From Doon with Death
The first Wexford novel published by John Long in 1964
Back in the 1970s, I was a trainee hack down in Devon and an avid consumer of crime fiction. I can still remember the jolt of reading Detective Inspector Reg Wexford’s beginnings in From Doon With Death and being bowled over. It’s one of a handful of crime novels that shaped my own ambitions in the field …
The trampled grass led to the body of Margaret Parsons. With no useful clues and a victim known only for her mundane life, Chief Inspector Wexford is baffled until he discovers Margaret’s dark secret - a collection of rare books, each inscribed from a secret lover and signed only as ‘Doon’.
Who is Doon? And could the answer hold the key to Wexford solving his first case?
I based him (Wexford) on other people’s fictional detectives, a bit on Maigret I suppose, and quite a lot on Fred Fellows, a police chief in Hillary Waugh’s books.
Notes
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A 60th anniversary edition with a new forward by Kate Hamer.
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The verses at the beginning of each chapter and the inscriptions in Minna’s books appear in The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.
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I had to give him a name. I’d just been on holiday in Ireland and it was a choice between whether he was called Waterford or Wexford, and Wexford won, I don’t know why. The same thing applied to the name of the town, which is based on Midhurst in Sussex, where I lived for a while as a child. And I chose Kingsmarkham because my son, who was a little boy at the time, had a friend who was called Markham. And the Kings, it was either kings or bishops. Again. I chose kings.
—Ruth Rendell 2 -
Searching for Kingsmarkham with The Curiously Specific Book Club.
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Adapted for TV by George Baker in 1991.
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Melvyn Bragg interviews Ruth Rendell for The Southbank Show in 2004.
Contemporary Reads 3
- Hillary Waugh - The Missing Man
- Georges Simenon - Maigret and the Ghost
- Patricia Highsmith- The Two Faces of January
- Agatha Christie - A Caribbean Mystery
- Iris Murdoch - The Italian Girl
- Celia Fremlin - The Jealous One
Footnotes
Essay on Inspector Wexford Penguin Books. ↩︎
The People’s Detective, ITV 2010. ↩︎
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