Ruth Rendell, one of Britain's best-loved and most admired authors, who delighted fans for decades with her dark, intricately plotted crime novels, has died at the age of 85.
Rendell had been admitted to hospital after a serious stroke in January. Her publisher Hutchinson announced the death of the Inspector Wexford creator on Saturday.
"It is with great sadness that the family of author Ruth Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE, announce that she passed away in London at 8am on Saturday 2 May, aged 85. The family have requested privacy at this time," the statement said.
Rendell wrote more than 60 novels, including the psychological thrillers she wrote as Barbara Vine, with her debut, From Doon with Death, introducing the world to Wexford in 1964.
Rendell landed that first £75 publishing deal from Hutchinson after around a decade of life as a mother and housewife; she had been a journalist on the Chigwell Times, but resigned after it emerged that her report of a tennis club dinner had been written without attending the event, meaning she missed the death of the after-dinner speaker during his speech.
Her novels, from A Judgement in Stone, which opens with the line "Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read and write", to last year's The Girl Next Door, which sees the bones of two severed hands discovered in a box, cover topics from racism to domestic violence. They have, her friend Jeanette Winterson has said, been "a major force in lifting crime writing out of airport genre fiction and into both cutting-edge and mainstream literature".
Rendell told the Guardian two years ago: "Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages.
"I just wait until I've got a character and I think why would anybody do that, what is it in their background, what is it in their lives makes them do it? Usually these things are just accident or impulse, or because people are drunk or on something.
"The old detective story that's got a really complicated tortuous motive doesn't apply to mine. It's that people do these things almost by accident, or because of anger, their rage, their madness - and then probably regret it."
A winner of prizes including the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for "sustained excellence in crime writing", Rendell's books generated worldwide sales of about 20 million copies.
Rendell was also a Labour life peer, helping to pass a law preventing girls being sent abroad for female genital mutilation. She was regularly in the Lords, and recently completed another novel for her publisher, Hutchinson, telling the Guardian in 2013 that she had no plans to retire.
"I couldn't do that. It's what I do and I love doing it. It's absolutely essential to my life. I don't know what I would do if I didn't write," she said. "I'll do it until I die, won't I? If I can. You don't know, but probably."
Hutchinson, an imprint of Penguin Random House, said Rendell's final novel, Dark Corners, was scheduled for publication in October.
"We are devastated by the loss of one of our best-loved authors," the publisher said. "Ruth was very much part of our publishing family and a friend to many at Penguin Random House - we will miss her enormously. Our thoughts and prayers are with her family at this time."