P.D. James's Books | Crime Books

Biography

Phyllis Dorothy James (1920 – 2014) was born in Oxford. She left school at 16 — her father didn’t believe in a University education for girls — and in 1941, married an army doctor at the age of 20.

Life Didn’t Go to Plan

That should have been the start of a respectable middle-class life, but things didn’t pan out like that. Her husband returned from the Second World War, a broken man. He had severe mental health problems and spent the rest of his life in psychiatric hospitals, dying in his early 40s from a combination of pills and alcohol. A suicide, so James believed.

Consequently, James was a single parent with two daughters to bring up. She studied hospital administration and worked as a civil servant for thirty years in the National Health Service and the Home Office. Yet James wanted to be a writer and, in her 40s, realised that the only way that would happen was by picking up a pen. She wrote her first thriller, Cover her Face, in the mornings before going to work.

A Late Bloomer

In late 1979 James retired from the Civil Service. The following year Faber and Faber published her eighth book, Innocent Blood. It was modestly successful in the U.K. but became the number one bestseller in the U.S.

“At the beginning of the week, I was relatively poor, and at the end of the week, I wasn’t.” (Crime Reads)

P.D. James was the quintessential late bloomer.

The Classic British Detective Story

P.D. James’s books follow the path of the classic British detective novel.

“I’ve got the central mysterious death, the closed circle of suspects with means, motive and opportunity, a detective who comes in like an avenging deity, and a solution which the reader should be able to arrive at by a process of logical deduction from clues.” (The Guardian)

Life in a Bureaucracy

Like both Mick Herron and Hideo Yokoyama, P.D. James wrote about bureaucracies. She set many of her thrillers against the bureaucratic backdrop of the National Health Service or criminal justice system.

“It has been said that a good mystery consists of twenty-five per cent puzzle, twenty-five per cent characterisation, and fifty per cent what the author knows best, and I, for one, have much enjoyed learning about horse racing from Dick Francis, theatrical life from Ngaio Marsh, banking from Emma Lathen, and campanology from Dorothy L. Sayers.” (The Paris Review)

Except for the odd foray into true crime and science fiction, that sums up P.D. James. Classic detective novels set against British bureaucracy. However, that doesn’t do her writing justice. Her style is precise, with a natural eye for characterisation and a strong sense of realism.

She was a thin, brown-skinned woman, brittle and nobbly as a dead branch who looked as if the sap had long since dried in her bones. She gave the appearance of having gradually shrunk in her clothes without having noticed it. Her working overall of thick fawn cotton hung in long creases from her narrow shoulders to mid-calf and was bunched around her waist by a schoolboy’s belt of red and blue stripes clasped with a snake buckle. Her stockings were a concertina around her ankles, and either she preferred to wear shoes at least two sizes too large, or her feet were curiously disproportionate to the rest of her body.
Shroud for a Nightingale

Conservative Values

If I were to criticise P.D. James’s books for anything, it would be her strong sense of Christian and conservative values. She became a Conservative Member of the House of Lords. These values can’t help but spill over into her writing. In a review in the Guardian of The Murder Room, Mark Lawson pointed out that “when reading James, you do find yourself nostalgic for crack cocaine, anal sex and people calling each other ‘mutha'”.

P.D. James went on to win almost every accolade for crime fiction on both sides of the Atlantic. Her stories have something more going for them than a little moral correctness.