Obituary: PD James THE QUEEN OF CRIME
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10787952
PD James was known as the Queen of
crime fiction, the creator of the suave, cerebral police officer, Adam
Dalgliesh.
She strongly rejected suggestions that crime novels were not proper
literature, producing a string of well-researched and beautifully constructed
stories to prove her point.
Phyllis Dorothy James was born in Oxford on 3 August, 1920, the daughter of a
civil servant.
Her parents did not have a happy marriage; her mother was committed to an
asylum when James was just 14, leaving her to look after the house and her
siblings.
From her early days at Cambridge High School for Girls, she nurtured an
ambition to write but was forced by the family's financial circumstances to
leave school at 16 and find a job as a filing clerk.
Early writing
In 1941 she married a medical student, Connor White who, shortly afterwards,
joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and was posted overseas.
But he found the traumas of war too great to cope with and, after struggling
to return to civilian life, was eventually placed in an institution, leaving
James to bring up their two daughters alone.
With her husband incapacitated, James continued her career as a health
service administrator, rising through the ranks until she eventually oversaw
five psychiatric clinics.
She began writing seriously in the mid 1950s, composing parts of her first
novel, while commuting to work.
"I realized that there was never going to be a convenient time to start that
first novel," she told an interviewer in 1997. "If I didn't make time, find the
motivation, I would be a failed writer and that would be absolutely appalling
for me."
The resulting book, Cover My Face, published in 1962, introduced her readers
to Adam Dalgliesh, the intellectual, poetry writing senior Metropolitan Police
officer who would feature in most of her crime novels.
Dalgliesh was the latest incarnation of that bastion of English crime
writing, the gentleman detective, epitomised by Lord Peter Wimsey and Albert
Campion.
However, unlike them, Dalgleish was a serving police officer - as was Colin
Dexter's Inspector Morse, who would follow a decade later.
The book was generally well received by the critics although one remarked
that Dalgleish was "too quietly competent" in exposing the killer.
Her follow up, A Mind to Murder, was published just one year later. The crime
took place in a psychiatric clinic with James drawing on her inside knowledge of
the workings of the health service.
In 1964 her husband died following an overdose of drugs and alcohol and James
moved to a new job in the criminal policy section of the Home Office. It would
give her more useful background for future novels.
But it was not until 1980, with the publication of her eighth book, Innocent
Blood, that her small but loyal following exploded into mass, international
popularity.
"Monday, I was ticking along as usual, and by Friday I was a millionaire,"
she once said.
In all she wrote 14 Adam Dalgliesh novels, the latest, The Private Patient, was
published in 2008.
Her novels were all elegantly written, with due attention to the proper use of
English. Not for her the street argot of pot-boiler crime fiction.
The meticulous construction of the plot was everything, a talent she shared
with her favourite author, Jane Austen.
The Sunday Times fiction editor, Peter Kemp once described her work as
"brilliantly plotted with all sorts of good twists and turns"
She paid great attention to her research, drawing heavily on her experience
in the NHS and the Home Office, against which backgrounds many of her novels
were written.
In 2010, she told the Telegraph she had seen someone being fed through a tube
during her days as a nurse.
"I remember thinking, 'that would be an easy way to kill someone.'" That duly
became the method she used to dispatch a character in her fourth book, Shroud
For a Nightingale.
But the author broadened her horizons with later books. A Certain Justice was
set in the closed world of the London Inns of Court, while Death in Holy Orders
used her knowledge of the Anglican Church, in which she served as a lay
reader.
Her books were not cosy in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha
Christie. Her victims died in brutal and often shocking ways and the perpetrator
was not always brought to justice.
"Doyle and Christie are genre writers - clever, yes, but one must suspend
considerable disbelief right from the get-go when reading their works," said
author Anita Shreve.
"No such acrobatics are necessary with a James novel."
But James admitted it could be hard to create such uncompromising
characters.
"When I am writing about a killer, I am that killer. I am in his mind, which
is probably why I don't have sadistic mass murderers as characters."
Cordelia Grey
As well as her Dalgleish novels she published two books, An Unsuitable Job
for a Woman and The Skull beneath the Skin, both featuring a female private
detective, Cordelia Grey.
She wrote a pastiche of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Death Comes To
Pemberley, in 2011, in which Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet become embroiled in a
murder-mystery.
In a complete departure from the crime genre her 1992 novel, Children of Men,
was set in an England of 2021 where mass infertility threatened the future of
the population. The book became an Oscar-nominated film in 2006.
She never got to grips with modern technology writing her novels by hand and
then dictating the words onto tape to allow a secretary to produce the first
draft.
"Dictating is quite useful," she once said, "because you can hear the
dialogue, hear the structure of the sentences, the very subtle and peculiar
usage that is English prose."
The Adam Dalgliesh novels were successfully adapted for television, first by
ITV starring Roy Marsden then, from 2003, by the BBC with Martin Shaw taking the
leading role.
James was in receipt of numerous awards and honorary degrees and served as a
Governor of the BBC. She also kept in touch with the criminal classes by sitting
as a magistrate in London.
She was appointed OBE in 1983 and, nine years later, was created Baroness
James of Holland Park.
Although she rejected the liberal leanings of large parts of the modern
literary world she hid her true political allegiance until 1997 when the
election of Tony Blair prompted her to take the Conservative whip in the
Lords.
In a 2009 speech she attacked what she called "the cult of political
correctness," which, she said, actually raised barriers in society.
"If, in speaking to minorities we have to weigh every word in advance in case
we, inadvertently, give offence, how can we be at ease with each other,
celebrate our common humanity, our shared anxieties and aspirations."
When asked to be a guest editor on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme in
December 2009, she lambasted Mark Thompson, the Corporation's Director General
over the high salaries received by senior BBC executives.
As Thompson, not the most able communicator, stumbled and fell, the noble
baroness deftly twisted her knife which, according to a Sunday Times review,
"left him filleted like a fish."
Her performance prompted regular Today presenter Evan Davis to comment that
"she should not be guest editing, she should be permanently presenting the
programme.
While she took great satisfaction from the crafting of her novels James
admitted that writing did not always come easily to her.
"There are moments when I'm rather reluctant to get started; the sort of day
when even cleaning the stove seems an agreeable thing to be doing rather than
start writing. But on the whole it is a labour of love."
Speaking to the BBC last November, the author said she was hard at work on a
new detective novel.
"It does seem important to write one more," she said, but added: "I think it
is very important to know when to stop."
