The Keys to the Street
A stand-alone novel published by Hutchinson in 1996
The Good Soldier is my favourite novel. Somewhere in its early pages Ford Madox Ford has Florence say that her strict aunts will give her the keys to the street if she misbehaves. It is an elegant way of saying that they would turn her out.
Mary Jago had donated bone marrow to save the life of someone she didn’t know.
This generous act led to her breakup with Alistair, for whom it was as if her beauty had been plundered. However, the man whose life she had saved would change Mary’s life in a way she could never have imagined.
Notes
Shelter:
Home is a human right. It’s our foundation, and it’s where we thrive. Yet, every day millions of people are being devastated by the housing emergency.
Ruth Rendell talks to John Mullan about The Keys to the Street in 2007. Audio via The Guardian Book Club.
Psycho geography: John Mullan on the location of The Keys to the Street.
Read by Claudie Blakley for BBC radio in 2012.
British acting talent has been signed up to star in a film adaptation of The Keys to the Street.
Ruth Rendell’s remarkable legacy remembered: Two hundred people attended the memorial service, including Rendell’s son Simon, his wife, and many of the literary community. Speakers included Val McDermid on Rendell’s crime writing, and actor Christopher Ravenscroft gave a moving reading from her novel The Keys to the Street.
Harriett Gilbert recommends The Keys to the Street to Kamal Ahmed and Brett Westwood.
Contemporary Reads 2
Val McDermid - Booked for Murder
Karin Fossum - Don’t Look Back
Henning Mankell - The Fifth Woman
Michael Connelly - The Poet
Margaret Atwood - Alias Grace
Alan Furst - The World at Night
Footnotes
Walking the lines. The Guardian, 2007. ↩︎
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