Good stuff, complicated stuff. At the center of this multi-character story is Mary Jago. Mary is a young woman who is having some difficulty getting an abusive boyfriend out of her life entirely. She works at and partly owns an odd tourist attraction: The Irene Adler Museum. Adler was a fictional character in one of the Sherlock Holmes' stories (by Arthur Conan Doyle). The museum offers items from the period, items Adler "might have worn", "might have owned". It has a gift shop with reproductions of originals for sale. As it is located not far from the famous 221b Baker Street (Holmes' supposed residence), it attracts tourists in the area.Mary moves out of the house she shared with Adrian, against his protests. She moves into a house-sitting job, taking care of a dog and a house while the owners are on a lengthy vacation in other countries. The house is in a nice location and is not far from the Adler museum, making it possible for her to walk to and from work. Unfortunately, Adrian shows up from time to time, expecting her to take him in and for their lives to continue as before, joined. While Mary is dealing with relationship issues, others are making their lives very differently. Bean is a dogwalker who takes pride in where he lives, a residence willed to him when his wealthy employer died. Among others, Bean walks the dog belonging to the couple that Mary is housesitting for. Bean is ambitious and haughty, rather full of himself and not given to thinking well of others. The dogs put up with him but there is no evidence of any great affection towards him. Bean hatches a scheme to take advantage of his position to find little bits of dirt on his well-off employers and to use it to his advantage.Roman lives on the streets. He doesn't have to, because he has money tucked away. But after his entire family was killed in a crash, he found no way to cope but to sell everything and take to the streets. He manages to maintain some semblance of an acceptable appearance, but his barrow of goods gives him away. One day when he awakes from inside the gate to the Adler Museum, Mary sees him and says hi to him. From then on, he takes an interest in her, one of the few people who think of the street people as still people. He even begins to feel a little protective of her when he sees an altercation with Adrian.Then there's Hob. A petty criminal addicted to various substances, he is ripe for any job that can use any of his skills, including beating up various marks. Hob does not seem to have any endearing characteristics, which makes reading about him not much fun for me. Mary, while still with Adrian, contacted an organization that solicits marrow donations from healthy persons for use in cancer cases. She offered to undergo the donation process for a person who had leukemia and would die without it. Some time after the donation, she learned that the recipient was doing well, and the organization allowed contact between them if she so wished. She did wish, and she arranged to meet him. This encounter led to many others, during which she found herself deeply drawn to the pale, thin person who reminded her very much of herself.While all these people are going about their businesses, murders are committed. Street people are found hung on the stakes on top of walls. Because of various connections that do not seem connected, between Mary and the other characters, she is indeed connected with at least one of the murders. Interesting and absorbing reading, complex enough to call for thought.
This started out as a fairly typical crime page-turner (if I ignore all the lengthy, boring descriptions of the geography of Regents Park, which Rendell only ever calls The Park, for some reason: perhaps she felt this made it sound more ominous), but got steadily worse.The concept isn't a bad one: several characters lives cross over in a small area of London, and we learn about their back-stories. And yet Rendell wasn't able to realise this well at all. She decided that only one of her characters should be remotely likeable, and so the main protagonist is a woman with as much backbone as a jellyfish (and just as wet), and is therefore unable to drive any action. I coped with her for a while, and was intrigued by how the stories would overlap, but then Rendell started describing characters' "lovemaking", and it went downhill from there.Downhill unfortunately involves the odd, shocking piece of casual racism, which evidently bypassed the editorial team in 1996: "It was the hottest day of the year . . . Two men were running on the oval track by the Primrose Hill Bridge but they were dark-skinned and perhaps interpreted the heat as pleasant warmth." Such descriptive pieces are completely redundant anyway, so how they remained is the best mystery in this book.The climax was badly delivered, with the result that the story seems to simply fizzle out, and the loose ends are tied up in a way that is far too convenient: it reads like Rendell couldn't wait to get it finished, and her agent just told her to kill everyone off. (Not a spoiler: not everyone dies! Unfortunate though that is . . .)I'll never read another Rendell, that's for sure.
What do You think about The Keys To The Street (1997)?
I usually enjoy Rendell's mysteries but this one wasn't one of my favorites. The plot is somewhat labyrinth, as per her usual set-up in her stand alone novels, and as the story deepens we are introduced to a variety of Londoners whose lives intersect during the summer. The main character, Mary, is in the process of breaking up with an abusive boyfriend and is moving into a posh "cottage" in a tony section of the city to house-sit for friends of her grandmother. She works in a tourist friendly theme museum and is following the recovery of an anonymous patient to whom she has donated bone marrow. When she learns that the young man, Leo, would like to meet her they arrange to do so at a nearby park.The park plays a central role in the story, many meetings take place there, the dog walker, Bean, takes the local's pedigreed pooches there, it is the de facto home of a number of homeless street people and it will be at the center of a series of ghastly murders.Rendell constructs a clockwork plot of great precision and layers her clues neatly throughout the story, she is never a plot cheater, but I must say I found the central mystery to be apparent right from the beginning and I was able to determine the culprit and his motive so soon that it reduced my enjoyment immensely. Although, in all fairness, I must admit the identity of the secondary mystery's culprit was nicely subsumed in the larger plot. Rendell does write well; her prose is clean, her story is quite interesting and she develops her characters nicely but the result here is not her best. Try one of her other books first.
—Texbritreader
I was a little surprised to find this wasn't released as a Barbara Vine book, as it's not exactly crime. There are crimes in it (a series of murders) but the perpetrator is not the main focus of the story.It's hard to say much without giving the game away, but I will say that this book, as well as being an enjoyable read with a lot of very well-defined characters, is a masterclass in how to handle the (fair) withholding of information.I was tempted after finishing it to pick up another Rendell right away, but I make a point of almost never doing that. I am sure that I'll be reading a lot more of her work in future, though.
—Dave Morris
I read this first years ago, and just finished rereading, and loved it as much as I did the first time around. One of my favorite things about this Ruth Rendell: London (where I lived as a teenager) as a character, as much of one as the people (and dogs! another favorite thing) who populate it. She's the only mystery writer I know who can describe a physical place so gorgeously, atmospherically--who can make it real in the same way her characters and situations, even the most far-fetched ones, become real in the context of her books.
—Kasey Jueds
