Long Fiction:
Cover Her Face, 1962
A Mind to Murder, 1963
Unnatural Causes, 1967
Shroud for a Nightingale, 1971
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, 1972
The Black Tower, 1975
Death of an Expert Witness, 1977
Innocent Blood, 1980
The Skull Beneath the Skin, 1982
A Taste for Death, 1986
Devices and Desires, 1989
The Children of Men, 1992
Original Sin, 1994
A Certain Justice, 1997
Death in Holy Orders, 2001
Drama:
A Private Treason, pr. 1985
Nonfiction:
The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliff Highway Murders, 1811, 1971 (with T. A. Critchley)
Time to Be in Earnest: Fragment of an Autobiography, 2000
In the decades since the publication of her first book, Cover Her Face, P. D. James has become one of the mystery genre’s most popular and critically acclaimed writers, considered by many to be the heir apparent to such enduring figures as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Yet while James uses the conventions of the traditional British murder mystery–a murder or series of murders, a detective, and a group of suspects, each with a possible motive–her novels are more firmly grounded in reality than those of either of her predecessors. Drawing on her earlier career as a hospital administrator and her work in a forensic laboratory and the British government’s Criminal Policy Department, James gives her books a level of realistic detail that separates them from the cozy, comfortable tone of many classic mysteries.
P. D. James
Phyllis Dorothy James is the daughter of Sidney James, an employee of the Inland Revenue office, and his wife Dorothy. James was educated at the Cambridge High School for Girls and at the age of sixteen went to work, like her father, in a tax office. After a brief stint as a stage manager at the Cambridge Festival Theatre, she married Ernest Conner Bantry White in 1941.
White, a physician, returned from his service in World War II with severe psychological problems. His young wife became the sole support of the family, which by that time included two daughters. Over the next thirty-five years, James worked at various times as a medical administrator in hospitals and forensic laboratories, a senior-level police department employee, and a London magistrate. Although her first novel was published in 1962 and her husband died in 1964, it was not until 1979 that she retired and began writing full-time.
The majority of James’s mysteries feature Scotland Yard investigator Adam Dagliesh. Unlike the amateur detectives favored by many crime writers, Dagliesh is a professional, and his direct, understated manner lends the books a gravity not often found in the genre. His success as a detective has led to his advancement over the years from the rank of detective chief inspector to commander, yet the job has at times also taken a physical and emotional toll. Dagliesh is an intriguing character, a reserved, intelligent man and a published poet whose life has been deeply marked by his wife’s death in childbirth.
Two of James’s novels, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and The Skull Beneath the Skin, have featured a young female detective named Cordelia Gray, a resourceful and intelligent private investigator whom many of James’s readers hoped might some day marry Dagliesh. James has remained noncommittal on the subject, although the two characters have crossed paths briefly.
What sets James apart from many mystery writers and earns for her a degree of acclaim and respect not generally accorded crime novelists is the seriousness with which she approaches her stories. For James, the mystery genre serves primarily as a useful format within which she is able to explore the complexities of human nature. The raw emotions called into play by the act of murder and the complicated psychological factors that can lead someone to commit such a crime offer James the perfect setting for her probings into the darker aspects of the human psyche.
Most of James’s books take place in relatively closed communities; James is fascinated by the many and varied ways in which people interact in these settings and the emotions that this interaction inevitably calls into play. In A Mind to Murder the setting is a prominent psychiatric clinic where a murder reveals the messy and complicated intrigues lying beneath the clinic’s surface. Shroud for a Nightingale takes place in a nurse’s training school, Death of an Expert Witness is set in a scientific laboratory, Devices and Desires unfolds in and around a nuclear power plant near a coastal village, and Original Sin sets its story in a London publishing house. The Black Tower and Death in Holy Orders take place in religious communities. Each of the books depicts a community torn apart by a violent crime, the solution to which lies buried in the intricacies of the relationships among its members.
James ventured outside the traditional mystery format for her best-selling suspense thriller Innocent Blood and the futuristic The Children of Men. It is her murder mysteries, however, that have established her reputation and won for her a loyal following among readers and critics alike. In 1991 she was made a life peer by Queen Elizabeth II. Acting on the conviction that a good mystery should also be a good novel, James has brought fresh insight and complexity to the conventions of the genre and established herself as one of its finest practitioners.