England, Kingsmarkham, ca 1985
En kvinde i nabolaget Joy Williams beder kriminalinspektør Wexford om hjælp til at finde sin mand, Ron Williams. Han er sælger og har været væk i en uges tid. Wexford tænker at manden er stukket af med en anden og at gåden mest består i grunden til at manden har holdt konen ud så længe. De har to voksne børn, datteren Sara og sønnen Kevin.

??? ( )

Joy Williams, a neighbour, asks Wexford to look into the disappearance of her husband. At first he assumes the husband has run off with another woman, but evidence mounts to show that something more sinister has happened.

An intriguing plot with a solution which I don't think anybody writing now would come up with. ( )

Cuando el marido de Joy Williams, una vecina del inspector Wexford, desaparece misteriosamente nadie imagina que el mundo de Joy se desmoronará por completo. En efecto, sin que ella lo supiese, su marido ocupaba un alto cargo en una empresa de pinturas, ganaba un abultado salario y, aún más desconcertante, estaba casado también con otra mujer. Joy lo creía un modesto vendedor de la empresa con unos ingresos mediocres y, desde luego, un marido modélico. Pero las cosas ya no tienen marcha atrás, pues el cadáver del bígamo ha sido hallado en las afueras del pueblo. ¿Suicidio? ¿Asesinato? ¿Quién era en realidad Rod Williams?... Una nueva incursión de la autora en los extraños entresijos de la mentalidad criminal.

Rodney Williams has gone missing. His wife reports it to the police and Inspector Wexford is given the case.

Wexford figures the man left his dowdy wife for a younger woman. When the man’s body is found, it comes out that Williams has two wives. The one in Kingsmarkham who reported him missing and is the mother of his fifteen year old daughter, and the one in Pomfret and is the mother of his eighteen year old daughter. Neither woman appears to have known about the other.

Williams had been killed by multiple stab wounds. Shortly after this there are a number of stabbings of young men. It is determined that a group calling itself ARRIA is responsible. This radical, feminist group has quite a following from the local girls’ school along with other females in the area. Their logo is a raven with the head of a woman. They claim to hate men.

Wexford thinks the daughters of Williams may have had a hand in the murder. His investigation is a tangled web that he has to undo to find the truth.

This is a complicated and bit of a grim plot. The feminist line is a bit too strong and distracts from the main plot…in my humble opinion. ( )

A Muddle of Clues
Review of the Arrow Books paperback edition (1986) of the Hutchinson original hardcover (1985)

I read An Unkindness of Ravens as part of my ongoing survey of classic crime writing. Ruth Rendell (1930-2015) is especially known for the psychological elements in her crime fiction. Ravens at No. 13 is exactly in the middle of the pack of the 24 Chief Inspector Wexford novels. Wexford is somewhat of an old fuddy-duddy who is set in his ways and often quotes from theatre or the classics to the befuddlement of his assistant DI Mike Burden. Most of the sources of those quotes or allusions are never explained, so it is flattering to the reader who recognizes them. An example in Ravens is when Wexford refers to a Bunbury alibi with Burden's confused reaction. Bunbury being Algernon's fictitious friend who he uses for excuses in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (1898).

At first you start to think that Ravens is going to be sympathetic to activist feminism which was beginning to rise to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990's. The female characters though are almost all portrayed as unsympathetic with the final reveal of the murderer being quite diabolical. The red herrings of the case are mostly all related to a local feminist organization named after the rather contradictory historical suicide Arria in ancient Roman history. Then there are various curious Freudian and misogynist subplots, Burden's wife is having a baby and fears that it will be born female etc.

So I can't really say that I enjoyed Ravens overall, except for Wexford's classical references and the twistiness of the plot. ( )