Dogged detection

Ruth Rendell's attempt to demystify serial killers in The Rottweiler disappoints Joan Smith
The Rottweiler by Ruth Rendell

The Rottweiler
by Ruth Rendell
342pp, Hutchinson, £16.99

Ruth Rendell has always excelled at creating a sense of place. In her latest novel, The Rottweiler, she focuses on a single house near Paddington Station, where the owner of an antiques shop supplements her income by taking in tenants. Rendell revels in showing how the city has changed in terms of race, class and wealth, and Inez Ferry's house in Star Street seems intended as a microcosm of contemporary London.

Inez is the widow of an actor who played a TV cop, a lonely woman who spends her evenings watching videos of her dead husband. The tenants and her assistant in the shop, Zeinab, are a surrogate family. They include Jeremy Quick, a computer expert who lives on the top floor; Ludmila Gogol and Freddy Perfect, the ill-matched couple in the middle; and young Will Cobbett, who looks like David Beckham but has learning difficulties.

Because she needs their rent and their company, Inez cannot inquire too closely into the stories they tell her, even though Ludmila's Russian accent is obviously fake and Zeinab is stringing along two rich men she does not intend to marry. The novel is about the accommodations people make to survive, and Rendell is hardly more judgmental about her characters than Inez is. But then their lives are disrupted by a serial killer nicknamed the Rottweiler, whose latest victim is discovered near the shop.

It sometimes seems as though everyone, crime writers as much as their readers, has become mesmerised by serial killers. In the golden age of crime fiction, Agatha Christie's murderers committed their initial crimes out of lust, anger or greed and subsequent killings tended to be attempts to cover their tracks. The difficulty is that serial killers tend to have much more opaque motivations than those rather innocent (by today's gory standards) figures who killed for a fortune or for revenge.

Rendell takes a swipe at journalists in The Rottweiler, as they persist in using the nickname even after the police reveal that the murderer's trademark is not a bite but his habit of taking away a small object as a souvenir. For quite a lot of the novel, the killings are secondary to various sub-plots involving Zeinab's suitors and Will's aunt, who is struggling with her conscience about her orphaned nephew. There is a lack of tension, as con artists and a rather improbable plot about buried treasure take centre stage.

Then the murdered woman's possessions turn up in the shop, and Inez has to face the possibility that one of her tenants may be the killer. Initially the police pick on the wrong man, and Rendell shows how easily suspicion leads them to misinterpret the evi dence. But this is not in any sense a whodunit, and we know who the killer is long before the detectives, leaving two different questions - why is he attacking women and what will happen to him - to be determined.

Rendell provides a more or less satisfactory answer to the second. But the way she deals with the first is much more problematic, providing what is in effect a recovered memory and suggesting that the moment of understanding also takes away the need to kill. This is one of several elements in the novel that draws too heavily on popular notions of psychology. There is also a looseness about some of the writing that suggests Rendell is not sufficiently engaged with either characters or plot to give them her full attention. Perhaps the fault lies in the attempt to demystify a serial killer, which results in an absence of menace as well as an honourable effort to avoid myth.

Joan Smith's Moralities is published by Penguin.

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