A pic you won't believe; Ruth Rendell

TCM writer piece on Movie Morlock's week long look at Racism in Hwood movies from the beginning: "I’m fond of Joan Crawford and I recently watched her 1954 performance in TORCH SONG for the first time and was shocked to see Crawford sporting blackface for a musical number.

TCM blogger: Posted By morlockjeff : July 29, 2011 10:52 am
"TORCH SONG should come with a warning: Danger, Joan Crawford ahead! Her most ferocious, ball-busting, scene-chewing performance with plenty to offend everyone – blind people, pianists, theatre directors, African-Americans, and just about everybody else on the planet. Proceed at your own risk!"

-------------------------------------------RUTH RENDELL


From the UK Telegraph

Ruth Rendell: Interview

Ruth Rendell’s Wexford is now an OAP but, at 81, the author’s own life is far from quiet retirement, finds Jake Kerridge.

By Jake Kerridge3:11PM BST 01 Aug 20111 Comment

Ruth Rendell ushers me into her house in London’s Little Venice, astonishingly spry and trim at 81. Recently, she wrote proudly that she goes up and down the 58 stairs in her house four or five times every day, and I wonder if this may be because this connoisseur of the hidden darkness in ordinary lives gets regular urges to spy on her neighbours. The people living on the houseboats on the surrounding canals seem horribly exposed.

And yet Rendell hardly has time to devote to gazing out of the window. She is not just two prolific novelists — Ruth Rendell and Barbara Vine — but since 1997 she has also been the Labour peer Baroness Rendell of Babergh, and today she is anxious to get back to the House of Lords to see whether her party is drumming up support from the cross-benchers for a vote on the Police Bill.

Her new novel, The Vault, finds her much-loved policeman hero Reg Wexford initially twiddling his thumbs in retirement – not something she is drawing on her own experience to describe.

Since she is now coping with the unfamiliar frustrations of being in opposition, might she follow the example of many of her fellow peers and become less assiduous about attendance? “No. I think it’s incumbent on me. And I imagine I always will.”

for the rest go here: