P. D. James

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Biography

Crime novelist P. D. James was born in Oxford on 3 August 1920, the eldest daughter of an Inland Revenue Official. The family moved to Cambridge when she was 11, where she attended the Cambridge High School for Girls. She worked for the National Health Service (1949-68) and the Civil Service until 1979 when she began to work as a full-time writer. She was a Governor for the BBC (1988-93), and Chairman of the Literature Advisory Panel at both the Arts Council of England (1988-92) and the British Council (1988-93). She was awarded the OBE in 1983 and created a Life Peer (Baroness James of Holland Park) in 1991. Baroness James is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and chaired the Booker Prize Panel of Judges in 1987. She has been President of the Society of Authors since 1997. She has received the following honorary degrees: Doctor of Letters from the Universities of Buckingham 1992; Hertfordshire 1994; Glasgow 1995; Durham 1998, Portsmouth 1999. Doctor of Literature from the University of London 1993; Doctor of the University, Essex 1996. She was made an Associate Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge (1986) and an Honorary Fellow (2000). She is also an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford (1996) and of Girton College, Cambridge (2000).

Her novels include a series of books featuring the Scotland Yard policeman Commander Adam Dalgliesh. Her latest Commander Dalgliesh mystery is The Private Patient (2008).

P. D. James has been awarded major prizes for her crime writing in Great Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia. In 1999 she received the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award for long term achievement. She is published widely overseas including the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Argentina.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Autobiography, Crime, Fiction

Bibliography

Cover Her Face   Faber and Faber, 1962

A Mind to Murder   Faber and Faber, 1963

Unnatural Causes   Faber and Faber, 1967

Shroud for a Nightingale   Faber and Faber, 1971

The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811   (with Thomas A. Critchley)   Constable, 1971

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman   Faber and Faber, 1972

The Black Tower   Faber and Faber, 1975

Death of an Expert Witness   Faber and Faber, 1977

Innocent Blood   Faber and Faber, 1980

The Skull beneath the Skin   Faber and Faber, 1982

A Taste for Death   Faber and Faber, 1986

Devices and Desires   Faber and Faber, 1989

The Children of Men   Faber and Faber, 1992

Original Sin   Faber and Faber, 1994

A Certain Justice   Faber and Faber, 1997

Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography   Faber and Faber, 1999

Death in Holy Orders   Faber and Faber, 2001

The Murder Room   Faber and Faber, 2003

The Lighthouse   Faber and Faber, 2005

The Private Patient   Faber and Faber, 2008

Read about books by P. D. James at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by P. D. James at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1971   Best Novel Award, Mystery Writers of America   Shroud for a Nightingale

1971   Crime Writers' Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction   Shroud for a Nightingale

1973   Mystery Writers of America Best Novel Award   An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

1975   Crime Writers' Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction   The Black Tower

1986   Crime Writers' Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction   A Taste for Death

1986   Mystery Writers of America Best Novel Award   A Taste for Death

1987   Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger   (lifetime achievement award)

1992   Deo Gloria Award   The Children of Men

1999   Grandmaster Award, Mystery Writers of America

2002   WH Smith Literary Award   (shortlist)   Death in Holy Orders

2005   British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year   (shortlist)   The Murder Room

2006   British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year   (shortlist)   The Lighthouse

2006   Crime Writers' Association Short Story Dagger   (shortlist - 'The Part-Time Job')

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Critical Perspective

P. D. James is one of the most successful detective novelists working in Britain today. Her writing has been praised for its sophisticated narrative techniques and its complex and multifaceted characters. These are features not usually associated with such popular literary genre as the detective story. James has actually declared that she prefers the term 'crime novel', thus advocating renewed literary dignity for the genre. Over the years, James claims, the conventions of the detective story have shifted away from their original oversimplifications which always led the good to triumph and the bad to be punished. Because of this generic contrivance, 'in the past, psychological truth was too often sacrificed to the demands of plot' so that the detective story was often classified 'as a subliterary form'. Yet, according to James, 'The modern detective story has moved away from the earlier crudities and simplicities. Crime writers are as concerned as are other novelists with psychological truth and the moral ambiguities of human action.” Influenced by such diverse writers as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, and G. K. Chesterton, James’s fiction is designed to blend 'a genuine mystery with the novel of social realism'.

Such combination is evident in the author’s description of the generic formula behind detective stories: 'What we expect is a central mysterious death, a closed circle of suspects with motive, means and opportunity for the crime, a detective, either amateur or professional, who comes in like an avenging deity to solve it and by the end of the book a solution which the reader should be able to arrive at by logical deduction from clues inserted in the novel with deceptive cunning but essential fairness.' The formula is, of course, behind James’s own novels which are always marked by a stunning awareness of place and characters’ psychology. In her novels, crimes occur within isolated communities of people such as a nurses’ training school (Shroud for a Nightingale, 1971), a publishing house (Original Sin, 1994), a theological college (Death in Holy Orders, 2001) and a museum (The Murder Room, 2003). The distorted relationships within these claustrophobic locales, which function as a microcosm for society as a whole, are as thoroughly investigated by the narrator as are the murders that have affected them by the detective. The victims, generally scheming and ruthless characters, always bring about their own murder because of their sinful lives. Because of her social realist vein, setting is particularly important for James and she has repeatedly acknowledged its importance in creating the atmosphere of menace and suspense required in a crime novel.

Two central protagonists recur in James’s fiction: Adam Dalgliesh, a professional Inspector, and Cordelia Gray, a private working-class investigator. Because Cordelia Gray only appears in two novels: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972); and The Skull beneath the Skin (1982); James is not often credited with the writing of the first modern novel to feature a female detective. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman combines the characterisation of the hard-boiled novel with the structure of the bildungsroman. Like the protagonists in the stories by Hammett, Chandler and Spillane, Cordelia is estranged from society and her role as a detective is often contested. Contrary to what characterised the hard-boiled genre, however, such repeated challenges derive uniquely from Cordelia’s gender, as the title underlines. This is apparent from the very start of the novel when Cordelia’s partner commits suicide, leaving her the unique proprietor of Pryde’s Detective Agency. The policeman who first questions her about Bernie Pryde’s death takes it for granted that she was simply his secretary. Female characters are equally sceptic about Cordelia’s chances to succeed in her job. When she breaks the news of the suicide to the owner of the pub where she used to go with Bernie, the landlady comments: 'You’ll be looking for a new job, I suppose? After all, you can hardly keep the Agency going on your own. It isn’t a suitable job for a woman ... I shouldn’t think your mother would approve of you staying on alone'.  Thus, her achievements celebrate her development into a professional detective from the amateur status she has at the beginning of the novel. After such a determined start, feminist critics were disappointed to see Cordelia Gray dropped for 10 years and revived only in The Skull Beneath the Skin, where she appears inept and unsuitable for her job. At the end of this second novel, Cordelia is hired to find a lost Siamese kitten: '... she had a job waiting for her ... she didn’t despise its simplicities; almost she welcomed them. Animals didn’t torment themselves with the fear of death, or torment you with the fear of their dying. They didn’t burden you with their psychological problems ... They didn’t try to murder you'. Such conclusion seems indeed to state that investigating murders is an unsuitable job for a woman. In her essay 'Gray Areas: P. D. James’s Unsuiting of Cordelia', Nicola Nixon has claimed that James’s belittling of Cordelia is the result of the author’s own distancing from feminism.

Contrary to Cordelia, the widower Adam Dalgliesh rises ever-higher in his career through the novels, attaining the status of Commander and even of published poet. In spite of his clever intuitions, Dalgliesh is fully conscious of his fallibility and James is careful not to romanticise the figure of the detective. 'Detectives', she argues, 'are far less creatures of fantasy or romantic wish-fulfilment. They tend to be professionals doing a difficult job in a modern world.' While Dalgliesh is a liberal agnostic, P. D. James has made no secret of her Christian and conservative views which have grown stronger with the years and which, some critics claim, put her out of touch with the contemporary society she is so eager to portray. In his review of The Murder Room, Mark Lawson has pointed out that 'when reading James, you do find yourself nostalgic for crack cocaine, anal sex and people calling each other "mutha"'. It has also been noted that, while James usually refrains from mentioning contemporary controversial events, when she does so (as with the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in Death In Holy Orders), it is to impose a conservative moral on them. Yet, masked under P. D. James’s genteel settings and dialogues, her novels explore the darker and disturbing instincts of the human mind with a complexity that defies political partisanship. James conforms to the definition of her homonym Henry that the purpose of a novel should be 'To help the human heart to know itself'. However, to her, such knowledge entails the disturbing admission that the human heart regards murder with fascination. 

Luca Prono, 2004

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Author statement

'All fiction is an attempt to create order out of disorder and to make sense of personal experience. But the classical detective story does this within its own established conventions; a central mystery which is usually but not necessarily a murder, a closed circle of suspects, a detective, either professional or amateur, who comes in like an avenging deity to solve the crime, and a final solution which the reader should be able to arrive at himself by logical deduction from the clues. This apparent formula writing is capable of accommodating a remarkable variety of books and talents. Within the formal constraints of the detective novel I try to say something true about men and women under the stress of the ultimate crime and about the society in which they live.'

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Faber and Faber Ltd 3 Queen Square London  WC1N 3AU Tel: +44 (0) 20 7465 0045 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7465 0034 E-mail: gapublicity@faber.co.uk http://www.faber.co.uk

Agent Greene & Heaton Ltd 37 Goldhawk Road London  W12 8QQ England Tel: +44 (0)20 8749 0315 Fax: +44 (0)20 8749 0318 E-mail: info@greeneheaton.co.uk http://www.greeneheaton.co.uk

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