The Veiled One
The fourteenth Wexford novel published by Hutchinson in 1988
If Ms. Rendell’s hero were any less gemütlich, any less of a soothingly old-fashioned presence, the starkness of the world around him might prove too unrelievedly grim for most readers.
Concealed by a shroud of dirty brown velvet and looking like a heap of rags—the woman’s dead body lay between a silver Escort and a dark-blue Lancia.
In the desolate shopping centre car park, Wexford is too preoccupied to notice anything out of the ordinary, only the teenage girl in the red car driving past him too fast.
Burden calls him at home with the grim news later that evening: the woman had been attacked from behind, perhaps with a thin length of wire.
But before Wexford can delve deeper into this curious murder, he too faces death. Can Burden solve this mysterious crime without the help of his worldly Chief Inspector?
Notes
I would like to thank Leonie Ness for an idea which she suggested to me in Ottawa and which contributed to
—Ruth Rendell
the plot of this novelBurden interviews Serge Olson, a Jungian therapist who asks the inspector if he has ever heard of a fallacy devised by the Megarian philosopher Eubulides named The Fallacy of Enkekalymmenos or the Veiled One. 2
The Veiled One was written in the 1980s when CND was very active. I was involved in CND and it was a very serious time. I made Sheila active in the movement and had Wexford showing sympathy but not support.
—Ruth Rendell 3Adapted for TV by Trevor Preston in 1989.
Contemporary Reads 4
Michael Dibdin - Ratking
Penelope Fitzgerald - The Beginning of Spring
Alan Furst - Night Soldiers
James Ellroy - The Big Nowhere
Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda
Footnotes
Forget angst, crime is enough. New York Times, 1988. ↩︎
Psychological Types by Carl Jung. ↩︎
Confessions of a Crime Writer: interview with Anthea Davey for Red Pepper Magazine, 1996, pp. 14-15. ↩︎
Book links may earn this site a small commission. ↩︎