Authors Like Ruth Rendell

Wilkie Collins

British · The Woman in White (1860), The Moonstone (1868)

Collins (1824–1889) was a friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens, who serialised The Woman in White in his magazine All the Year Round in 1859–60. The novel turns on a stolen identity and a woman shut away in an asylum, and is told by several narrators in turn. The Moonstone, about a diamond stolen from a country house, is often counted among the first English detective novels.

Francis Iles

British · Malice Aforethought (1931), Before the Fact (1932)

Francis Iles was a pen name of Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893–1971), who also wrote puzzle mysteries as Anthony Berkeley. Malice Aforethought opens with a country doctor who has already decided to murder his wife, and follows his reasoning as the plan unfolds. Before the Fact became Alfred Hitchcock’s film Suspicion (1941).

Margaret Millar

Canadian-American · Beast in View (1955), A Stranger in My Grave (1960)

Millar was born Margaret Sturm in Kitchener, Ontario, in 1915 and spent most of her life in Santa Barbara, California, with her husband Kenneth Millar, who wrote as Ross Macdonald. Beast in View, about a reclusive heiress tormented by anonymous phone calls, won the Edgar Award for best novel. The Mystery Writers of America made her a Grand Master in 1983.

Shirley Jackson

American · The Haunting of Hill House (1959), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Jackson (1916–1965) lived in North Bennington, Vermont, and became famous for “The Lottery” (1948), a story about a village’s annual ritual. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is narrated by eighteen-year-old Merricat Blackwood, who lives with her sister and her uncle in a shuttered house six years after the rest of the family died of arsenic in the sugar bowl, while the village watches.

P. D. James

British · Cover Her Face (1962), Innocent Blood (1980), A Taste for Death (1986)

James (1920–2014) was born in Oxford and worked in the civil service while writing her early novels; her first, Cover Her Face, introduced Adam Dalgliesh, a Scotland Yard detective who writes poetry. She became a Conservative life peer in 1991. She and Rendell, a Labour peer, were friends who never talked about their writing, because, Rendell said, they knew they might disagree violently.

Every book by P. D. James →

Minette Walters

British · The Ice House (1992), The Sculptress (1993), The Scold’s Bridle (1994)

Walters was born in Bishop’s Stortford in 1949. Her first three novels won the CWA John Creasey Award, the Edgar Award and the CWA Gold Dagger in turn, the first time a crime writer had won three major prizes with her first three books. The Sculptress follows a writer who visits a woman jailed for killing her mother and sister, and begins to doubt the confession. Her most recent novel is The Players (2025).

Natsuo Kirino

Japanese · Out (1997; English 2003), Grotesque (2003; English 2007)

Kirino was born in Kanazawa in 1951. Out follows women working the night shift at a boxed-lunch factory outside Tokyo; when one of them kills her husband, the others help dispose of the body. In Stephen Snyder’s translation it was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best novel in 2004. Some critics in Japan objected to a woman writing about women and violence at all.

Sarah Waters

Welsh · Fingersmith (2002), The Night Watch (2006), The Paying Guests (2014)

Waters was born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, in 1966. Fingersmith, set in 1860s London, follows a young thief placed as maid to an heiress as part of a plot to marry her for her money and have her committed to an asylum; it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Park Chan-wook adapted it as The Handmaiden (2016). The Paying Guests turns on a killing in a 1920s London house.

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Tana French

Irish-American · In the Woods (2007), The Likeness (2008), The Searcher (2020)

French was born in Vermont in 1973 and trained as an actor at Trinity College Dublin. Her six Dublin Murder Squad novels are each narrated by a different detective; In the Woods, about a detective who as a boy was the only one of three children to come back from a wood, won the Edgar Award for best first novel. Her Cal Hooper trilogy ended with The Keeper in 2026.

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Liz Nugent

Irish · Unravelling Oliver (2014), Lying in Wait (2016), Strange Sally Diamond (2023)

Nugent was born in Dublin in 1967 and worked as a stage manager before writing fiction. Unravelling Oliver opens with a respected author beating his wife into a coma and then works backwards to explain him; Lying in Wait begins with a judge’s wife admitting to a killing. Strange Sally Diamond won Crime Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards in 2023.