Ruth Rendell is an English crime writer and author of psychological thrillers and murder mysteries who also writes under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. Her latest novel is No Man's Nightingale.

After starring in 23 books, Inspector Reginald Wexford is still solving crime in your latest, No Man's Nightingale, when he might be enjoying his recent retirement. At 83, you are doing much the same thing. Does Wexford still reflect your perspectives on life?

He sort of is me, although not entirely. Wexford holds my views pretty well on most things, so I find putting him on the page fairly easy. Like me, he sees things changing, like people not writing letters any more. I used to get an awful lot of letters and they have almost all gone. I used to answer nearly all of them. But I do love emails and texts, so I am not like Wexford in all respects.

I try to give him a fully-rounded character. It is important to me he is not a violent man. I get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books.

Since you identify with Wexford, you seem to have two routes for getting across your sympathies: through the narrative voice and through the detective. You have placed an embattled Asian female vicar at the centre of this book and then you let Wexford defend her position.

I probably do use both, although maybe I shouldn't. I call these books "the political Wexfords" because they are about subjects I care about. It started with Simisola really, which was about racist behaviour. Then I tackled the environment, and then domestic violence in Harm Done. Wexford is a Liberal Democrat though, and I am a Labour party member, in fact a Labour peer, so I am further to the left than him. Having said that, my books are not political really, even though I call them that. I don't choose my villains and heroes for political reasons. I have found that if I stop to write down a plan for the story, it all goes away. So I just write it as it comes and then go over it with great care.

There is some discussion about aliases and how to invent them in this book. They are a common feature of detective fiction, and of your own life too.

I am interested in names and what they say, it is true. I like to look at the columns of baby names in the newspapers. But I don't run out of new ones for my characters. And it is much easier now to find names for people from distant countries. You can just go on to the internet and get a list of Thai names, or Paraguayan names, or whatever it is. For Barbara Vine, my other writing name, I took my middle name and a family surname.

The murder in an English vicarage that opens this book is an echo of one of Agatha Christie's most famous stories. You also refer to the plotting of classic Victorian novels a couple of times in the story. Are these literary resonances intended?

Maybe The Murder at the Vicarage was in the back of my mind, you never know. I did read a lot of Christie a very long time ago. I don't read much crime fiction now. I mention Wilkie Collins in this book because a beautiful young girl's fate is to be decided in a letter. I read a lot of Victorian novels, so I suppose the comparison, especially with their neat endings, is often there. Collins was damaged as a writer by taking all that laudanum, but The Woman in White is a very good novel.

What do you think still draws readers to the crime genre in such numbers? Is it the licence to ask questions about other people? The characters in Grasshopper, a Barbara Vine title from 2000, actually look into other people's houses from the rooftops to discover their secrets. Is this the appeal for you in essence?

I don't know whether that is what I am doing. I just want to tell a good story so I always ask myself, are these people real to me? The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better. There are schools of thought that dispense with all that now, but I think if there are strong characters, people want to know more.

I have talked before about the withholding of information from the reader in a great book like Jane Austen's Emma and I do think it should be part of any story, if it is told well, whether or not it is detective fiction. The reader has got to be thinking, what does it mean? Why did they do that?