The People's Detective

It was back in 1987 that Ruth Rendell’s books about Inspector Reginald Wexford were turned into a television series. The well-known film actor George Baker took on the role of Inspector Wexford, who went about solving crime in the fictional town of Kingsmarkham, along with his sidekick, Inspector Mike Burden. The show was hugely popular, with 10 million viewers tuning in every week, and it ran for 13 years. It was sold around the world with fans as far afield as New Zealand, South Africa and Japan.

Well, what I had done was write a detective story for fun, to see if I could, featuring chief Inspector Wexford, and it was called From Doon with Death. And Wexford was in it, simply there to investigate the crime. I didn’t know that he would become a series character and in fact, become a popular detective.

I had to give him a name. I’d just been on holiday in Ireland and it was a choice between whether he was called Waterford or Wexford, and Wexford won, I don’t know why. The same thing applied to the name of the town, which is based on Midhurst in Sussex, where I lived for a while as a child. And I chose Kingsmarkham because my son, who was a little boy at the time, had a friend who was called Markham. And the Kings, it was either kings or bishops. Again. I chose kings.

My own view has always been that the reason Wexford works so well with an audience is he’s secure and he’s safe. Despite that Kingmarkham had—I don’t know—six murders a week for God knows how many years. The audience felt very comfortable and very safe with him. And that’s why I think the character works so well. And that’s why I think George works so well.

So what do we know of Wexford’s background? Wexford was a local village boy who went to grammar school and then joined the police force. He is married to a faithful wife, Dora, who George Baker is married to in real life, and together they have two daughters, Sheila and Sylvia. But despite the goings on in his home life, it’s his police work with sidekick Burden in Kingmarkham that keeps the moral Wexford busy.

When I think of Wexford, I think of someone who’s very stolid and very English, and very measured and very reasonable. Not somebody that you would say was an exciting man in any respect.

He began to become popular. I decided that he should be less tough and become more sensitive, more liberal, more literate … a reader. And I also decided that he should be married and remain married. That was not to say that he might not be attracted by other women. After all, he’s a man.

I believe that he didn’t go to university. He went straight from school to police college and then went straight into the police force after that. Though his education was not particularly extensive, he has taught himself about art and about the theatre and is a huge, huge reader. So it’s a very broad knowledge of the arts and of the world.

I think Wexford’s a bit like your favourite uncle, you know, you could go down the pub with him and have a pint, have a chat with him and maybe go and have a fight with him afterwards.

Wexford had two sidekicks. There was Inspector Burden, who was, I suppose, a polar opposite to the character of Wexford. He was very buttoned up, he was very tight, but very kind of very right wing.

Burden was rather prudish and prim. And then people began to tell me that he was too prudish and prim for a detective inspector.

So I killed his wife and let him have an affair with an actress. But strangely enough, it didn’t make him less prim and prudish.

Burden is the sort of the straight man of the two … really. By no means a fool, but probably not as intelligent as Wexford. Not as imaginative as Wexford.

Burden? very precise, very well dressed, very clean cut, and did everything by the book.

With regard to myself as a sidekick, I was the one who was sort of always rushing at things like a bull at a gate. She just thought Wexford was wonderful. She liked his methods, but she wanted to impress him all the time. That was the core of her being—really—was to be approved of by him and to move up in his team.

Wexford’s temperament, to a certain extent, became George Baker’s temperament, which I guess is inevitable because George became the character.

Very stubborn. Very stubborn, but I used stubborn nicely, but stubborn in the sense that if he got his teeth into something a bit like a terrier, you couldn’t get it out of his mouth.

Anybody who comes up against Wexford when he is in a temper is in for a bad time. He’s pretty terrifying. And George Baker is able to convey that extremely well. And the actor has a certain weight, and I don’t just mean physical weight, he has a weight which makes him quite frightening. So anyone who goes up against him, someone who is a lawbreaker, is in for a tough time.

He could get very caught up emotionally in the story of the case that he was following and the individual lives who were involved in that story.

I think Wexford tried not to get emotionally involved in cases, but any policeman will tell you that at some point they are … they find a connection with a case and it never leaves them. So I think for Wexford, being a caring man, his compassion was quite big.

Because he works off instinct, therefore he works off emotion, therefore he does get emotionally involved.

Wexford is a family man, which is actually quite unusual. Many of us crime writers do away with the family life because it’s a bit tedious sometimes and it gets in the way of the plot. But Ruth Rendell is interested in him as a fully rounded human being and so to Wexford, the family is very important.

But Wexford’s family, it’s a bit of a strange one really, because he goes home and tells his wife everything—Dora—and just kind of involves her in all the cases and to a certain extent his kids as well, which you can’t really imagine a copper doing these days. I think Dora secretly wants to be the detective herself because she’s really supportive of his work and really gets involved in the cases. And at one point she even got kidnapped herself. That’s how desperate she was to get involved in the case.

In one of the stories, Dora, his wife, is kidnapped, and along with various other people and ransoms are demanded and he heads the investigation. So both his daughters kind of come home.

And that always creates a kind of domestic tension. And what I think Ruth particularly does well is take big issues, put them into a very personable way that they relate to the public or they relate to the viewer.

He has two daughters whom he loves dearly, one to whom he is absolutely devoted and dotes on and is his favourite, which he knows and is ashamed of, I think, and the other daughter who he loves, but I think can be a bit of a trial sometimes.

Wexford was not really very supportive of Sylvia at all. The personality clashed. It didn’t matter that she was daughter number one or anything else. Their personalities just went Brrr…

They clash, I think because they’re very like each other. She’s like her dad. So inevitably in those kinds of situations, there are times when they just kind of like two poles kind of coming together.

Well I wouldn’t say that he was well dressed.

No He’s not a stylish man at all. Intellectually and emotionally, he’s immensely stylish but in terms of the clothes that he wears and the way that he presents himself, stylish is the last thing that he is.

Wexford’s style is somebodies granddad, really. Comfy. Always immaculately smart and immaculately dressed but kind of cosy.

Wexford is not glamorous but then that was my idea. I didn’t want him to be. I wanted him to be the kind of man that men identified with and women would fall in love with. And that has happened. In fact one woman wrote to me—this was quite a long time ago—and asked me if I would kill Wexford’s wife so that she could marry him.

Yes, I think women did fancy him. They fancied that tall handsome man in whose arms they would be utterly safe.

I do think he was a ladies’ man. He was a ladies’ man because I think George is very fanciable, We used to get a phenomenal number of letters from women who found him really attractive.

I think his wife cared carried about his appearance. Which it’s why he was always well-turned out. In the last story we did, his wife persuaded him to get rid of his old macintosh.

And so he ends up giving it away and sees a homeless person in the street wearing his old macintosh.

I think Wexford was very passionate about his job. He really believed in policing and he really believed in catching the criminal. That was him, really. Yes, a very passionate man, really. Yes.

As the Wexford series went on I think Ruth Rendell, the author, got much more interested in social issues. And I think that came across in the books. Whether it was things like the rerouting of a road through an area of countryside that was the habitat that was in danger of being destroyed, whether it’s to do with immigration policy, I mean, whatever it is, she’s got a social conscience. I mean, she sits in the House of Lords and she has a lot to say in the House of Lords, Ruth Rendell. And so, why not give those concerns to your characters? And as an author, we are channelling your questions and frustrations about the world and making sense of the world through your fiction.

The character of Wexford certainly has a huge sense of being aware of society. What’s happening, and a lot of it was not sexy in the sense that we were dealing with people in bad situations. He couldn’t but be unaffected by what he was seeing.

With Road Rage as an example, which is about a road being cut through the edge of a of market town, which happens to be close to Kingsmarkham. Wexford has to run that fine line between the fact he doesn’t want the road to be built. He thinks what they’re doing is wrong to build the road, but it is destroying the environment, it is destroying the countryside. You don’t need the road.

Nevertheless, it’s his job to police the area so when protesters move in to prevent the road being built, on the one hand, it plays to his sympathy, but on the other, he doesn’t agree with the way that they’re doing it.

Wexford prided himself, of course, on not being the least racist. But Dr Akande came in and said that his daughter was missing and he was a new doctor in the town and they found a black girl dead. And Wexford jumps to a conclusion.

Mrs Akande comes running down to the police station and says, how dare you, and you’re a racist.

And he, as somebody who would never have called himself a racist, finds that sort of in a subterranean way in some of his attitudes there is an inbuilt racism. He sees black people as different and he’s brought sort of face-to-face with that in the course of the story and is very shocked by himself and what he sees in himself.

I think if I had suffered from the activities of a criminal, I would prefer to have Foyle investigating my case than Wexford. Wexford will get there, but I think his might be a rather long drawn-out investigation, whereas I think Foyle would be more instinctive.

I think you'd have to vote for Wexford because he's absolutely reliable. He's honest, he's dependable, and he cares.

Very much a kind of everyman, astonished by the changes in society, trying to move with the times, trying to juggle family life, and he appeals to people on that level. You can identify with something in Wexford, whoever you are.