Hutchinson £17.99 pp336

This is the 20th appearance of Chief Inspector Reg Wexford, who has been solving crime in Sussex with infallible success, but no sign of either promotion or retirement, since his first recorded case in 1964. Wexford was never young. For as long as I can remember, he has looked like an elephant, heavy and lumbering with big ears and baggy wrinkled skin. “From head to foot he was grey — grey sparse hair, old grey raincoat, shoes that were always a little dusty. His face was deeply lined and . . . grey . . . A pair of grey eyes was the only brilliant sharp thing about him.”

That was in 1971 (from No More Dying Then), when Wexford was already a grandfather with dangerously high blood pressure. End in Tears shows him still struggling gamely to take exercise and control his diet, rationing his trips to the local greasy spoon and denying himself cashew nuts in pubs by sitting on his hands. “You’ll have to bring them out unless you’re going to lap your drink,” says his lean and handsome sidekick, Inspector Mike Burden.

Time has begun to tell on Burden, too. He remains as prim and buttoned-up as he was to start with, surprisingly shockable for a police officer, eternally baffled by his boss’s Eng Lit quotes, still barking as energetically as ever up all the wrong trees. But he has put away the snappy suits and ties he used to fancy in favour of open-necked shirts, suede jackets and jeans that are, as Wexford notes with sardonic satisfaction, too young for him. Burden (who was “not yet 40 ” in 1971) must have reached his mid-seventies by now. Wexford must be 93.

No wonder this old-world couple comes in for constant teasing from the increasingly edgy and competitive junior personnel of Kingsmarkham police station. In a town with a flourishing drugs trade and a black population that has quadrupled in the past decade, Wexford looks back to an era when ethnic minorities were unknown and heroin meant a girl in a romantic novel. If he gets blank looks from the crime team when he quotes Macbeth, they in turn have problems with a chief who can’t find his way around online and apparently never touches a mobile phone.

Ruth Rendell’s admirers will be familiar with the creeping sense of unreality that undercuts her Wexford novels whenever they rely, as this one does, too heavily on the standard fictional formula of an intricately contrived plot in a sleepy rural setting twisting compulsively via strange coincidences, copious red herrings and the odd lucky break to a more or less preposterous conclusion. The trouble is that this kind of fantasy provides inadequate stimulus for a powerful fictional imagination that feeds and grows on contemporary actuality.

Even with its new bypass, its rundown housing estates and out-of-town shopping precincts, the imaginary topography of Kingsmarkham has never generated anything quite like the acute sense of place, or the phenomenally accurate monitoring of social change in Britain, provided over the past 40 years by Rendell’s other fiction. Emotionally and psychologically speaking, the Wexford series works best when the crime to be solved finds an echo at some level in corrosive feeling surfacing beneath the otherwise placid home life of one or other detective.

Wexford’s painfully ambivalent response to his tough, bossy, resentful feminist daugher Sylvia memorably reinforced Rendell’s account of paedophilia and domestic violence in Harm Done. Much the same was true of the two remarkable novels, published 14 years apart, in which child abduction and serial murder respectively provide an uneasy counterpoint to the disintegration of Burden’s personality after the death of his first wife in No More Dying Then, and the slow, grim, apparently irretrievable collapse of his second marriage in An Unkindness of Ravens.

End in Tears settles instead for a relatively conventional mystery featuring drugs, surrogate motherhood and illicit baby-smuggling, marginally enlivened by the arrival of an unexpected Wexford grandchild conceived for ideological reasons with her discarded ex-husband by the formidable Sylvia (currently by my reckoning not far short of 60). Fans will be relieved to hear that Wexford’s masterly unravelling in the last chapter triumphantly confounds the local rag’s pettyminded campaign to hound him out of the force on the grounds that he has been in the job for far too long.

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