The purpose of government was the guarding of property-rights, the perpetuation of ancient force and modern fraud. Or was it marriage? Marriage and prostitution were two sides of one shield, the predatory man’s exploitation of the sex-pleasure.

Stay on the sidewalk.

Let the Cream get firmly in her nut the idea that Sir Roderick Glossop was not the butler, the whole butler and nothing but the butler, and disaster, as I saw it, loomed.

So it is not surprising that the old boy finds himself in codgerly company these days. Ms. Rendell has ghoulish fun with the assorted elderly, eccentric characters who bedevil him in “Not in the Flesh,” which is only the third of her Wexford books to appear in this present century.