Oxford former prison seems the best place for a photoshoot with Ruth Rendall, one of the leading crime authors of all time.

Ruth Rendell was born in 1930, and here are a few details of her daily life.  Every day, she writes for four hours; every day, she eats exactly the same lunch. She writes every morning from about a quarter to nine to a quarter to one. The lunch never varies. "Bread and cheese and salad and fruit." She is, so she has said, "neurotic" about punctuality!!.

She often walks several miles a day. She thinks up her stories as she walks; exercise, she believes, frees the mind.

Each year she produces two novels, and it would seem that her life, "all writing and publicity," is as driven and relentless as her work.

She has won many awards including four Gold Daggers and three Edgar Allen Poe's. Her books have been translated into twenty-two languages and are also published to great acclaim in the United States.  She lives in London, where she is a Life Peer in the House of Lords. She also has an alter ego, Barbara Vine, whose books are equally as successful.