P.D. James mysteries: clever, sly and neatly solved
The title alone jump-starts the inevitably surprised reader:
“The Murder of Santa Claus.” “If you’re an addict of detective fiction, you may have heard of me, Charles Mickledore. I say addict advisably: no occasional or highly discriminating reader of the genre is likely to ask for my latest offering at his public library. I’m no H.R.F. Keating, no Dick Francis, not even a P.D. James.”
He was close — he was a cop who was the creation of P.D. James.
And P.D. James was in fact
Phyllis Dorothy James (19202014) and would do quite well, thank you, as Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Also in fact, P.D. James was not only a popular fiction writer but also, in private life after her husband’s passing, the bearer of that admired and popular author’s more private title: Phyllis Dorothy James, administrator in the forensic and criminal law divisions of the British Department of Home Affairs.
That work provided her — and through her, us — with accurate procedural detail for her other more preferred employment: writing enormously popular murder mysteries.
P.D. James once noted to The New York Times: “It seems to me that the more we live in a society in which we feel our problems — be they international problems of war and peace, racial problems, problems of drugs, problems of violence — to be literally beyond our ability to solve, it seems to me very reassuring to read a popular form of fiction which itself has a problem at the heart of it.
“One which the reader knows will be solved by the end of the book.”
One way or the other.
In 2013 P.D. James also provided the BBC with useful working advice for those who would follow her in making magical marks on paper:
“Never go anywhere without a notebook because you can see a face that will be exactly the right face for one of your characters, you can see place and think of the perfect words to describe it. I do that when I’m writing, I think it’s a sensible thing for writers to do.”
Buy the book, published posthumously: “Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales,” P.D. James (Vintage Books, 173 pp., $15).
And happy hunting.