It’s easy to recognize Ruth Rendell’s writing. The prose is elegant, and it’s restrained, with strong emotions held in check. When violence occurs, it happens in an almost incidental way, without fanfare. The violence emerges from a well-defined character, and seems totally natural. The fact that she’s a British writer completes the description.

I just finished my fifth Rendell book, “The Lake of Darkness.” Martin Urban wins a large chunk of money and decides to give half of it away to selected people in need–a task which is more difficult than it would seem. Along the way, he strikes up a romance with a young woman named Francesca, who is quite a bit of a mystery.

Occasionally, the narrative switches to Finn, a strange guy caring for his demented mother. Finn is also a killer. The Finn and Urban storylines, obviously, eventually intersect.

The book moves along slowly, yet purposefully. Rendell develops her characters well, and you begin guessing where things are headed. I wasn’t surprised by the ending, but I wasn’t sure just where it would end up.

I prefer lots of action and less description. And yet, Rendell is such a doggone good writer that I’m perfectly willing to plod along with her.

“The Long Goodbye” is among my favorite Raymond Chandler books. The 9-volume Philip Marlowe series begins in 1939 with “The Big Sleep,” and ends with 1958’s “Playback.” I’ve been reading the books in order, which means I have only “Playback” to go. Then I’m done, because Chandler died in 1959.

The book begins with Marlowe’s accidental friendship with Terry Lennox. When Lennox’s rich wife is killed, and everything points to Lennox as the killer, Marlowe helps Lennox flee to Mexico. There, Lennox apparently commits suicide. And the book moves on.

Marlowe gets involved with a self-destructive, alcoholic writer and his wife. This relationship consumes most of the book. Eventually, their story intersects with that of Terry Lennox. Then several varieties of nastiness commence.

The book moves along rather slowly, but not in a bad way. Chandler masterfully creates the smoky pulp noir mood; you can see steam arising from the LA streets at night. I found myself basking in the atmospherics, which is unusual for me.

And yet, this was a different Marlowe. The Marlowe of the previous books–snarky, smart-mouth–is gone. In his place is a more caustic, rude, humorless fellow who bears little resemblance to Bogart.

And gone are the Chandlerisms that make his books so delightful–the sentences, metaphors, and descriptives that stop you in your tracks every few pages. You must, MUST stop to re-read and admire the wordsmithing.

The only real flash of that Chandler came on page 82 with this line: “He was a guy who talked in commas, like a heavy novel.” His earlier books are filled with such things. From “The High Window,” for instance:

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

He looked as if he had been sitting there since the Civil War and had come out of that badly.

Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer….people who look like nothing in particular and know it.

We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used car salesmen.

She had eyes like strange sins.

A rather heavy perfume struggled with the smell of death, and lost.

There are websites devoted to Chandlerisms (like this one). But “The Long Goodbye” contributes next to nothing. It’s just way too serious.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s an elegantly-written book, with everything you could ask of a novel. But the renowned Marlowe wit is missing, and I don’t know why.

“Run for Your Life” is the second installment in the Michael Bennett series, which James Patterson launched in 2007. Michael Ledwidge, one of the many writers under the James Patterson brand,  wrote “Step on a Crack” in 2007, getting the series off to a thrilling start. But “Run for Your Life,” which arrived in paperback this spring, fell flat.

Michael Bennett is an NYPD homicide detective with ten adopted kids. Yes, that’s an unusual premise. After adopting all those kids, who represent several different races, Bennett’s wife died. So he’s left to raise them on his own, with some help.

In “Run for Your Life,” Bennett goes after a serial killer who calls himself the Teacher. The targets are rich, pretentious people. I didn’t find him to be a particularly interesting villain, and the killings didn’t strike me as realistic in a place like New York City.

Of course, we can’t ignore those ten kids. Flu was running rampant through the Bennett household, so every few chapters we would check back into the disease zone, seeing who was getting sick, who was getting better, etc., etc. It was very boring. I found myself skipping over those chapters. The flu drama just didn’t interest me.

Then Ledwidge resorted to exactly the gimmick I feared: the family in peril. The Teacher comes after the Bennett kids.

Bennett, of course, gets his man, the family is safe, yada yada. But the book was a chore to get through, which is something I’ll rarely say about a James Patterson book.

I’m not sure what Patterson/Ledwidge can do in the future with all those kids. In a mystery/thriller, they just get in the way. But they are central to Michael Bennett’s life, so they must be included…somehow.

“The Long Walk” is the first-person story of Slavomir Rawicz, a Pole who is imprisoned in Siberia by the Russians, escapes, and treks thousands of miles through some of the harshest conditions on earth. It’s an amazing story of survival. The book was published in 1956, and has since been published in a couple dozen languages.

The story begins in 1939, when Rawicz is arrested by the Russians, who suspect him of being a spy. As an officer in the Polish army, he had already been wounded in combat against the invading Germans. His only crime against Russia was living too close to the border.

The “long walk” doesn’t actually begin until page 93, and those 93 pages may be the most gripping part of the book.

• For months on end, Rawicz is brutally interrogated and tortured in Russian prisons.
• He is finally sentenced to prison in Siberia after a show-trial at the Lubyanka prison.
• For weeks, he travels to Siberia squeezed into a railroad car with hundreds of other prisoners. Many die as they travel deep into Siberia.
• Near Lake Baikal, around 4000 prisoners are handcuffed to long chains dragged behind trucks, and they spend weeks marching to the remote camp. Many more die.
• The living conditions in the camp, the work details–we see the worst of the Soviet system.
• We come to understand the desolation of Siberia, and why it should be feared.

Rawicz spearheads an escape, meticulously planned, with six other prisoners joining him–including an American who had come to Moscow to help build the subway system and been accused of spying. Most of the prisoners, in one way or another, had been convicted of spying by the paranoid Stalinist regime.

Camp 303 is located near Yakutsk, deep in Siberia. They decide that the safest way to freedom–though not the shortest–is to head south to British-controlled India. The trip takes a year, starting in March 1941. And they cover it all on foot, usually with little food or water, yet ever pushing onward.

About half the distance merely gets them out of Siberia. Along the way, they come across a Polish young woman who had recently escaped from a labor camp. She joins their party.

Eight people enter Mongolia, but only four make it to India. In Mongolia, they cross the dreaded Gobi Desert. They enter into China, then cross the Himalayas through Tibet during the dead of winter. Finally, they encounter some British soldiers–and freedom, at last–in India.

Rawicz tells the story with the eye of a travel reporter. Some of the most interested passages  involve the hospitality of villagers and shepherds in Mongolia, China, and Tibet. They never encounter persons who would do them harm, only persons who take them in, give them shelter, feed them, and stock them with provisions for the next part of their journey.

This “story of survival” resembles, to an extent, “Endurance,” the story of the ill-fated 1914 Ernest Shackleton expedition which spent a year stranded in Antarctica. In that book, which I read several years ago, nothing particularly dramatic happened. Yet it was a riveting story of perseverance, of the human spirit refusing to give up.

Andrew Vachss writes roman noir, in which the protagonists are criminals. Think of movies like “Bonnie & Clyde,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Last Man Standing,” and “Payback.” Or the books of Jim Thompson.

“Shella” is told in first-person by a young contract killer. We never learn his name. He kills with his hands, never with firearms. After serving several years in prison, he emerges in search of his sometime-prostitute girlfriend, whom he calls Shella. The search takes him across the midwest, to bars and pool halls and dance clubs, and into the arms of a white supremacist group bent on inciting a race war. There are no good citizens, nobody with socially redeeming qualities. It’s a dark book, told by a sociopath. Yet I liked it.

“The Getaway Man” is also told in first-person, this time by Eddie, a simple-minded young man who knows cars, and knows driving. The books tells his story, from teenagerism on. He teams up with various robbers, and does stints in prison. Finally, in prison, he catches the attention of J.C., who plans out heists meticulously. A good share of the book involves planning for one last major theft of an armored car. A very good surprise ending, which you don’t grasp until the last four words.

“The Getaway Man” isn’t nearly as dark as “Shella,” and Eddie is a more fully-drawn and interesting character. He is, in many ways, a very innocent, naive fellow. The protagonist in “Shella” is similar in ways, seemingly a bit dim-witted, but also an unfeeling killer (like Dexter, in Jeff Lindsay’s books). I liked “The Getaway Man” better.

Finally, “Hard Candy,” the 4th of the 18 Burke novels by Vachss. These novels are set in New York City, I believe, and they’ve got a very distinct feel. Burke and his fascinating assortment of friends live on the criminal side of the Citizen/Criminal line, but are mostly just trying to get by. Someone described these novels as “urban survival.” Roman noir stuff all the way. 

I’m interested in the Burke novels, and not. He writes in a somewhat cryptic way, so that sometimes you’re not sure what has just happened. The characters tend to be very sexually charged, though his writing isn’t sexually graphic; however, I could do without that. This 4th novel continually referred to events in the first three books, which I haven’t read. So if I’m going to read this series, I need to start at The Beginning. But I’m not sure if I want to start. But don’t get me wrong–these are interesting, unique books. I’ve not seen anything like Burke.