Ruth Rendell: Britain's greatest living author

Unusual suspect ... Ruth Rendell. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Since most of my favorite authors are dead, there isn't much in the way of new books for me to look forward to most of the time. Here and there a stray title will capture my attention - James Salter's Last Night was a recent example - but for the most part in the vast flood of published material the pickings are slim, at least for me. No doubt this is largely my fault for not being able to relate to what's happening in the current literary marketplace, but perhaps it's also the fault of the material that comes down the pike.

But there is one living author whose books I invariably look forward to - those of Baroness Rendell of Babergh - better known to her readers as Ruth Rendell or, sometimes Barbara Vine. I like to think of her as the greatest British writer, bar none. And, please note, not just the greatest British crime writer.

Rendell's non-Wexford (or non-detective genre) novels are certainly consigned to the mystery and crime section of your local bookstore and that's a shame, because she's alert to contemporary life like none of her contemporaries, including such luminaries as Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith. And if the aforementioned writers are her equals, then I submit that Rendell is a hell of a lot more entertaining.

Rendell/Vine's books are crammed full of characters from every walk of life - from closeted politicians and psychotic laundresses (Adam And Eve And Pinch Me) to homicidal spinsters and the new English bourgeoisie by way of India (The Water's Lovely) to mentally challenged handymen and displaced immigrants from the islands (The Rottweiler).

These figures are more than, to use the bookchat cliché, "sharply observed". Rendell's characters live and breathe. They leap off the page and haunt the imagination and the memory. And given Rendell's propensity to make the lives of the high and low and the middle collide in the most unexpected ways - just as they do in real life - they end up becoming her building material for an incredible and fascinating mosaic of contemporary British life.

If the sometimes bizarre plots in Rendell's novels occasionally seem, at least to some critics, to strain credulity, it's my opinion that they are rather accurate reflections of the insanities of modern life. Because real life squirms with Rendellian madness. Who, for instance, would have thought that a young man obsessed with Jodie Foster that the best way to woo her would be to assassinate the president? Or that someone as ridiculous as Joey Buttafuoco could convince anyone to shoot his poor wife in the head? All are Rendell scenarios, for sure.

There are good adaptations for TV and film, too, with directors as classy as Pedro Almódovar, Claudes Chabrol and Miller zeroing in on a very fine storyteller. But for the full Rendell effect you simply have to experience the great lady on the page.