a sum of money between £50 and £200 had been found and if someone had lost it, could they please apply to the number below. I thought, who could have lost this? And that when they rang the number they would have to say exactly how much money it was.”
She also revealed which novelists she most admires – Dickens, Trollope and Wilkie Collins – and one she dislikes, Virginia Woolf.
“There’s a great virtue to a book being un-put-downable,” she said. “If it’s easy to stop reading it, the author has failed. The great Victorian novels have that virtue. The Woman in White is one of my favourites. It’s so exciting.
“Even if you’ve read it before, you long to have it served up to you again.”
Artistic Ripples
CHOPPY waters full of mystery have inspired painters from Turner to Matisse… and now Bayswater resident Lorraine Fossi has joined their ranks.
Rip Tide and Blue Ripples, the first exhibition of her work has opened in Hampstead.
The French painter, whose technique involves sculpting oil paint with a knife, says she goes into a “trance-like state” when painting. She traces her love of maritime air to holidays spent at a family home in Brittany.
“Sometimes I hold my breath and try to swim under the waves for as long as I can without breathing,” she says.
The 45-year-old’s paintings include Moses’ Hand, which shows a subtle, supernatural parting in the ocean spray and Beyond .
She says the paintings were inspired by myths and Bible stories, adding that the French have a special relationship with the ocean. “Mère [mother] and mer [sea] sound the same in French,” she says.
•Rip Tide and Blue Ripples is at Burgh House, New End Square, Hampstead, until May 30.
Call 020 7431 0144.
Davina lifts the lid on theatrical mayhem
FOR those who enjoy rubbish theatre-based puns comes former St James’s librarian turned author Davina Elliott’s second literary romp in the footlights, Climbing the Curtain.
It follows the release of her ticklesome debut, Chewing the Scenery in 2008, and sticks to the same – West End production goes spectacularly awry – formula.
We meet Judith Gold, grande dame of British theatre with narcissistic tendencies, who has high hopes for her adaptation of a fictional classic film. Messy off-stage lives, a hard-to-rein-in Rupert Blake and fighting that makes Spartan history look timid, combine in a potent cocktail of theatrical mayhem.
Ms Elliott, who lives in Victoria, is no stranger to the otherworld of the stage. She has worked on more than 80 productions in a variety of roles from dresser, to PA, to small-time producer, as well as once being a librarian for Westminster Council.
• Climbing the Curtain, £7.99 is published by Puck Books next month.
Fourth estate to bite back?
HAS anyone seen the Tory A-lister turned failed would-be MP, Joanne Cash, since she flounced out of the Queen Mother sports centre on election night?
If so they might want to let her know that not everybody in the room that night took heed of her proclamations about the devil horns of the Fourth Estate.
Diary hears that despite putting the Press “on notice” in her concession speech after losing out to Labour rival Karen Buck, her closest aide and former campaign manager Stuart Gardner is thinking about a career in – you guessed it – journalism. Our mole told us he was considering taking a journalism training course since the door of the House of Commons closed.
He’d certainly have a political scoop or two up his sleeve. Perhaps he could start with the first interview with Ms Cash’s bitter rival, the former president of Westminster North Conservative Association, Amanda Sayers.