spoiler alert

I just finished reading one of my favourite authors - Ruth Rendell - murder mysteries are my thing and this was one of the early Inspector Wexford novels, 'The Veiled One'. I found it especially interesting because there were a few knitters in the story - okay, they were hand knitters but same difference, you know what I mean.... Now, the victim was garroted, but the murder weapon was nowhere to be found and they didn’t really know what it was.
So, the knitters - one created the most fascinating, colourful, exotic, original pieces and Wexford thought them inspired and beautiful. Another knitter was one who ‘obviously knitted to produce, without thought and care or pride of workmanship’. Describing the vest worn by the most obvious suspect at that point - ‘it was plainly hand-knitted, but not expertly, the hand of the imperfectly skilled evident in the neck border and the sewing up’. Another time she writes:
‘his pullover (same guy, subsequent police questioning) was of a darker grey shade with a cable pattern but errors had been made in the knitting of the cables. Burden found himself compulsively staring at one of these flaws up near the left shoulder where the knitter in twisting the cable had passed the rib over instead of under the work...’
When speaking of this knitter, Rendell pens ‘she did many things but none of them well...’
By the time Wexford realizes the murder weapon is ‘a circular knitting needle of some high-numbered gauge - that is with thicker pins at each end of the wire’, I’m torn - the slant is somewhat toward the artistic, skilled knitter but I don’t want it to be her! And then, the next chapter biases you to the crappy knitter; then, she turns up dead...I won’t spoil the rest of it for you, but I loved the knitting content!
I’ve never had a circular needle....just sayin’...