Ruth Rendell thinks self-analysis can be dangerous for a writer. But she delights in casting her novelist's eye over everything else - including the subject of her latest thriller, 'adventure sex'. Nigel Farndale takes notes. Portrait by Laura Hynd

Ruth Rendell is a diminutive 78-year-old with a dry and concise manner. She lives alone in a large house that sprawls backwards from the canal in Maida Vale like a breaking wave. It's not a paradox exactly, more an idiosyncratic contrast, one that seems to suit her. Moving like the robot cowboy played by Yul Brynner in Westworld - steady and purposeful - she leads the way along a hall, through a high-ceilinged, double drawing-room and down an open stairwell to her favourite room, one that has French windows opening into the garden. Here there are sofas, a television she doesn't watch much and hundreds of books. She is a voracious reader: it's Dickens at the moment.


Ruth Rendell: 'When it isn't workingI find that I am plodding, I don't like my characters and I know I have to stop and start again'

After this she will read Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. The greatest novel she has ever read is Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, though the one she wishes she had written is Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal: 'Such a simple conceit but so effective.' What about more commercial fiction? What did she make of the Dan Brown phenomenon? 'Rather not say.' Go on. 'The Da Vinci Code was pretty awful. A good idea disappointingly handled.'

Her eyes are piercing, her face fiercely sculpted. She exercises on a treadmill daily and is 'absurdly proud' of being a size 10 and of having a 'very good head of (dyed) hair', the only disadvantage with this being that a lot of people think it's a wig, apparently. She can seem a little cold and remote at first. It's because she does not expand on her answers and will float calmly on the silences that follow them. She even sits at a slightly awkward angle, in three-quarter profile, and her laughter can seem more like polite punctuation, as if she has trained herself to do it. I don't mean that to sound rude, by the way, and I don't think she will take it that way. It is, after all, the sort of observation she makes all the time in her books.

Rendell grew up in Essex, where both her parents were teachers, and became a novelist almost by default when a career as a reporter on a local newspaper ended abruptly. She was fired after writing an article on the local tennis club's annual dinner without actually attending it. She would have got away with it had the after-dinner speaker not died mid-speech. She wrote two unpublished novels before her third, featuring Chief Inspector Wexford, was accepted in 1964. Since then she has written about three novels every two years. Most have been best-sellers, with worldwide sales of about 20 million.

Her latest is called The Birthday Present and will be the 13th published under her pseudonym Barbara Vine, which means it is a multi-layered psychological thriller. Her next will be out in November and that will be a Ruth Rendell, which means it will be a more conventional detective novel; more formulaic, too. The 21 Wexford novels she has written have been Ruth Rendells, and they have been her most commercially successful. She has said that it is not much use pretending she is not rich, as everyone knows she must be. But good socialist that she is - she was made a Labour peer in 1997 - she always gives a sizeable chunk of her income each year to charity (and I won't embarrass her by saying how much).

The Birthday Present is set in the spring of 1990. A rising Tory MP is involved in an 'adventure sex' game that goes wrong. He arranges to have his unsuspecting, but willing, girlfriend snatched from the street, bound and gagged and delivered to a mutually agreed venue. I tell Rendell that in preparation for this interview I had Googled the words 'adventure sex' - and that it was quite an awkward thing to have to do in an open-plan office.

'I have heard of something called adventure sex, but I don't remember where,' she says. 'I don't think it has been written down anywhere. It didn't take much of a leap of the imagination to come up with it. I mean, look at the Max Mosley case. A great source of entertainment in these economically gloomy times. I think we are much less judgmental about sexual matters than we used to be. No longer puritanical.'

The novelist Jeanette Winterson is one of Rendell's closest friends. She describes her as funny, kind and enormously gentle, but also a person who can come across as autocratic and solitary. She has a truly open mind, Winterson says, and will think about whatever you put to her. Nothing would shock her.

'No, I don't think there is anything that would shock me,' Rendell says when I mention this. 'Regarding sexuality, at least. As long as consenting adults are involved, I would never censure. Not on moral grounds. There was a case a few years ago involving men doing violent sado-masochism to each other, nailing their scrotums to planks, and so on. You can't understand it, but you don't have to understand it. All that matters is that they like it. They enjoy it. It's up to them. What does shock and appal me is paedophilia. Also I've been campaigning about female genital mutilation for the past eight years. That shocks me. What they do to a three-month-old baby. Appalling.'

Yet she never writes about sex in a graphic way, only ever alludes to it in passing. 'That is because I would dread winning the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award. No one likes to be laughed at. There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare. Sex in books I think is usually unnecessary. You get a better idea of characters and relationship if you know when to stop. If the reader is intelligent they will fill in those gaps.'

Her forte is suspense and psychological insight, especially in the Barbara Vine books. She enjoys analysing the way people dig themselves in deeper when they deceive. 'If the politician in The Birthday Present had been honest about his sex game he would have been fine. A couple of jokey paragraphs in the paper and that would have been it. Where blackmail is involved, telling the police is always a good option.

'People don't realise how discreet the police will be with you. I know this because someone I know, not a public figure, was being blackmailed in a mild way and asked me what to do, and I said, "Go to the police now."He did and the police were wonderful and no one else knew about it, his wife, his family, no one. The police said, "Leave it to us and you'll never hear of it again." It doesn't work for people in the public eye. I think we all fear appearing foolish in public. We don't want to be laughed at. And people do laugh. Hugh Grant will always be associated with his scandal and so will Max Mosley. Same with all those disgraced MPs: Aitken, Mellor, Prescott.'

One of the most interesting characters in the new book is called Jane: the narrator quotes from her diary and in it she reveals her low self-esteem. 'One knows a lot of people like that, always putting themselves down and always expecting to be done down. Passive-aggressive. Chronic mild paranoia. The pleasure for the reader is in identifying with such characters, half recognising them.'

Rendell sometimes finds herself psychologically weighing up strangers and passing acquaintances. 'I don't try to get the measure of them, but after a while you do get it. Perhaps they get stored up for future use. I know readers read me for the characters as much as anything; that's what they want. Also I always think people want to read about families in fiction. That is often overlooked. Families are what we all have. They are the real point of empathy. Often in my case they are dysfunctional families.'

Certainly, this is an intriguing aspect of her work. Rendell seems quite suspicious of conventional families. In her Barbara Vine books, she often shows the family as a potentially dangerous thing, hardly the support network that David Cameron would have us believe it is. This may have something to do with her own circumstances. It becomes clear that while she is fascinated by psychology, she is suspicious of psychiatrists, especially their tendency to attribute all human behaviour to formative influences, family backgrounds and so on. All the more intriguing, then, her answer when I ask if she had a happy childhood.

'Not particularly, no. My parents were very unhappily married and it rubs off. There were arguments and silences and terrible isolations. I think I have always sought out friends because I was an only child. I need my friends. I have an only child myself.' He is a psychiatric social worker who lives in Colorado - he and his American wife have two sons, aged 16 and 14. Rendell sees them four or five times a year. The grandchildren like being asked if they are any relation to Ruth Rendell. 'I've dedicated this new book to them. They haven't seen it yet.'

Rendell has never talked in public about how in 1973 she and her husband, Donald - a Daily Mail journalist she met while working on the Chigwell Times - got divorced, only to remarry four years later. Has she talked to her son about that hiatus in her marriage? 'No, never talked to him about it.' Has he ever asked about it? 'Well he was around at the time. I suppose if he asked... I don't suppose he would. He knows about it. He was grown up when it happened. I suppose I'm a believer in not telling everyone about everything. I think that is one of the things I don't need to talk about.'

Has she heard of anyone else doing it? 'Getting unmarried and remarried? I think it's quite common.' Really? Is that because people realise they don't like anyone else as much as their former husbands and wives? Is that what happened in her case? 'That's what happened, yes. Also divorce got very easy at that time. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1973. Before that it had been difficult. You know, the need for guilty parties, the Brighton hotels. It was easy because our son was grown up and there was no question of money problems. Then we decided we liked each other best.'

Had her success put a strain on the marriage? 'No, not at all, and later on when we remarried my husband retired quite early and it was fine with him and he never minded if we went to some party that was for me. He liked it. Was very good about that. Not sure if anyone else would have been. Not then. But you have to be a well-adjusted man. Other men might feel they have to be in the ascendant, in control, the superior partner.'

Rendell rises at 6.15am, feeds her two cats and writes all morning. In the afternoons she goes to the House of Lords where she is what is called a working peer (unlike, say, her friend and fellow detective fiction writer P.D. James, a Tory peer who rarely attends). Rendell walks some of the way and completes the journey by Tube. Reflecting on her marriage, it strikes me that it can't be easy being married to a highly prolific, driven and self-disciplined author, especially one with a divided self.

I ask if her novels start off in a limbo between Barbara Vine and Ruth Rendell. 'No, I always know which they are going to be right from the start. The one coming out in November was always going to be a Ruth Rendell, but I find it very hard to say why. I sort of know but I find it hard to put into words. And there was no question that this one was going to be a Barbara Vine. It took me a long time to get into this book, trying to find the right narrator. I had written several chapters that didn't work. I scrapped them rather than carry on. It was because there was a lifelessness to them. It has to come to life on the page. When it isn't working I sit there in an awful state of sluggishness. I find that I am plodding, I don't like my characters and the setting isn't working. I know because it has happened to me a lot and I know I have to stop and start again, and when I do it is a very happy feeling. I know it will be all right this time. I have abandoned books more than halfway through.'

It isn't to do with her mood, she adds. 'When I am writing I am always in the mood, even when I'm not feeling very well, not that that has happened very much. I'm always feeling well. Even when I'm tired it doesn't stop me. It's not mood and it's not a physical feeling. It's the thing itself. I have not done it right.'

Unlike many authors, she says she has never succumbed to self-loathing. 'Because it's not as if the writing is me. I'm not involved. My personality is not involved and it won't affect it. I often have feelings of self-reproach and feelings that I have behaved badly, but I don't think I have self-loathing. That couldn't happen. I might feel I am not doing a good job, in which case I would stop for the day. But I don't want to know why. Too much self-analysis can be dangerous for a writer. You might never write again. That is why I have never had any psychotherapy and I wouldn't even if I might have needed it, because who knows what that might do to you. You might lose something.'

Do her psychological insights really have nothing to do with her own personality? 'No they don't and I appreciate that that is a strange thing to say.' It is strange because her psychological insights are usually so astute, the Jane character feeling sorry for herself and putting herself down, for example. 'In that case, I was only aware that I had to create a character whose central characteristic is that she has low self-esteem. Once I have that, I think what she might look like. She doesn't like the way she looks. I have a feeling of getting into someone's shoes and seeing what I would do if I were she, but not if I'm me.'

Hm. I think I follow. Has she, Ruth Rendell, always been confident about the way she looks? 'That's an awful question because the answer sounds vain but, yes, I have always been confident about the way I looked. I'm getting on now but, yes, I have never suffered from any sense of inferiority in that way.'

In what way has she felt inferior? 'Intellectual. I have been 11 years in the House of Lords, where giants of intellect surround me. It doesn't upset me or anything, but I am aware without paranoia of how much cleverer these people are than me. I don't mind. Rather like it. I admire this sort of thing. But I don't confuse my humble intellect with theirs.'

Is it to do with her not having been to university? 'I would have thought it was the other way. Who knows why people are the way they are? As an autodidact, I have read all my life, educated myself with constant reading, I suppose it was compensation. But I don't think it has much to do with it, because my intellectual capacity would have been the same whether I had been to university or not.'

I notice she rarely uses swear words in her prose and when she does they seem to have more impact because of their scarcity. 'Yes, that's deliberate. I keep swearing down to a minimum for that reason. I don't say f--- in conversation, but I do when I'm on my own, swearing at the television.' I find myself laughing at this. Such an unexpected comment. An endearing one, too. She hasn't seen The Apprentice or Big Brother, she goes on to say, but she is aware of them. 'I do have a passion for hospital dramas: Casualty, Holby City and this new one Harley Street. When my husband was alive we used to watch them together, largely to guess what was wrong with people. I was always very good with the diagnosis.'

Her husband died of prostate cancer in 1999, a fairly quick death with no mental deterioration. Rendell believes some widows have a terrible time because they have never done anything on their own, and they are utterly lost and don't know how to live. That never happened to her. 'Practically, his death was nothing, emotionally it was everything.'

She thinks about her own death every day, but comes to no conclusion. I ask how the fictionalised deaths she has written about so much over the years compare with her experience of death, the death of her husband. 'You do think about your own experience when you write about subjects such as death. After I had lost people, it did change the way I wrote about people who were bereaved. I appreciated what bereavement was. So often in detective stories someone dies and people carry on as if little had happened. Actually, bereavement endures for a long time.'

Does she ever talk to herself as if to her husband, all those unfinished conversations? 'I did for a time but not any more. Not now. Nor do I have the sensation that he might walk into the room. I do still think it would be nice to have him back. Not everyone does. Some people feel they get used to their aloneness. And I do like living alone. It's all right. And I certainly don't want to live with anyone else. That has come up.'

Donald Rendell was the only person in the world with whom she felt completely relaxed, though she had been very close to her father, whom she takes after in terms of personality, and who died a quarter of a century ago (her mother having died comparatively young of multiple sclerosis). Her father's deathbed scene, which she witnessed, was 'extremely emotional'. We know what her father was like because the character of Wexford is based on him: a liberal, literate, compassionate man with a dry sense of humour, but one who can also get quite exasperated and hot-tempered.

Rendell has never had a period in her adult life when she has not written. I ask if she would still write even if she wasn't going to be published, not that that would ever happen. 'I think so, but I do still feel the need to be published. I did think of writing a Wexford in which he dies and it would be published posthumously. Stick the manuscript in a bank. But I don't like that idea. I shan't care what happens after my death, so why bother?' She doesn't care whether she's remembered? 'Why would one care? Naturally, I hope my son and my grandchildren will remember me, but whether people go on reading my books, I don't really care.' She is an agnostic, she adds, a lapsed Anglican one. 'I can't listen to The Alternative Service Book. Dreadful sentences. It doesn't aid understanding.'

Spoken like a novelist. We've been talking for an hour and a half and it is time to part. I head back out into Maida Vale and follow the canal onto the main road. I am ambling, it has to be said. Thinking about the interview. After 10 minutes, I stop and check my mobile for messages, stepping to one side, partially hidden by an awning. I look up and see Ruth Rendell walking in my direction with methodical, purposeful strides, never varying her pace, staring straight ahead.

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