Is This Wexford’s Last Case? : * Books: After 15 Reginald Wexford mysteries, writer Ruth Rendell may put an end to her fictional detective’s career. ‘I am bored with him,’ she says.

Ruth Barbara Grasemann spent much of her childhood terrified that people would catch on to the potential--and dreadful--nickname hidden in her first and middle names.

“I was afraid people would call me Rubarb,” she recalls. “I was a precocious infant. I saw it right away and shook with fear that somebody would catch on. Nobody ever did.”

As an author, those names have served her well.

Using her alliterative married name--Ruth Rendell--and a non de plume that combines her middle name with her grandmother’s maiden name--Barbara Vine--the stellar British novelist has authored 42 books under those names since her first was published in 1964.

The prolific Rendell rivals her friend, P. D. James, in popularity, and the two crime novelists are the most talked about here and in Europe as successors to the Grande Dame of Mystery, Agatha Christie.

And like Dame Agatha before her, who said she had tired of her famous sleuth, Hercule Poirot, Rendell hints at the unthinkable: She may give up her popular detective; her latest novel, “Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter,” may be the last featuring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford.

Say it ain’t so, Ruth.

An unprecedented four-time winner of the prestigious Crime Writers’ Gold Dagger award, Rendell has written 15 books and 12 short stories that feature Wexford.

“I’m afraid of writing the same book over again,” Rendell said recently during a lunch break from the American Booksellers Assn. convention in Anaheim. “If I get an idea and it’s very good, I’ll do another. But I’m not prepared to strain myself to find one. Maybe I’ll find it. I don’t know.

“I don’t mind coming back to him every four years. But yet, I am bored with him.”

Rendell ventured that her boredom with the clever, unflappable Wexford--characteristics the author most assuredly shares with her fictional character--stems from sensing his every move even before she writes it: “I know him so well, I don’t have to think about what Wexford says.”

“Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter” has received glowing international reviews. More than one has said it is her best.

The novel is set in the same English village of Kingsmarkham where Wexford usually practices his craft, a fictional place not unlike the wooded countryside of Suffolk where Rendell lives. The first killing, of a policeman, intertwines with the assassination of a family dominated by an unpleasant novelist matriarch. The lone survivor is the matriarch’s 17-year-old granddaughter.

“Gunner” is a first-rate novel with an inventive plot and subplots, skillful portraits of its characters and succinct social comments about greed. Its full title is a Royal Navy expression used when a sailor was lashed to the muzzle of a gun before he was flogged.

Rendell confessed she was unfamiliar with the phrase until she saw it in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and decided it would be a “most wonderful title.”

Rendell, 62, has not been content to stick with Detective Wexford. She writes three kinds of novels: the Wexford whodunits, the suspenseful Vines and the free-standing psychological thrillers that deal with obsessed, often psychotic characters.

“I try not to formalize my books,” she said. “I finished the latest Barbara Vine three weeks ago.” Her current Vine novel “King Solomon’s Carpet” is set in London’s Underground.

A master of unusual and inventive plots, Rendell projects herself into the mind of the killer about whom she is writing. A early example of this gift is the illiterate murderer Eunice Parchman in Rendell’s 1978 novel, “A Judgement in Stone.”

The opening paragraph reads: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.” Rendell spends the rest of the book threading through Parchman’s mind, convincing readers that Parchman is mentally deformed by illiteracy.

In “Live Flesh,” Rendell lives in the psyche of a sexual psychopath; in “Going Wrong,” she tells her tale from a murderer’s viewpoint.

“I imagine that I am that person,” Rendell said of these killers. “I don’t find it very difficult to understand why people do terrible things. I can imagine that horrible thing and then write it. It’s a matter of changing your consciousness of how people behave--people who have absolutely no concern for the feelings of others.

“Like your gangs. They have a big grudge against society, an unformed hatred of society. . . . Nobody ever does anything for a motive of evil. What they are doing they think is right. They think it is right to do this.”

Men, Rendell believes, are much more capable of violence than women because “aggression is built into men. It’s not really natural to us.”

Each of Rendell’s novels sells hundreds of thousands of copies and now are published in 21 languages. They have been serialized and aired constantly on British television; a series also has run here on the Arts & Entertainment channel.

“When you first begin (to sell books in other countries), you get terrible translators, especially for names,” she explained. “Now, I have very good translators, but it’s still hard to imagine Wexford in Japanese.”

Producers have asked her to write story lines for additional Wexford television episodes, but she has refused. And she’s “not likely” to accept a request to write a detective novel about “a 35-year-old feminist policewoman.”

Rendell gets volumes of fan letters. While some fans say they are in love with Wexford, others complain about the violence in her novels. In spite of the bloodletting, Rendell said, “my books aren’t really that violent. It’s just their own imaginations working. Bad language? Yes. You wouldn’t have a hardened criminal in prison talking like a Sunday school teacher.”

Rendell said she is most criticized by U.S. fans for the sex and foul language she includes: “Americans are far more puritanical than Europeans. . . . They write such things as ‘I used to read your books, but not anymore, because of the sex and the language and taking of God’s name in vain.’ ”

Although Rendell said she has often been congratulated by police for her accuracy in describing police procedures, she admitted she doesn’t do much research about the police and doesn’t have many forensics in her books:

“I make it up, or I ask people or read other people’s books. I don’t like the police. I never go near them. Only once in the past 20 years have I been near them, when I was stopped for speeding.”

Rendell became a crime novelist by accident. She submitted a novel to Hutchinson, an English publishing house, but it was rejected. They asked if she had any others and she sent in a detective story she had written.

Wexford was born.

She threw away the first novel. “I’ve started a lot I didn’t finish,” she said. “I’ve done some nonfiction that’s not published over here.”

Rendell will start another book--not a Wexford, she emphasized--when she returns to England in late June from an Alaskan cruise with her husband, Don, a former journalist and financial public relations specialist.

The cruise will be pure vacation, not a purposeful collecting of material for a new novel: “I just observe and get the feeling of a place,” she said.

“I find if you do it consciously it doesn’t work.”