Make Death Love Me
A Ruth Rendell stand-alone novel published by Hutchinson in 1979
Antony and Cleopatra is my favourite play. There are more quotes from that play than any other in my books. That love affair has influenced the relationships of my characters more than any other, such as in the novels Shake Hands For Ever and Make Death Love Me. This is a love affair between people no longer young; it is a destructive relationship. In Make Death Love Me, that love affair comes to nothing because it is doomed from the start …
Alan Groombridge is trapped. Husband to a woman he doesn’t like, father to two children he never wanted, and manager of a tiny branch of the Anglian-Victoria bank, he is doomed to a life of domestic boredom and tedious routine. All that keeps him afloat is his one fantasy: stealing enough of the bank’s money to allow him just one year of freedom - one year in which to live a different sort of life.
But one day, the bank is robbed, the manager and cashier disappear and what was once a place of dull and dreary repetition becomes the scene of a brutal, chilling nightmare that might never end.
Notes
- Shortlisted for best novel at the Edgars and winner of the Martin Beck Award for best crime novel in translation in 1980.
Contemporary Reads 2
William Styron - Sophie’s Choice
Primo Levi - If This Is a Man
Agatha Christie - Miss Marple’s Final Cases
Ellis Peters - One Corpse Too Many
Colin Dexter - Service of All the Dead
Norman Mailer - The Executioner’s Song