A Demon in My View
A stand-alone novel published by Hutchinson in 1976
I was at the time living in a flat in which I found a shop window model or torso made of a sort of plastic in a garden chair. I was sharing this flat with a cousin of mine at the time and he is called Richards. There was somebody who had another flat in the same house called Richards and their correspondence got mixed up so these two ideas came together and gave me the idea for the book.
Arthur Johnson doesn’t look like a murderous psychopath. He is a mild-mannered man who has never known how to talk to women.
Years of loneliness have warped his mind, turning his desire for a woman’s love and respect into a pathological need for carefully controlled violence. Locked in the cellar of his building is the perfect willing victim: a woman who waits for Arthur every night. A mannequin in the form of a female.
But when a young scholar of psychopathic personalities moves in downstairs—and Arthur’s mannequin disappears—where will he turn to satisfy his urgent craving for violence?
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring …
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view …
Notes
Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger.
As well as being a classic of suspense, this book marks the high point of Rendell’s gift for seeing the comedy in tragedy.
—Jack Kerridge 2Anthony Perkins plays Arthur Johnson in a 1991 film adaptation.
BBC World Service profile.
Some thoughts on A Demon in My View, an inverted crime story.
Contemporary Reads 3
Anne Rice - Interview With The Vampire
Richard Yates - The Easter Parade
Christopher Isherwood - Christopher and His Kind
Bob Woodward - Final Days
Muriel Spark - The Takeover
Colin Dexter - Last Seen Wearing
Footnotes
Means of Evil: Inside the Mind of Ruth Rendell by Diana Cooper-Clark, The Armchair Detective Vol. 14 Issue 1, Spring 1981 ↩︎
The Best of Ruth Rendell, The Telegraph 2015 ↩︎
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