Thirteen Steps Down [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

Ruth Rendell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2004

Mix Cellini (which he pronounces with an 'S' rather than a 'C') is superstitious about the number 13. In the musty old house where he is the lodger, there are thirteen steps down to the landing below his rooms, which he keeps spick and span. His elderly landlady, Gwendolen Chawcer, was born in St Blaise House, and lives her life almost exclusively through her library of books, so cannot see the decay and neglect around her. The Notting Hill neighbourhood has changed radically over the last fifty years, and 10 Rillington Place, where the notorious John Christie committed a series of foul murders, has been torn down. Mix is obsessed with the life of Christie and his small library is composed entirely of books on the subject. He has also developed a passion for a beautiful model who lives nearby - a woman who would not look at him twice. Both landlady and lodger inhabit weird worlds of their own. But when reality intrudes into Mix's life, a long pent-up violence

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. British veteran Rendell (The Rottweiler) delivers the best novel she's written in years, featuring elderly Gwendolen Chawcer and her younger tenant-in-the-attic, "Mix" Cellini. The unlikely housemates share St. Blaise House, Chawcer's rotting London mansion, full of many generations of dead insects and past dreams of upper-middle-class glory. Both Chawcer and Cellini are looking for love in all the wrong places. Boozy, delusional Cellini—who earns his keep fixing fitness equipment and is a "fan" of real-life murderer Harold Christie—obsesses about supermodel Nerissa Nash. He'll do anything to snag her attention and assume his "rightful" place as her husband. The Miss Havisham–like Chawcer pines for Dr. Stephen Reeves, whom she last saw when he attended her dying mother in 1953. Cellini spins out of control first, killing a clingy, "unworthy" date, then hiding her beneath the floorboards in his apartment. Rendell exhibits all her trademark virtues: vivid characters, a plot addictive as crack and a sense of place unequaled in crime fiction.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

The British crime novelist Ruth Rendell is the author of fifty-odd books in which things go horribly, intricately wrong. (Her creepiest, most disturbing novels are written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine.) In her latest, a fitness-machine repairman's dual fixations-on a famous Notting Hill serial killer, hanged half a century before, and on a young black model in thrall to a soothsayer-collide. The novel lacks the modifying, likable intelligence that Rendell's recurrent character, Chief Inspector Wexford, brings to other of her works, and the result is a wan puzzler painted in broad strokes. However, her portrait of the repairman's landlady-a Miss Havisham among her scruffy bits and bobs, who reads Darwin and seems to take a dim view of the evolution of man post-1900-has the zany, wry touch of a master.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Random House (July 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1856868672
• ISBN-13: 978-1856868679
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.9 x 4.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,441,758 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gruesome but compelling, November 23, 2004

By 

Beverley Strong (Australia) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Thirteen Steps Down (Hardcover)

Mix Cellini is a gym equipment repair man of limited intellect but with a vivid imagination which, at the present time, is focused on the murders of Reginald Christie, the incredibly evil man who killed and THEN raped a large number of women in London in the 1940's. Mix is obsessed with the way Christie killed the women and then buried them, either in graves in his garden or in the wall cavities in his home.
Mixs' other main obsession is a beautiful, black model who is the subject of his fantasies and whom he stalks on every possible occasion.
Mix occupies the attic flat in the huge, mouldering house owned by Gwendolen Chawser, an old, eccentric spinster who lives among dirt and decay, and whose escape from reality is in her collection of fine books which she reads incessantly. Mix meets and brings home with him, a young girl whom he kills after a minor argument. He then thinks of how Christie would dispose of the body and emulates his methods, his mind and imagination fuelling a fast track to a nervous breakdown. He decides to get rid of Gwendolen in the same way after she becomes suspicious of his connection with the young girl who is now listed as a missing person. It is his plan to kill Gwendolen which proves to be his downfall.
I thoroughly enjoyed this latest Ruth Rendell novel and would recommend it to all of her fans.

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rendell at her very best, May 12, 2005

By 

CEB (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Thirteen Steps Down (Hardcover)

Mix Chellini is the star of this latest novel by Ruth Rendell. An exercise equipment repairman whose IQ rivals his shoe size, Mix has two great passions in his life--an obsession with past serial killer, Reggie Christie, and an overwhelming fascination with beautiful model Nerissa Nash. Mix has all of the books ever written about Christie and takes great pleasure in exploring the area in which the serial killer lived. He haunts the places Nerissa frequents and spins fantasies about her continually.

Mix rents rooms on the top floor of an ancient home owned by Gwendolyn Chawser and has spent a great deal of his money, making the rooms liveable. To characterize Miss Chawser as eccentric is a gross understatement, and she and Mix are like oil and water. Each lives in a bizarre world of his/her own creation.

As is often the case with Ms Rendell's non-Inspector Wexford books, Thirteen Steps Down is not a mystery. Instead, it is a psychological thriller of the highest order, and the intricately woven plot and wonderful, in-depth character studies make this one of Rendell's finest efforts.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 13 Steps to 10 Rillington Place, February 28, 2006

By 

E. Hanson (Baltimore, Maryland United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 13 Steps Down (Hardcover)

The rate at which Ruth Rendell turns out material is a mystery in and of itself. Maybe she never bothers to sleep. Maybe she has a squad of highly creative, shrewd and literate elves in the cellar. Maybe she types with one hand and eats with the other. Whatever the explanation, neither time nor output seems to dilute her prowess or diminish her invention. No wonder she needs a second name (it is Barbara Vine).

Thirteen Steps Down, like its predecessor The Rottweiler, has a sizeable and varied cast of characters who intersect at a primary location: in this case, the dilapidated Victorian mansion of aging and testy Gwendolyn Chawcer. She rents out a room to Mix, a sociopath whose obsessions are divided between serial killer Reg Christie and a rather vacuous, naive supermodel. What landlady and tenet have in common, cobwebs and crumbling roof aside, is mutual contempt, a skewed impression of
reality and a self-satisfied conviction to the contrary. As Mix researches his hero and pursues means of winning the lovely and celebrated hand of Nerissa Nash, Gwendolyn becomes fixated on
establishing contact with a man last seen some fifty years before, whom she regards as having been her suitor. Neither has the slightest inkling that perception may well fail to align with fact, and produce catastrophe when acted on.

Events weave the past in with the present as characters criss-cross each others' paths, sometimes coming face to face, sometimes missing each other - and the dire implications - only by minutes. Gradually, as Gwendolyn subsides into tattered, dust-covered caprice and Mix gives way to homicidal temper, the threads come together to reveal the inevitable whole. The warp and weft of tension is maintained throughout, dotted with coincidence, incision and sardonic humor.

Even secondary characters achieve vitality, sometimes displaying a delightful refusal to yield to type. Cultures and classes teem the streets of Notting Hill: a grandiloquent neighbor with the deportment of a soldier and a penchant for fairy lights; a caftaned psychic whose advice is not quite as off-mark as she thinks; her timid receptionist, rendered gullible by loneliness; Gwendolyn's loyal but barely-tolerated pair of friends, whose family ties are crucial to the plot's weave. All contribute to the novel's ambiance and vigor. Last, but not least, is the house itself: as much of an anachronism as
the woman who inhabits it and, like her, a little sinister, a little ludicrous, entirely unapologetic but yielding, inevitably, to time and neglect.

This is a psychological study, not a mystery. After all, while murder is done, we know who done it; what is unclear is whether it will be noticed at all, or solved it if is. What keeps one turning pages well past bedtime is the presence of characters whose motives and triggers remain believable long after they themselves have crossed the line that divides "quirky" from "delusional". Mix Cellini is a madman, but his hunger for acclaim and inability to empathize is absolutely plausible. Gwendolyn Chawcer is a haughty, condescending snob, but also self-reliant, witty and curiously compelling. Both make us flinch, both engender sympathy. Neither is presented with a shred of sentimentality: they are their own respective (and corollary) disasters -- at once victims and products of social class, upbringing and experience.
The pleasure of Rendell's work is in the telling: adroit, witty, intelligent writing that neither cheats nor condescends. She understands the wheels and cogs that drive nominal mundanity, and through understated exploration reveals that little is ever what it seems: everyone has secrets. Some are poisonous. Some are simply fatuous, delusional or sad. But all are recognizably human, and each, even the well-intentioned ones, have consequences.
Whether signing in as Ruth Rendell or Barbara Vine, she is a master craftsman, and Thirteen Steps Down does not disappoint.