This month on the reading group, we’re going to read a book by PD James. This week marks 100 years since the birth of the writer known not only as “the new queen of crime”, and one of the last links to the genre’s golden age (she was dubbed the new queen after Agatha Christie’s death, a title James did not mind), but also “the doyenne of detective novelists”.
James was one of the most successful crime novelists of the late 20th century, and into the start of the 21st. She won dozens of awards including the Crime Writers’ Association’s Diamond Dagger and the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster award. Many of her works were adapted for television and cinema, and she sold truckloads of books. She was also widely regarded as “a very good writer” – which seems like reason enough to revisit her career now.
That career began in 1962 when James was in her 40s and raising two children, working in a London hospital and looking after a husband who had returned from the second world war with mental-health problems. She woke up at five in the morning, and wrote before going to work, to produce her first novel, Cover Her Face, a kind of cosy crime caper featuring a refined poet policeman called Adam Dalgliesh.
“I gave him the qualities I admire,” she said many years later, “because I hoped he might be an enduring character and that being so, I must actually like him.”
Readers liked him, too. Dalgliesh appeared in 14 novels, and while his essential characteristics remained the same, the books grew deeper and darker. Violence and fear entered the cosy world she had first described. James’s writing could be nasty, and she had plenty of cold steel in her. “If I had a friend in distress I would have no hesitation in putting my arms around her to comfort her,” she once said, “but part of me would be observing the scene.”
Alongside the Dalgliesh novels, she wrote two books about Cordelia Gray, a tough female detective. There was a Jane Austen pastiche called Death Comes to Pemberley and a dystopian satire about a world where the population is going down called The Children of Men – which is beginning to seem more and more prescient. In 1980, she also wrote Innocent Blood, a standalone novel about a murderous secret related to an adoption. This novel made her rich and finally allowed her to quit her day job as a civil servant in the Home Office, as Emma Brockes once explained here in the Guardian: “She sold paperback rights for £380,000 and film rights for £145,000 – more than she had earned in 10 years working at the Home Office – and promptly retired: ‘At the beginning of the week I was relatively poor and at the end of the week I wasn’t.’”
Lucky PD James. Lucky us, too, because it enabled her to maintain a successful career until she published her final book in 2011. Her full roster of novels is as follows:
Adam Dalgliesh novels
Cover Her Face (1962)
A Mind to Murder (1963)
Unnatural Causes (1967)
Shroud for a Nightingale (1971)
The Black Tower (1975)
Death of an Expert Witness (1977)
A Taste for Death (1986)
Devices and Desires (1989)
Original Sin (1994)
A Certain Justice (1997)
Death in Holy Orders (2001)
The Murder Room (2003)
The Lighthouse (2005)
The Private Patient (2008)
Cordelia Gray mysteries
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972)
The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982)
Miscellaneous novels
Innocent Blood (1980)
The Children of Men (1992)
Death Comes to Pemberley (2011)
I suggest we have a simple vote – just name the title you’d most like to look at in the comments below and we’ll pick one out to read this month. If you can give a reason why, so much the better. I’m looking forward to digging in.
