"After I had progressed in my
craft I came to believe that it is possible to
write within the conventions of a classical
detective story and still be regarded as a
serious novelist and say something true about
men and women and the society in which they
live."
—P.D. James
Throughout her writing career
P.D. James has produced mysteries that have
transcended traditional molds. She maintains the
elements of the classical detective story in her
novels, yet at the same time she provides her
readers with realistic characters and
well-researched plots and settings.
Born Phyllis Dorothy James in
Oxford, England in 1920, P.D. James did not
begin her first novel until she was in her late
thirties. Before that, she was an administrator
for England’s National Health Service and later
a principal administrator for the British Home
Office’s criminal policy department. Both
positions provided her with a wealth of
knowledge which she later put to good use in her
highly successful mystery novels.
In 1962 P.D. James’ first
novel, Cover Her Face, was published. In
that novel she introduced the sensitive,
taciturn, and hardworking Inspector Adam
Dalgliesh, a character who has since won her
legions of fans around the world. She went on to
feature Dalgliesh in twelve other novels, most
of which have made the bestseller lists. In 1983
Anglia Television began successfully adapting
the Dalgliesh novels for a television series
starring the incomparable Roy Marsden, which
quickly became a hit. In 1972 P.D. James wrote
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman featuring
the independent-minded and resourceful amateur
private detective Cordelia Gray. That novel also
spawned a television series in the UK which,
like the Dalgliesh series, was broadcast in the
United States on WGBH’s Mystery!
program. In 2000 she published a
candid and highly acclaimed autobiography called
A Time to Be Earnest.
In 1991, P.D. James was created
Baroness James of Holland Park. Over the years
she has received almost every prestigious
writing award and honor available. In 1987 she
was awarded the Diamond Dagger, a lifetime
achievement award presented by the Crime Writers
Association, and in 1999 she was named a Grand
Master by the Mystery Writers of America. Since
1997, she has been the president of the Society
of Authors. She currently divides her time
between London and Oxford. Her latest novel,
The Lighthouse, will be released this
November by Knopf.
AFG: So, tell us about your new book that
is going to be coming out in November, The
Lighthouse.
PDJ: Well, it is another Adam Dalgliesh
novel. In some ways, it is just a continuation
of the last, but only as far as the relationship
with the woman he is in love with, Emma, is
concerned. Otherwise, it is a complete story in
its own right. It is set on an island called
Combe Island, off the Cornish coast. This island
has a very bloodstained history because it was
the home of pirates in the 17th or 18th century.
It is privately owned and it offers respite for
many overstressed men and women in positions of
high authority who really require privacy and
guaranteed security. People who are Prime
Ministers can go there without their security
men. It is absolutely secure, but of course the
peace is violated when one of the distinguished
visitors is very bizarrely murdered. So Adam
Dalgliesh is called in to solve the mystery
quickly and he has got a depleted team with him.
They are at the moment rather wound up with
their own problems. He is worried about the
future with Emma, and Detective Inspector Kate
Miskin has some emotional problems. There is a
very ambitious Anglo-Indian sergeant, Francis
Benton-Smith, who was in the last book, now
working on the case and there are difficulties
with that relationship as well. They begin their
investigation with this very bizarre murder and
then something happens—which I won’t tell you
because it’s rather a secret. This places
Dalgliesh in even greater danger than he is from
the murderer and of course, as usual with me,
there is a second death.
AFG: That sounds very interesting. Do you
find that you are more popular in the US or in
the UK?
PDJ: Well, I do not think one can say,
because the United States is a much larger
market, so you cannot just compare sales. You’d
have to think of sales in relation to
population. I think it is pretty well about the
same, but the sales in the United States are
very, very large.
AFG: I know it is a huge market. The
interesting thing I’ve noticed is that readers
in the United States tend to like traditional
mysteries whereas in England they tend to like
more of the hard-boiled, hard-edged,
psychological mysteries.
PDJ: Yes. And that is very interesting,
isn’t it? That is not what you would expect at
all. It seems to me that the best American
writing in this genre has been from the
hard-boiled school. One thinks of Hammett and
Chandler as being very fine novelists, quite
apart from writing crime novels. I mean, they
have had some influence on fiction generally. So
these are very, very fine writers and one would
imagine that their kind of hard-boiled fiction
would be the more popular, but I gather it’s
not. People do really rather like the cozy
mysteries over there in the United States. It is
interesting because my books are very, very
English. Well, obviously they are. They are
written by an English woman and they are all set
in England. And they deal in many ways with the
sort of social and political problems in the
country at the moment, because they are very
much set in the present time. Yet despite being
so English, they do sell remarkably well in the
United States. So people do not seem to worry
about them being so English. They rather welcome
the fact, I think.
AFG: I know what you mean. I live about
25 minutes away from Detroit and I do not want
to read a mystery about murders in
Detroit.
PDJ: I think I understand this
absolutely. W.H. Auden loved detective stories
and he wrote quite a famous essay—I think it’s
called "The Guilty Vicarage"—about them. He said
that he liked the mystery to be set in a small
town or a village. He wanted a contrast between
order, goodness, hierarchy, and normality and
this extraordinarily disruptive crime. He said
the body on the drawing room carpet is much more
interesting than the bullet-riddled bodies down
Raymond Chandler’s mean streets. I think that
probably sums up your attitude. I think it sums
up the response of very many thousands of
people. They would rather have the body on the
drawing room carpet.
AFG: That’s true. Don’t you think that
the mystery novel affords writers the
opportunity to get certain points across to
their readers which they may not be able to do
with a more general novel? It is such a popular
genre and readers generally will stay with a
mystery and read it through to the end. Whereas
someone may pick up a novel by, let’s say,
Martin Amis or some other author and not be able
to get through it. So in the end, sometimes,
general fiction novelists may not always be able
to deliver what they have to say.
PDJ: Yes, I think that is very true. And
also I think that you can learn far more about
the social mores of the age in which the mystery
is written than you can from more pretentious
literature. I mean, if you are thinking of the
1920s, the so-called Golden Age [of mysteries],
and want to know what it was like to live in
England at that time, you can get a much better
story from mysteries than you can from
prize-winning novels. It is very interesting to
me. The novels which have won very prestigious
prizes over the last fifteen years are not
available in paperback at the bookstores
anymore. But when you look at crime novels, then
you see a whole two or three shelves full of
Agatha Christie. She is still there, and this is
quite astonishing, really. Isn’t it?
AFG: What do you think of Agatha
Christie?
PDJ: Obviously, I wouldn’t rate her as an
important or even a very good novelist, but I
rate her very highly as a fabricator of mystery.
I think her ingenuity is absolutely
extraordinary and her style is very serviceable.
It suited the books very well. The dialogue is
crisp and good. The books move at a fast pace
and they are very, very readable and there is a
kind of universality about them. She is read,
really, all over the world. She appeals just as
much in China as she does in the States and in
England or in Scandinavia.
AFG: Tell me about the writers that
influenced you when you were growing up.
PDJ: Oh, I think undoubtedly Jane Austen,
Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and probably in
crime writing, Dorothy L. Sayers. I think I can
see the influence of those, but particularly I
think of Evelyn Waugh and Jane Austen.
AFG: What is you favorite Evelyn Waugh
book?
PDJ: Well I think the Waugh trilogy
[Men at Arms (1952), Officers and
Gentlemen (1955), The End of the
Battle (1961)] is fine, but I think A
Handful of Dust, possibly.
AFG: Decline and Fall is my
favorite and I like Scoop.
PDJ: They are so funny. But of course,
stylistically, he was very brilliant—very
brilliant!
AFG: Oh, I know! I remember in
Scoop the newspaper was called The
Daily Beast. I mean, that was a stroke of
genius.
PDJ: [laughs] Yes. Oh, I think he was a
marvelous writer.
AFG: I know you’re a fan of Graham Greene
and so am I.
PDJ: Oh, yes. I think I have read most of
him. I just do not know which really would be my
favorite. I am just sort of thinking. I suppose
Brighton Rock really stands out as being
the tour de force.
AFG: I think, unfortunately, Graham
Greene is underrated.
PDJ: Well, I think he is. There are
passions in literature as there are passions in
everything else, and very often after a writer
dies there is a period during which he is not as
highly regarded as he was during his life, and
then they [become popular] again. I remember
that when I was a girl no one thought very much
of Rudyard Kipling, who was felt to be an
imperialist and just always lauding the empire.
I think he was a marvelous writer and a
marvelous poet and I think that people have
begun to realize that.
AFG: So, was Dalgliesh modeled on anyone
you knew?
PDJ: No. No, he isn’t—no one I know at
all. I sort of created him, I suppose, from my
own imagination. But it was fairly easy. I
decided he should be from Scotland Yard and I
gave him the qualities that I admire either in
men or women, because I thought that if I did
not give him what I admired, then I would get
bored with him. I was also careful not to make
him too eccentric. We know that Agatha Christie
got rather fed up with Poirot and that she
wished she had created someone who was not quite
so bizarre and, certainly, Dorothy L. Sayers
changed Lord Peter Wimsey quite considerably
between the first and the last book. So I
thought I must try and make a credible
professional detective and let him develop as I
write the books.
AFG: So, does Roy Marsden look like the
Dalgliesh you envisioned when you originally
wrote the first novel?
PDJ: No. Not at all.
AFG: So in your mind’s eye do you see a
different person when you are writing it?
PDJ: Oh, yes.
AFG: Did your experience in hospital
administration and forensics help you with some
of the plots?
PDJ: Oh, yes. Very much. Shroud for a
Nightingale is set in a nurse training
school in the hospital world. I do not think I
could have written that if I had not worked in
the health service. And of course the second
one, A Mind to Murder, was set in a
psychiatric clinic. I was administering five
outpatient psychiatric clinics when I wrote
that. Then when I went to the Home Office and I
was concerned with the forensic science
service—I mean, I am not a scientist; I was only
concerned as a bureaucrat—that gave me all the
background to write Death of an Expert
Witness. So the working experience really
has been very valuable indeed.
