PD James: Grand old dame of English detective fiction
1920-2014
BARONESS James of Holland Park, better known as PD James, who has died aged 94, was among the most celebrated in a long and distinguished line of women crime writers stretching back to Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, with neither of whom she cared to be compared.
She admitted that she had started writing crime fiction because she thought it would be easier to have a story published in that genre before going on to produce “proper” novels.
She stayed with what she called “traditional English detective fiction” because she found she could still explore human behaviour within the crime genre. Even her final novel, Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice , is a mystery story that opens with a brutal murder.
A vigorous, beaming woman who described herself as “grandmotherly”, PD James had a frank and sociable exterior that belied a fascination with pain and death, often graphically described in her books.
A long and illustrious career in the Home Office led to a period as a magistrate, appointments to the British Council and the BBC, and finally to a place in the House of Lords, where she took the Conservative whip and lobbied for the arts.
Becoming a pillar of the literary establishment rather late in life — she set up as a full-time writer only after retiring from the civil service in 1979 — James threw herself into literary life with remarkable zest. She became chairwoman of the Society of Authors at 64, joined the board of the Arts Council at 68, and in 1987 chaired the judging panel for the Booker Prize.
Her private life, in its middle years, was cruelly hard. But she retained her great capacity for friendship.
Phyllis Dorothy James was born on August 3 1920 in Oxford. When her father, an ill-paid tax officer, was transferred to the Inland Revenue in Cambridge, she enrolled at Cambridge High School for Girls. Although she became a star pupil — excelling at English — there was never any question of her education continuing beyond the age of 16.
Instead, at 17, she went to work in a dreary tax office. During World War 2 she was in Cambridge, engaged in the no less dreary chore of issuing ration books, and in 1941 she married Connor Bantry White, a medical student, with whom she had two daughters. Later in the war, White qualified as a doctor but was badly affected by his wartime experiences and returned in 1945 suffering from schizophrenia. He
James’ insights into sexual fears and needs is profound, She makes of even murderers human beings we can pity
never recovered and died in 1964.
In 1949, Phyllis White and her husband moved in with his parents. Faced with the responsibility of being the family breadwinner, she took a job keeping medical records. In the evenings she studied for a diploma in hospital administration. For the next 10 years, she worked for the North West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board, eventually becoming principal administrative assistant. Meanwhile, she was not only nursing her husband but also bringing up her two girls.
As she approached 40, Phyllis White began to fear that she would never fulfil her ambition of becoming a writer. “It was a now or never situation,” she recalled. “I didn’t want to end up saying to my children and grandchildren: ‘I always thought I’d be a writer.’ ”
In 1959, as PD James, she began to plot her first novel, Cover Her Face, which introduced her master detective (and poet), Adam Dalgliesh. James endowed him with the qualities she most admired in men: “courage, compassion, high intelligence and sensitivity”. She agreed that it would be unusual to find a senior detective who was also a successful poet, but argued that “we do tend to stereotype people. Why shouldn’t a policeman write poems?”
Working for two hours each morning before leaving for work, James completed the novel in 1961. Her agent approached Faber and Faber, which accepted her book immediately. It was an instant success.
Reviewers were impressed with her characterisation. “James’s insight into sexual fears and needs is profound,” wrote one critic. “She makes of even her murderers ... human beings we can pity.”
As for her hero Dalgliesh, she always insisted that he was not the man she would have liked to marry, but the man she might like to have been. As the burden of work grew, she used to complain, only half-jokingly, that what she really needed was a good wife.
For most of her writing life James was saddled with the sobriquet “Queen (or First Lady) of Crime”, a crown that the media had handed to her after Christie’s death in 1976. But she was at pains to point out that she differed from Christie (“such a bad writer”) in that she cared about the victim.
The death of her husband when she was only 44 caused her great and abiding distress.
In her later years her fellow authors awarded her the coveted Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger for a lifetime’s achievement. Her books were filmed and televised and she travelled the world lecturing, signing and taking on visiting fellowships in Boston, California and Toronto. She published A Time to Be in Earnest, her “fragment of autobiography”, in 1999, and the final Dalgliesh novel, The Private Patient, about the murder of a journalist at a plastic surgery clinic, in 2008.
More than almost any other crime writer, James transcended the genre to produce novels that stood on their own as works of literature. She herself observed that “a first-class mystery should also be a first-class novel”. — © The Daily Telegraph, London