The sometimes lazy division in crime fiction between “hard-boiled” and “cosy” is often done along gender lines, but the days when women provided comfortable Home Counties mysteries (while men took care of much darker stuff) are long gone.

Nowadays, women crime-writers are perfectly ready — eager even — to take a header into the abyss. Ruth Rendell, one of two women universally acknowledged as a Queen of British Crime (the other is her fellow peer P. D. James), was never a comfortable writer — despite outward trappings of the “cosy”. More than almost any other writer in this country (and certainly more than James), Rendell (born in 1930) has always delighted in probing the darkest reaches of the human psyche: hers is a world in which all the comforting values that shore up our existence can be cruelly snatched away, particularly if we commit a criminal act.

Rendell’s books imply that we are all capable of such transgressions. Reading her is like watching one of Alfred Hitchcock’s better movies, in which we are drawn into the lives of people whose world is coming apart because of one ill-considered action. Rendell’s jaundiced (but bracing) view of human nature is matched only by the late, great Patricia Highsmith.

Rendell’s approach is always radical — not least in her refusal to be tied down to one genre. She is perhaps best known for her Chief Inspector Wexford novels, set in the fictional Kingsmarkham (which generated a long-running television series). These are the nearest she has come to the cosy field, but are actually nothing of the sort, despite the familiar apparatus of the police procedural in a picturesque setting. Rendell has always been ready to tackle social strife, and the universe that her hero inhabits is a far queasier place than the untroubling settings of Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple.

Wexford’s world is, largely speaking, the real world, and those who have not read Rendell should not be put off by the surface gloss, however far Kingsmarkham is from the gritty council estates of Ian Rankin and co.

But there is a considerable body of opinion that believes Rendell’s best work is in her novels in which there is no detective protagonist, and the reader can experience (in measured prose) the destruction wrought by evil and criminality. It is in these that Rendell is most ready to take the reader on a vertiginous ride.

And even better was to come: in 1986, the author created another persona for her writing. As Barbara Vine, her books were to confront even more directly dark psychological issues. A Dark Adapted Eye was a portrait of a bitter conflict between sisters, in which issues of responsibility were far more murkily uncertain than in most crime fiction.

In her Barbara Vine books, Rendell began to build up a picture of British society that suggested how thin the veneer of civilisation was. The Vine novels showed the family as a potentially dangerous thing, hardly the support network that David Cameron would have us believe it is.

But Rendell was not done with Wexford (as her latest book, Not in the Flesh, demonstrates). Wexford’s liberal turn of mind is contrasted with that of his colleague Mike Burton, who is of a more conservative stamp (readers of both Rendell and James have enjoyed wondering just what is said in the private conversations between the left-leaning Rendell and the Conservative James). Politics are at the centre of the Wexford books. Admittedly, the notion of the restoration of order out of the chaos created by criminals is essentially a conservative one, but Rendell coolly ensures that the division of guilt is spread to include society on both Left and Right (An Unkindness of Ravens, one of her most celebrated books, cast a cold eye on radical feminism, while many of her books locate the source of corruption firmly within the Establishment).

Not in the Flesh is one of the most ingenious Wexford outings in some time. A man walking his dog in the woods encounters a grim find — a human hand. The body to which it belongs has been concealed for more than a decade. Shortly after, in the cellar of a rundown cottage, another corpse is discovered, and Wexford and his colleagues are up to their elbows in a very nasty mystery.

Rendell has a reputation for being forbidding, and certainly the steely gaze she trains on someone she is meeting for the first time suggests a woman who does not suffer fools gladly. But perhaps this absence of a readily welcoming manner is most appropriate in an author whose job is to strip bare — without reservation — all our baser motives.

Ruth Rendell, Wednesday 15, 11.30am, RBS Main Theatre is in conversation with fellow crime-writer Ian Rankin

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

Times Recommends

• The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
• Burning is too good for them
• Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate by Kenan Malik