![]() Her 1992 work, Children of Men was a dystopian fantasy that focused on the results of mass infertility. She was also endearingly ready to switch genres. While her murders were sometimes brutal ‒ in Shroud for a Nightingale, for instance, where a victim was poisoned through a hospital feeding tube before a shocked audience - her murderers were proud, self-possessed, intelligent: worthy adversaries to Dalgliesh. No psychopathic lunatics who hated their mothers or serial killers who chained women up in their dungeons. For motives, James thankfully stuck to the four Ls of classic detective fiction: love, lust, lucre, and loathing. And underpinning all that were James’s incredible backdrops ‒ country manors, hospitals, courts of law ‒ all sketched in convincing detail, drawing from her own experiences as a hospital administrator and, later, working in the Home Office. ![]() James’s early novels featured Cordelia Gray, one of the first women detectives, in the aptly named An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Then there was Kate Miskin, the working-class girl who moved from council estate to Dalgliesh’s right hand woman. The poetry-loving, solitary Adam Dalgliesh, of course, was the thinking woman’s crumpet, long before the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch came along. It was her characters and settings that will live after her. Timeless characters And yet her themes were irrelevant. Believing readers preferred male authors, she used her initials instead of her real names, Phyllis Dorothy. In her later novels, she covered nuclear power, drug smugglers, the NHS, and legal services. But James broke away with her first Dalgliesh novel, Cover Her Face, exploring illegitimate pregnancy. When she wrote her first novel in 1962, women writers wrote “cosies”, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Christie herself. For years now literary critics have commented on how James transcended the conventions of detective fiction. Then I read my first James, and discovered that detective fiction could be as ambitious, dark, and poignant as any Booker winning novel. Until then, detective fiction for me ‒ like for so many of us ‒ was Agatha Christie: light, cosy, quick reads. I was in my teens when I read my first James. She was a writer of detective fiction, but for those of us who read her obsessively, she was so much more. ![]() PD James died on Thursday, November 27, at 94, having written 20 books.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |