You can keep your Cumberbatch and Rathbone. Of the 75-odd actors who have played Sherlock Holmes on screen, Jeremy Brett is the man.

The distinguished crime writer Ruth Rendell was so frightened after she read it she had to keep her bedside lamp on all night.

Clive James is inspired by Sherlock and Endeavour to reflect on the great traditions of the British TV detective drama

'It looks as if the NHS will gradually fade away' says crime writer and Labour peer Ruth Rendell.

I was going to go off on one about how Ruth Rendell is FLAWLESS but then I remembered that she has got a flaw, which just comes of her age: she can’t incorporate the Internet convincingly into her recent stories. She is just not used to a world in which characters could find out information about each other, or about any topic they can think of, through Google, so they go ages not knowing things that real people nowadays would have found out within minutes.

The attacks in Oslo and Utøya have changed Norway for ever and it will never again be the innocent, trusting place it once was, says novelist Jo Nesbø.

P D James has just collected an award, aged 90, but ageism is still all too common in the literary world, says Arifa Akbar.

No law prevents criminals from publishing their memoirs but there are restrictions on profiting from them, as enacted by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. This enables courts to recover any assets that a criminal has acquired as a result of writing about their crimes. That money then goes into something called the Consolidated Fund. Those still serving a sentence can be prevented from publishing while in custody, as happened to serial killer Dennis Nilsen, whose autobiographical manuscript was confiscated. During the debate on the bill Baroness Rendell of Babergh (aka Ruth Rendell) pointed out that Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal might have fallen foul of such a law. In fact, great train robber Bruce Reynolds called his own memoir Autobiography of a Thief as a homage to Genet, whom he admired.

"I thought I should retire him but not leave him out of the series all together," says Ms. Rendell, 81. "He's very aware that he's no longer what he was."

Back in the 1970s, I was a trainee hack down in Devon and an avid consumer of crime fiction. I can still remember the jolt of reading Detective Inspector Reg Wexford’s beginnings in From Doon With Death (published in 1964) and being bowled over.

Labour peer Ruth Rendell, creator of Inspector Wexford, an unusually genial figure for a detective, is estimated at £30m plus and is ranked seventh, followed by Ian Rankin, creator of the more typically glum Rebus, at £25m. Colin Dexter, creator of Inspector Morse, just missed the top 10, with a fortune estimated at £20m.

And then we have writers such as Ruth Rendell, who also featured. Rendell not only understands plot but she’s a genre writer who writes extremely well. Why shouldn’t critics and academics rate her? They do, because they recognise a thrillingly good writer when they read one.

BBC2's Faulks on Fiction (all episodes are available on iPlayer) may have taken a fairly traditional approach in terms of the show's structure and use of talking heads, but it also allowed us to hear fictional characters – and not just the obvious British literary icons – discussed at unusual length. Ruth Rendell got rather defensive of Zoë Heller's Barbara Covett, despite the latter's permanent air of frosty disapproval.

BERNHARD Schlink is the author of The Reader, a haunting parable of German guilt about the Holocaust that is also a convincing portrait of the coming together of a teenage boy and a mature woman.

Simon Brett says that in the golden age of mysteries, Hercule Poirot would get them all in the library and point at one person and say ‘For zees reazons you deed it…’ and they’d go off and be hanged. But now, without the death penalty, the ramifications of crime and punishment are gone into far more.

"I think Ruth is brilliant at writing about people with disturbed psychological or mental states – but rather than seeing them as freaks, she takes for granted that they’re absolutely normal. That’s just how she sees the world".

David Jason and Martin Clunes are among those cast too often in dramas by 'gutless' television executives.

The Avengers writer created some of TV's most enduring shows. His secret? 'There's no mystery: arse to chair, pen to paper'

Ruth Rendell knows so many ways to tell a story you might count her as three or four writers. Her Inspector Wexford stories are probably her most popular works, especially after a long-running television series based on them.

Ruth Rendell has criticised the graphic portrayal of violence on television. She has said, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph that she believes that some scenes are too explicit. Do you agree?

Campaigners against screen violence have won a surprising ally. Ruth Rendell, the best-selling crime novelist, has accused broadcasters of corrupting young people.

The author PD James has criticised the BBC for treating its audience as though it has the attention span of a child.

"I will go to Ruth Rendell’s home, because she and PD James are having a cross-party baroness night, which shows true open-mindedness..."

Acclaimed screenwriter Guy Hibbert has called on his industry counterparts to create more roles for women in television dramas, urging them to “argue the case” for more female protagonists with broadcasters and commissioning executives.

Producers are harnessing new distribution methods and making more thought-provoking television as TV supplants Hollywood as the home of moving picture excellence, experts say.

Diane Keen has called for her long-running BBC drama Doctors to be given a prime time slot.

Murder mysteries, once looked down on, are now fit for the literary elite

On 5 February the contaminated blood (support for infected and bereaved persons) bill is due for a second reading debate in the House of Commons.

I am writing to express my thanks to Ruth Rendell for her support of the contaminated blood (support for infected and bereaved persons) bill (Letters, 30 January). The bill was instituted by Lord Morris of Manchester and has passed rapidly through the House of Lords, unchallenged and widely supported.

Googling isn't always a detective's best strategy, says Mark Lawson...

Girls are still at risk this Christmas as 'cutters' are flown in from abroad to perform the illegal procedure here.

Misleading article. Much better to listen to the recording of the event embedded on the page.

In The Moonstone, Collins invents a number of characters, situations and strategies that would shape thousands of detective novels to come. He brought us the professional bumbling policeman who is forced to give way to the detective of superior genius; the gifted amateur sleuth and his less perceptive sidekick; the party at an isolated country house which becomes the scene of an inexplicable crime; the beautiful but perverse heroine; the battle between rationality and superstition; and the notion of fair play for the reader in the presentation of clues. It's true that a reader schooled by nearly 150 years of subsequent detective fiction won't have much trouble sorting out whodunit, but how they did it is quite ingenious, more than worthy of any later master of the genre.

Leon y Rendell, entre la ensalada y la pasta, desgranan sus especulaciones sobre cómo matar a alguien: «el garrote, el veneno, la dificultad de elegir un arma u otra...».

That ITV1's ratings are in decline is no great surprise - since this is the inevitable upshot of digital fragmentation. But one of the most worrying aspects of its current performance is the lack of upmarket viewers it attracts.

Ruth Rendell, who is a good friend of mine, is not gay, but she has supported Stonewall from the start – just as she voted in the Lords for the repeal of Section 28, and for gay partnerships.

Was Agatha Christie so conservative?

Stephen Fry has criticised the handling of television writers during filming of their scripts, claiming they are “treated like dirt” and excluded from a large part of the production process.

Jack the Ripper was a forgery invented by journalists to link a series of unrelated murders and sell newspapers, according to a new book.

AJ Raffles was the ultimate gentleman thief: elegant, loyal, morally suspect. It's time EW Hornung's great crime creation emerged from the shadow of Sherlock Holmes.

The man who, unwittingly, set me off on the track of writing a book about the Dambusters was the actor George Baker, whose birthday is today. In an interview on the BBC Radio Today programme in December 2005 he told the story of how he had been cast to play the part of my uncle, David Maltby, in the 1955 film The Dam Busters.

"I showed author Ruth Rendell the drafts and she was very helpful,” says Desai. Crime writer Rendell asked him to write more and develop the plot further. “‘Show more interest in your characters, Meghnad,’ she’d say. ‘Tell me what they wear, what they eat.’

Ruth Rendell: "I always feel a thrill and a surge of hope when I hear of a new library being built, something which doesn't happen very often. Libraries have always been places of refuge and peace to me, havens where I feel at home..."

They're not on Her Majesty's payroll, yet somehow they constantly find themselves banging up badduns. Have-a-go heroes or interfering know-it-alls, we're not sure, but we do know one thing: Britain would be overrun with cunning killers without them.

David Peace's fiction should be interpreted as the product of a writer's mind, not of an age.

Ruth Rendell, the award-winning crime writer, has made two abortive attempts to write a memoir. "I have given up both times because it was so hopeless. It was too painful really and I just thought: why should I put myself through that?" she admits. Revisiting difficult experiences on the page is not something she believes in.

Leading television writer Guy Hibbert, whose credits include Omagh and the BBC’s forthcoming political drama Sweet Delta, has criticised commissioners for having too much control over productions.

The characters are cardboard, the plots rely on chance and the settings are implausible. But no one can resist an Agatha Christie, says Barry Forshaw/

She tells a great story, but her fictional world has become period drama in bad modern dress.

Sean O'Brien on the ups and downs of thriller writers.

Raymond Chandler: literary genius is all about hard work. How do you create a masterpiece? With a lot of graft and heartache, according to the crime fiction master

"My favourite author is probably Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, and I think she writes about warped minds in a way that makes them feel normal."

Jon Henley comes face to face with himself while reading Ruth Rendell's latest thriller.

The plotlines are bleak, the locations are forbidding and the main characters are usually angst-ridden alcoholics. So why is Scandinavian crime writing suddenly the hottest genre in town?

George Baker invests Wexford with the manners of an old-fashioned country solicitor and the physique of the blacksmith under the spreading chestnut tree. Were anyone to get around to doing a screen biography of Stanley Baldwin, the quintessential Tory prime minister who handled the Abdication Crisis, then George is your man. He's Captain Mainwaring of Dad's Army without the pomposity or his capacity for losing his dignity.

Lynda La Plante is one of the greats of British television, right? So how come Above Suspicion is just the latest in the long line of tosh she's churned out?

The loss of one of Charing Cross Road's best bookshops is as much down to customer neglect as the economic climate.

The Hampstead novel was once shorthand for a certain type of literary fiction, but does anyone write about London NW3 any more? Where do authors locate their stories now? We discover how Britain's literary landscape is changing.

The seven spies fighting the war on terror in London include: Ben, the token black bloke given hardly any dialogue, and Malcolm, who has more technology than the Starship Enterprise. Then there's Ros, a blonde, bloodless skull in a trenchcoat and white blouse. Starchy, crisp, sexless - not to mention the shirt.

...there are similarly cuddly pictures of PG Wodehouse, Barbara Pym, Robert Graves, Ruth Rendell, Margaret Atwood (with "Fluffy") and on and on and on.

Hats off to crime writer Baroness (Ruth) Rendell who has weaved the plot of her latest Barbara Vine mystery around kinky sex without having to carry out any field research.

Muriel Spark, perhaps the finest novelist publishing these past 40 years, never won. Nor have any of our best genre novelists John le Carré, PD James, Ruth Rendell, Robert Harris, say ever been considered, most unfairly when you look at the literary quality of some prize Booker specimens.