‘REMARKABLE’ P.D. JAMES DIES
Detective novelist a master of plot
Mystery writer P.D. James, who brought realistic modern characters to the classic British detective story, has died, her publisher said. She was 94.
Faber and Faber said James died Thursday at her home in Oxford, southern England.
James’s books, many featuring sensitive sleuth Adam Dalgliesh, sold millions around the world, and most were just as popular when adapted for television.
Faber, her publisher for more than 50 years, said in a statement that she had been “so very remarkable in every aspect of her life, an inspiration and great friend to us all. It is a privilege to publish her extraordinary books. Working with her was always the best of times, full of joy. We will miss her hugely.”
Because of the quality and careful structure of her writing — and her elegant, intellectual detective Dalgliesh — she was at first seen as a natural successor to writers like Dorothy L. Sayers, creator of Lord Peter Wimsey in the between-thewars “Golden Age” of the mystery novel.
But her books were strong on character, avoided stereotype and touched on distinctly modern problems, including drugs, child abuse and nuclear contamination.
“She has pushed, as a modernist must, against the boundaries of the classical detective story,” critic Julian Symons once wrote.
“The greatest mystery of all is the human heart,” James said in a 1997 interview, “and that is the mystery with which all good novelists, I think, are concerned. I’m always interested in what makes people the sort of people they are.”
Although there was nothing remotely “genteel” about P.D. James’s writing, some younger writers of gritty urban crime novels criticized her. They accused her of snobbery because she said she liked to write about middle-class murderers, preferably intelligent and well-educated, who agonize over right and wrong and spend time planning and justifying their crimes. Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard, hero of more than a dozen James novels, is a decidedly gentlemanly detective, who writes poetry, loves jazz and drives a Jaguar.
Nevertheless, her stories were different from the more old-fashioned mysteries of the old British school.
“Let those who want pleasant murders read Agatha Christie,” 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.”
Phyllis Dorothy James was born in Oxford on Aug. 3, 1920. Her father was a tax collector and there wasn’t enough money for her to go to college, a fact she always regretted. Even as a child, she said, she had been interested in death. As a little girl, when someone read Humpty Dumpty to her, she asked, “Did he fall or was he pushed?”
But she did not start producing her mysteries until she was nearly 40, and then wrote only early in the morning before going to the government job with which she supported her family. Her husband, Connor Bantry White, had returned from the war mentally broken and remained so until his death in 1964.
Her work was not confined to the mystery genre. Her 1992 science fiction novel The Children of Men, about a dystopian future in which humanity has become infertile, was turned into a critically praised 2006 movie by Alfonso Cuaron.