The British mystery writer P. D. James has died at age 94. She took a popular conventional genre, the mystery story, and brought to it her gifts as a serious literary novelist. Drawing on her work in a police forensics unit, she perfected the “police procedural” in novels of gritty realism and psychological depth. She was also a Christian who said that the final revelation of a mystery story is analogous to Judgment Day.
A good place to begin with her works
is her first Adam Dalgliesh novel, Cover Her Face. (I love that allusion to the horrific 17th century tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi.) Also read her pro-life dystopian thriller The Children of Men.
From Steve Donoghue, P.D. James, who brought a gritty realism to the British detective novel, dies at 94 – The Washington Post.
P.D. James, the British author whose cerebral murder mysteries brought a new level of sophistication to the genre and who created such enduring characters as the erudite but melancholy Scotland Yard sleuth Adam Dalgliesh and the resourceful private investigator Cordelia Gray, died Nov. 27 at her home in Oxford, England. She was 94.
Her publisher, Faber and Faber, announced her death. The cause was not disclosed.
Ms. James was 42 when she launched a literary career that would bring her critical acclaim, a life peerage and millions of fans worldwide. Her accomplishments were shadowed by tragedy: Her mother and then her husband suffered from mental disorders that left them at times institutionalized.
A civil service employee since her teens, Ms. James held a series of high-level jobs while caring for her family and harboring ambitions to write. She was the administrator of outpatient psychiatric clinics for the National Health Service in London and later an administrator in the police department’s forensic science section. Through those experiences, she gave her nearly 20 novels a convincing sense of police and forensic procedures.
Her books were brimming with vivid and gruesome details: ravaged corpses oozing rivulets of blood; a young nurse who unwittingly swallows bathroom disinfectant while volunteering for a demonstration before a class of her peers; a dead barrister with blood dripping over her white courtroom wig. Some of her books were infused with the suffering of chronic illness and prolonged dying.
“Let those who want pleasant murders read Agatha Christie,” Ms. James once said in a lecture. “Murder isn’t pleasant. It’s an ugly thing and a cruel thing, and murder in the isolated country house with the snow piled up outside just isn’t real.”
Her books’ adroit pacing and pervading aura of menace made her one of the finest, most absorbing craftsmen of the profession. . . .
Ms. James was a practicing Anglican who featured the Church of England in many of her novels, including “Death in Holy Orders” (2001). In a 1980 interview with The Washington Post, she explained her affection for detective fiction in charged moral tones, noting, “They’re based on the fundamental belief that life is sacred and murder is unique and uncommon. . . . In a sense, detective novels are like 20th-century morality plays; the values are basic and unambiguous.”
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