I had been contemplating a long rant setting forth in detail how and why this book trespasses into several of my pet peeve areas at once, but as I won't be rushing to read the next books from the series even though I enjoyed it from a mere storytelling point of view, here's the expedited version:

"Outside of marriage, your Victorian gentleman could look forward to 2.4 fucks a week," actor Mike coolly calculates after his screen partner (and lover) Anna has read to him the statistics according to which, while London's male population in 1857 was 1 1/4 million, the city's estimated 80,000 prostitutes were receiving a total of 2 million clients per week. And frequently, Anna adds, the women thus forced to earn their living came from respectable positions like that of a governess, simply having fallen into bad luck, e.g. by being discharged after a dispute with their employer and their resulting inability to find another position.

This brief dialogue towards the beginning of this screenplay based on John Fowles's 1969 novel succinctly illustrates both the fate that would most likely have been in store for its title character Sarah, had she left provincial Lyme Regis on Dorset's Channel coast and gone to London, and the Victorian society's moral duplicity: For while no virtues were regarded as highly as honor, chastity and integrity; while no woman intent on keeping her good name could even be seen talking to a man alone (let alone go beyond that); and while marriage – like any contract – was considered sacrosanct, rendering the partner who deigned to breach it an immediate social outcast, all these rules were suspended with regard to prostitutes; women who, for whatever reasons, had sunk so low they were regarded as nonpersons and thus, inherently unable to stain anybody's reputation but their own.

Note to the English Speakers out there: I've read the book in German, and not least because of its author and its topic it seemed logical to me for once to write a review in both German and English, and to put the German version first. You'll find the English version of this review if you scroll to the bottom of the German text and the two photos. Also, all quotes rendered in English are my own translations – they may not be identical with the translations of the same quotes in the English edition of Brandt's memoirs, which is entitled My Life in Politics. (Lastly, apologies for the length of this review: This is, however, the sort of book that merits some in-depth consideration if you're going to tackle it at all.)

Als fast auf den Tag genau vor 40 Jahren Beamte des deutschen Verfassungsschutzes an der Tür einer Wohnung im gehobenen Bonner Stadtteil Bad Godesberg klingelten und sich, nachdem ihnen der Wohnungsinhaber geöffnet hatte, in ihrer dienstlichen Eigenschaft auswiesen, entgegnete ihnen der vor ihnen Stehende: "Ich bin Bürger der DDR und ihr Offizier. Respektieren Sie das!" Der Mann hieß Günter Guillaume und war einer der politischen Referenten des damaligen Kanzlers Willy Brandt; mit seinen Namen verbindet sich bis heute der vor- und unzeitige Rücktritt eines der führenden deutschen Politiker der zweiten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts.

Note to the English Speakers out there: I've read the book in German, and not least because of its author and its topic it seemed logical to me for once to write a review in both German and English, and to put the German version first. You'll find the English version of this review if you scroll to the bottom of the German text and the two photos. Also, all quotes rendered in English are my own translations – they may not be identical with the translations of the same quotes in the English edition of Brandt's memoirs, which is entitled My Life in Politics. (Lastly, apologies for the length of this review: This is, however, the sort of book that merits some in-depth consideration if you're going to tackle it at all.)

Als fast auf den Tag genau vor 40 Jahren Beamte des deutschen Verfassungsschutzes an der Tür einer Wohnung im gehobenen Bonner Stadtteil Bad Godesberg klingelten und sich, nachdem ihnen der Wohnungsinhaber geöffnet hatte, in ihrer dienstlichen Eigenschaft auswiesen, entgegnete ihnen der vor ihnen Stehende: "Ich bin Bürger der DDR und ihr Offizier. Respektieren Sie das!" Der Mann hieß Günter Guillaume und war einer der politischen Referenten des damaligen Kanzlers Willy Brandt; mit seinen Namen verbindet sich bis heute der vor- und unzeitige Rücktritt eines der führenden deutschen Politiker der zweiten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts.

Agatha Christie famously once commented that, had she foreseen the lasting popularity of Hercule Poirot, she would not have made him a man already in mid-life in the book marking his first appearance – and the beginning of Christie's own literary career –, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). The awkwardness of that situation, from the writer's point of view, would come to be even greater in the case of Miss Marple, who even at her first appearance in 1930's Murder at the Vicarage was already an elderly lady; a character partly inspired by Christie's own grandmother. Maybe Ruth Rendell should have heeded that thought when she was writing From Doon With Death, the 1964 novel which, in turn, marked both her own literary debut and Inspector Reginald Wexford's first appearance. For Wexford, too, came to his readers ready-made as a Detective Chief Inspector; i.e., a police officer of advanced rank and a corresponding degree of maturity. Yet, as in the case of Agatha Christie's famous detectives, readers did not seem overly bothered by the fact that over the course of the decades Wexford did not age in real time, and indeed, he at least did age more noticeably than Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, both of whom remained essentially unchanged even as the world around them changed a great deal. Rendell's career as a writer thrived on the basis of the Wexford novels as much as it did on the basis of her stand-alone mysteries and thrillers, many of the latter published under the pen name Barbara Vine. British TV also went on to produce a long-running TV series, starring George Baker as Wexford and Christopher Ravenscroft as his sidekick, Inspector Mike Burden; in both actors' cases, arguably still the roles for which they are the most widely known.

Eventually, however, retirement is bound to catch up even with a fictional detective of Wexford's staying power. Already at the publication of the 2009 mystery The Monster in the Box, an interview given by Rendell herself fostered the notion that this was going to be her last Wexford book. That turned out to be wrong, or in any event Rendell changed her mind; however, in the follow-up novel The Vault, Wexford had retired. No Man's Nightingale (2013) is the second novel in which Wexford is consulted by Burden, now his successor and himself a Detective Superintendent, in connection with a murder case, and brought in as an unpaid so-called Crime Solutions Adviser (whatever precisely that may be).

Read more on my own website, ThemisAthena.info.

Preview also cross-posted on Leafmarks.