P.D. James

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this appreciation of P.D. James, one of my favorite crime novelists. If you've read her, you will enjoy it too. If you haven't you may be tempted to give her a try.

... For her, the key to her books was always the setting. The single body on the drawing-room floor was more horrifying than a dozen bullet-riddled bodies on noir’s mean streets, because it was shockingly out of place. The contrast between respectability and planned brutality intensified the magnitude of such an appalling act. ....

To read a James novel is to acquire an intimate knowledge of flats, kitchens, offices, gardens, villages, castles, clinics, schools, hospitals, houses great and small—and the lives that are lived there. She was particularly fond of isolated places and closed communities....

And even if the setting wasn’t isolated, it was the closed community, the hothouse atmosphere of people too close to one another, that fascinated her....

From Death of an Expert Witness:

The window was slightly open at the bottom. He pushed it open, wincing at the rasp of the wood, and put out his head. The rich, loamy smell of the fen autumn night washed over his face, strong, yet fresh. The rain had stopped and the sky was a tumult of gray clouds through which the moon, now almost full, reeled like a pale, demented ghost. His mind stretched out over the deserted fields and the desolate dikes to the wide, moon-bleached sands of the Wash and the creeping fringes of the North Sea. He could fancy that he smelled its medicinal tang in the rain-washed air. Somewhere out there in the darkness, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of violent death, was a body.

Her detective:

James’ most important character was, of course, Adam Dalgliesh, one of the most iconic figures in crime fiction. The only child of an elderly couple, the son of a vicar, he lost a wife and baby son early on, and since then has led a very private life. He is also a respected poet, a fact that mystifies many onlookers who can’t quite square one man being both a poet and a policeman. Dalgliesh also worries about it himself sometimes: “People tell me things. It had begun when he was a young detective-sergeant and then it had surprised and intrigued him, feeding his poetry, bringing the half-shameful realization that for a detective it would be a useful gift. The pity was there. He had known from childhood the heartbreak of life and that, too, had fed the poetry. He thought, I have taken peoples’ confidences and used them to fasten gyves round their wrists” (The Murder Room).

James always said that she gave Dalgliesh the qualities she most admired in either men or women—“compassion without sentimentality, generosity, courage, intelligence, and independence” (A Certain Justice)—but some of those qualities can cut both ways. His detachment is both his strength and his weakness: “How long could you stay detached, he wondered, before you lost your own soul” (A Mind to Murder, 1963). His independence and lack of sentimentality make him prone to personal antipathies and occasional sudden anger, and his “cold sarcasm could be more devastating than another officer’s bawled obscenities” (Devices and Desires). ....

Something else:

And one other aspect of her life suffused nearly all of her books. She was a devout Anglican, often asked to read lessons from the pulpit, and her novels are full of churches, abbeys, cathedrals, rectories, and churchyards, some as a source of peace, others as the setting for spectacular murders. The novels are also full of those who believe, disbelieve, revere, damn, or pointedly ignore God. ....

James herself, while devout, had her own problems with the Church of England: “I sometimes find it difficult today to recognize the church into which I was baptized. Much of its former dignity, scholarly tolerance, beauty and order have been not so much lost as wantonly thrown away” (Time to Be in Earnest). And in Death in Holy Orders, a distinguished character agrees: “The Church of England will be defunct in twenty years if the present decline continues. Or it’ll be an eccentric sect concerned with maintaining old superstitions and ancient churches. People might want the illusion of spirituality…but they’ve stopped believing in heaven and they’re not afraid of hell.” ....

There is much more: "P.D. James: A Crime Reader's Guide to the Classics"