I consider myself lucky. I grew up surrounded by books which catered for all age groups and tastes. They ranged from ‘Shane’, a western written by Jack Schaefer to ‘Emilie’ by Jean Jacques Rousseau. I was to see the screen adaptation of ‘Shane’ twice later. It was in Delhi for the first time and then in Mauritius. Mr Kenneth Noyau gave his appreciation of the film in an issue of L’express to which I refer time and again. I still remember a man named Alan Ladd.
At a certain stage of my life- in the mid- sixties or so- I avidly perused detective stories. The authors I read were Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, Perry Mason and James Hadley Chase to name but a few. Some years later, it was time for Ian Fleming. Despite the passage of time I have not forgotten DR. NO, Goldfinger and Moonraker, I remember names like Roger Moore and Sean Connery whenever these titles are mentioned.
The name of P.D. James did not feature among the authors I perused. When her genius and versatility came within my ken, I could not help thinking that I had missed something. It was during my visits at Foyles and Dillons that I discovered her for the first time and have since been reading her to this day. I agree with critic Gina Macdonald who is of the opinion that her “detective novels are realistic, psychoanalytical studies of character and motive with intricate plots and a strong visual sense of place”.
Responsibility to Provide for the Family
P.D.- Phyllis Dorothy – James was born in Oxford, England, on August 3, 1920. She attended the Cambridge Girls School from 1931 to 1937, then joined a tax office for a few years until she found more interesting work as assistant stage manager of the Festival Theatre, Cambridge. During World War II, while she worked as a Red Cross nurse and an assistant at the Ministry of Food, she married Ernest White. They had two daughters. When her husband returned from the front a severe Schizophrenic and was permanently “institutionalized”, the responsibility to provide for the family fell to James.
Authentic and Credible Novels
And thus in 1946, she began her long civil service career initially as a National Health Service Clerk and then, after qualifying for diplomas in hospital administration and medical research, was appointed principal administrative assistant at the North West Regional Hospital Board, London. This position enabled her to acquire a detailed knowledge of illness, ageing and institutions that give an aura of authenticity and credibility to her novels.
At forty-two, James published Cover Her Face (1962) and was immediately hailed as a major crime novelist. Her husband passed away in 1964.
In 1968, she took the highly competitive Home Office examinations and became a senior civil servant in the criminal department, specializing in juvenile delinquency and criminal law policy. This position, which she held until her retirement in 1979, provided her with a working familiarity of forensic science laboratory routines, police procedures and law. It also helped her to understand the juvenile mind better. This is effectively depicted in Innocent Blood (1980) and Devices and Desires (1989). She started to write full-time but continued to serve as fellow of the Institute of Hospital Administrators and as London magistrate.
She was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1983 and taught a detective fiction course at Boston University’s Metropolitan College in 1984.
Unpleasant Truths About Human Frailty
P.D. James became a skilled novelist. Her works “are restrained, their internal tensions resulting from close associates facing painful and unforgiving inquiries into secret fears and obsessions. Keen and inspiring, James faces unpleasant truths about human frailty, the complex and sometimes self-destructive relationships among people, and humankind’s potential for psychic violence. Kind characters murder to protect family, hearth or reputation; suspects prove culpable. Her credible plots meticulously provide clues and convincing motives and create a realistic world of professionals whose jealousies and rivalries in the close confines of narrow communities produce complex relationships.
James’s novels build on a strong sense of place with her initial inspiration emanating from “a desolate stretch of coast, an old and sinister house, an atmospheric part of London, a closed community such as Nurses Home, a Village, a forensic science laboratory.” In A Mind to Murder (1963), an elegant stately Georgian home turned Psychiatric outpatient clinic provides an ironic counterpoint to sinister events. Toyton Grange of The Black Tower (1975), a nursing home, commune, hotel, monastery and “dotty lunatic asylum”, reflects the bleak desolation of the Dorset coast. In Devices and Desires a nuclear power plant dominates a coastal town and its inhabitants Shroud for a Nightingale (1971) most effectively draws analogies between a nurse’s training centre and a Nazi Prison camp to demonstrate the ambiguous nature of rules and of humans.
James’s murder investigations turn on relationships and routines that are dependent on place. The initial murder in Shroud for a Nightingale, for example, results from student nurses, who while practising intragastric feeding, witness a ghastly death beyond their capacities to cope; carbolic acid added to warm milk in the inserted tube. In Death of an Expert Witness (1977) a despised physiologist is murdered in his laboratory while examining physical evidence from another murder. A suspect in Devices and Desires plunges to his death in the reactor room, the heart of a nuclear power plant whose dangerous power feeds the latent heart of darkness in those associated with it. James’s writing captures the “minutiae of ordinary life”: the internal rivalries, the competition for advancement up the bureaucratic ladder, the unhappy home lives, the daily pressures, jealousies and strife.
An Intricate Mind at Work
All of James highly visual novels communicate a sense of an intricate mind at work, meticulously and precisely calculating every twist of plot. She keeps an hour-by-hour chart of her characters so that each detail fits logically and each piece of physical evidence is psychologically correct. Her style is leisurely with intricately woven sentences reflecting the complex musings of intelligent, but not always reliable, characters. Her narrator is third person- the omniscient author, a particular character, even the murdered. Her easy movement from one perspective to another adds a rich, varied texture to detailed descriptions of place and character. Her characters casually allude to William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy and talk of murder while taking tea or admiring a rose garden.
P.D. James explores complex interpersonal relationships, particularly in closed communities. For example, she describes hierarchical medical communities whose personnel share a knowledge and a professional mystery that leave patients vulnerable outsiders. Her respectable middle-class characters, literate and cultured, prove to be consumed by hidden emotions and desperate to preserve their façade of respectability or the reputation of those dearest to them.
Her victims are often disagreeable- selfish, narcissistic, lascivious, greedy, hot-tempered and spiteful. Her murderers, on the other hand, appear normal on the surface but deep down they are emotionally maimed, beset by hidden torments that ultimately evoke sympathy and pity- an abused childhood, a sexual compulsion or a tragic loss. Her plots frequently include apparent suicides which prove to be murders.
A Lonely Man in a Lonely Profession
Her main detective, Adam Dalgleish, brings critical intelligence, sensitivity and professionalism to his Job. He is a “lonely man in a lonely profession”, observing the bleakness of the human condition and considering himself as an “instrument of justice”. He is the son of a London clergyman, versed in articles of faith, but a born sceptic whose distrust of simple creeds the tragic demise of his wife in childbirth has deepened. Well-read and introspective, he internalizes his horror of unnatural death and comes to term with it through poetry (titling one volume “Invisible scars”). A private man with personal compulsions, Adam Dalgleish keeps away from deep emotional attachments.
He is honest, patient, “ruthless, unorthodox” – a master interrogator with an instinct for asking the right questions to uncover evil. He likes Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, old churches and fine art.
Irony and Existential Absurdity
A James novel with its dense prose, shrewdly realized characterization and sound plotting examines human interaction, rationalization and despair with a unique combination of compassionate understanding and uncompromising analysis.
The novels are realistic studies of the hidden realities of the soul that compel forbidden acts of violence and murder. A sense of irony and existential absurdity lies behind her depiction of a civilized English Façade that crumbles only slightly in the face of multiple murders by human beings who appear decent. To her credit goes the fact that she has made of the crime novel an effective study of human interaction and psychology.