Ruth Rendell.

I was not afraid of the house, at least not then. I was too sore for that. All my misery and fear derived from humanagency, not the supernatural. If I thought of the `bad room' at all, it was with that recklessness, that fatalism, which comes with certain kinds of unhappiness: things are so bad that anything which happens will be a relief - disaster, loss death. So I climbed that stairs and explored the house, looking into all the rooms, without trepidation and without much interest.

This is an excerpt from Ruth Rendell's novella ''The Strawberry Tree'' . It is probably short, simple, by-the-by ''psychological life-wisdom-isms'' like the one above, used in a more generic crime fiction environment of course, that make Wikipedia pieces of information, like the following, accurate: Many credit her and close friend P. D. James for upgrading the entire genre of whodunit, shaping it more into a whydunit.