With Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgleish back on television in his third incarnation, it seems an appropriate time to look again at Talking About Detective Fiction by P D James. This is not a comprehensive survey or an academic study. It’s more of a personal reflection on her favourite genre both as reader and writer and the one in which she wrote for almost fifty years. It came out in 2009, when she was almost ninety, and I think it was her last published work.
As well as insights into her own writing, there are some very interesting views on the work of others here, and part of the pleasure of a book like this is seeing where you agree or disagree with the author. I was delighted to see that she gave some attention to Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley, a personal favourite of mine that I think is rather underrated today. On the other hand, she doesn’t have much to say about the novels of Nicholas Blake, which I think is a pity. Is this a case of damning with faint praise, or was it simply that she had not read them?
She has rather more to tell us about the four “Queens of Crime” of the inter-war “Golden Age” – Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie. She has clearly been reading and re-reading these writers since her teenage years. Given that she was born in 1930, she is a little bit closer to the world they lived in and brought to the page. Her observation that the “cosy” description is a later romanticisation of that era, and that English society really did feel more stable and secure then, is fascinating.
Part of the limitation of her approach is that she concentrates on what she calls the “classical detective story”, the murder mystery with a closed circle of suspects. This means that some of the most interesting books of the “Golden Age”, the psychological studies of would-be killers whose identity is revealed at the start of the story, fall outside her remit. I am thinking of Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles and The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake.
She relates the appeal of detective fiction to the Christian sense of guilt, so it would have been interesting to have her thoughts on writers who abandon this completely, such as Patricia Highsmith.
Given that she seemed such an establishment figure, it’s worth remembering that P D James was an innovator in the genre. She brought all her Home Office experience to bear, and her forensic cold-bloodedness of the descriptions of crime victims was something quite new, pre-dating Patricia Cornwell, I think. She was one of the writers who modernised the detective story with greater realism, both in setting and the details of police work. Like Colin Dexter with Morse, she created a detective who was a credible modern policeman while retaining some of the appeal of the private investigators of earlier stories. This all came together brilliantly in her 1977 novel Death of an Expert Witness, where the murder suspects were themselves a group of pathologists.
Interestingly, she says that if she were starting today she would create a female detective as her lead character. At the time she began writing, there weren’t any women police detectives so a female character would have to be an amateur. She says of Dalgleish: “I gave him the qualities I personally admire in either sex – intelligence, courage but not foolhardiness, sensitivity but not sentimentality, and reticence.” James did in fact write two detective stories with a young female lead but then returned to Dalgleish for the rest of her writing career, giving him a female sidekick rather than the usual male one. Perhaps this is why she so admires the writing of Sara Paretsky, the creator of private eye V I Warshawski, who “operates as a courageous, sexually liberated female investigator”.
One of James’ great talents was description and creating a sense of place. There is a wonderful example of that here, so good that it could have come from one of her novels and worth quoting in full, I think.
“East Anglia has a particular attraction for detective novelists. The remoteness of the east coast, the dangerous encroaching North Sea, the bird-loud marshes, the emptiness, the great skies, the magnificent churches and the sense of being in a place alien, mysterious and slightly sinister, where it is possible to stand under friable cliffs eaten away by the tides of centuries and imagine that we hear the bells of ancient churches buried under the sea.”
The Good Reader 