Baroness James of Holland Park P. D. James

P.D. James was one of the most successful detective novelists working in Britain today. Her writing has been praised for its sophisticated narrative techniques and its complex and multifaceted characters. These are features not usually associated with such popular literary genre as the detective story. James has actually declared that she prefers the term 'crime novel', thus advocating renewed literary dignity for the genre. Over the years, James claimed, the conventions of the detective story shifted away from their original 'in the past, psychological truth was too often sacrificed to the demands of plot' so that the detective story was often classified 'as a subliterary form'. Yet, according to James, 'The modern detective story has moved away from the earlier crudities and simplicities. Crime writers are as concerned as are other novelists with psychological truth and the moral ambiguities of human action.' Influenced by such diverse writers as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, and G. K. Chesterton, James’s fiction is designed to blend 'a genuine mystery with the novel of social realism'. Her literary production also includes the dystopian novel The Children of Men (1992), the autobiography Time to Be in Earnest (1999) and The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811 (1971), co-authored with T. A. Critchley.

Such combination is evident in the author’s description of the generic formula behind detective stories in her non-fiction work, Talking About Detective Fiction (2009): 'What we can expect is a central mysterious death, usually murder; a closed circle of suspects, each with motive, means and opportunity for the crime; a detective, either amateur or professional, who comes in like an avenging deity to solve it; and, by the end of the book, a solution which the reader should be able to arrive at by logical deduction from clues inserted in the novel with deceptive cunning but essential fairness.” The formula is, of course, behind James’s own novels which are always marked by a stunning awareness of place and characters’ psychology. In her novels, crimes occur within isolated communities of people such as a nurses’ training school (Shroud for a Nightingale, 1971), a publishing house (Original Sin, 1994), a theological college (Death in Holy Orders 2001), a museum (The Murder Room, 2003), an off-shore island used as a VIP hideout (The Lighthouse, 2005) and an expensive private clinic (The Private Patient, 2008). The distorted relationships within these claustrophobic locales, which function as a microcosm for society as a whole, are as thoroughly investigated by the narrator as are the murders that have affected them by the detective. The victims, generally scheming and ruthless characters, always bring about their own murder because of their sinful lives. Because of her social realist vein, setting is particularly important for James and she has repeatedly acknowledged its importance in creating the atmosphere of menace and suspense required in a crime novel.

Immediately after giving such a clear and fitting definition of detective fiction, however, James admitted that it seems 'unduly restrictive and more appropriate to the so-called Golden Age between the wars than it is today.' On the contrary, James found it fascinating how authors of detective fiction played with conventions, thus celebrating the power of an apparently fixed literary form to liberate creative imagination. What James has added to this Golden Age formula is an increasing moral and emotional uncertainty. The solution of the mystery does not necessarily remove the causes of the crime and, rather than assurance, P. D. James’s narratives often close with the reinforcement of moral dilemmas. This avoidance of easy reassurance comes to P. D. James as a mirror of the times. According to her, we may be about to experience a second Golden Age of the detective genre as 'the theory is that the mystery flourishes best in times of acute anxiety and depression, and we're in a very depressed state at the moment.'

Two central protagonists recur in James’s fiction: Adam Dalgliesh, a professional Inspector, and Cordelia Gray, a private working-class investigator. Because Cordelia Gray only appears in two novels, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) and The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982), James is not often credited with the writing of the first modern novel to feature a female detective. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman combines the characterisation of the hard-boiled novel with the structure of the bildungsroman. As the protagonists in the stories by Hammett, Chandler and Spillane, Cordelia is estranged from society and her role as a detective is often contested. Contrary to what characterised the hard-boiled genre, however, such repeated challenges derive uniquely from Cordelia’s gender, as the title underlines. This is apparent from the very start of the novel when Cordelia’s partner commits suicide leaving her the unique proprietor of Pryde’s Detective Agency. The policeman who first questions her about Bernie Pryde’s death takes it for granted that she was simply his secretary. Female characters are equally sceptic about Cordelia’s chances to succeed in her job. When she breaks the news of the suicide to the owner of the pub where she used to go with Bernie, the landlady comments: 'You’ll be looking for a new job, I suppose? After all, you can hardly keep the Agency going on your own. It isn’t a suitable job for a woman ... I shouldn’t think your mother would approve of you staying on alone'.  Thus, her achievements celebrate her development into a professional detective from the amateur status she has at the beginning of the novel. After such a determined start, feminist critics were disappointed to see Cordelia Gray dropped for ten years and revived only in The Skull Beneath the Skin, where she appears inept and unsuitable for her job. At the end of this second novel, Cordelia is hired to find a lost Siamese kitten: ' ... she had a job waiting for her ... she didn’t despise its simplicities; almost she welcomed them. Animals didn’t torment themselves with the fear of death, or torment you with the fear of their dying. They didn’t burden you with their psychological problems ... They didn’t try to murder you.' Such a conclusion seems indeed to state that investigating murders is an unsuitable job for a woman. In her essay 'Gray Areas: P. D. James’s Unsuiting of Cordelia', Nicola Nixon has claimed that James’s belittling of Cordelia is the result of the author’s own distancing from feminism. Yet, many of the mysteries centring on inspector Dalgliesh also feature Detective Inspector Kate Miskin, a working-class woman from a disadvantaged social background.

Contrary to Cordelia, the widower Adam Dalgliesh rises ever higher in his career through novels, attaining the status of Commander and even of published poet. In spite of his clever intuitions, Dalgliesh is fully conscious of his fallibility and James is careful not to romanticise the figure of the detective. 'Detectives,' she argues, 'are far less creatures of fantasy or romantic wish-fulfilment. They tend to be professionals doing a difficult job in a modern world.' In the most recent novels, Dalgliesh also enjoys a satisfying private life with Cambridge don Emma Lavenhamand, and, in The Private Patient, he seems about to ask her to marry him. Yet, it is not love that fuels his poetry, as we are clearly told in The Lighthouse: 'The best of his verse had its roots in the pain, horror and pathetic detritus of the tragic and broken lives, which made up his working life.' The same interest can be detected in P. D. James’s fiction and Dalgliesh also embodies the principles that his author particularly values: 'High intelligence, sensitivity but not sentimentality — which I loathe — compassion, courage and reticence.'

While Dalgliesh is a liberal agnostic, P. D. James has made no secret of her Christian and conservative views which have grown stronger with the years and that, some critics claim, put her out of touch with the contemporary society she is so eager to portray. In his review of The Murder Room, Mark Lawson has pointed out that 'when reading James, you do find yourself nostalgic for crack cocaine, anal sex and people calling each other "mutha"'. It has also been noted that, while James usually refrains from mentioning contemporary controversial events, when she does so (as with the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in Death In Holy Orders), it is to impose a conservative moral on them. Yet, masked under P. D. James’s genteel settings and dialogues, her novels explore the darker and disturbing instincts of the human mind with a complexity that defies political partisanship. James conforms to the definition of her homonym Henry that the purpose of a novel should be 'To help the human heart to know itself'. However, to her, such knowledge entails the disturbing admission that the human heart regards murder with fascination.

Luca Prono, 2010

'All fiction is an attempt to create order out of disorder and to make sense of personal experience. But the classical detective story does this within its own established conventions; a central mystery which is usually but not necessarily a murder, a closed circle of suspects, a detective, either professional or amateur, who comes in like an avenging deity to solve the crime, and a final solution which the reader should be able to arrive at himself by logical deduction from the clues. This apparent formula writing is capable of accommodating a remarkable variety of books and talents. Within the formal constraints of the detective novel I try to say something true about men and women under the stress of the ultimate crime and about the society in which they live.'