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Obituary:
P.D. James Phyllis
Dorothy (P.D.) James, Baroness James of Holland Park, crime writer,
died on
November 27th, aged 94 Dec 6th 2014
| From the print edition AS HE neared
the house, down the quiet autumnal streets of Holland Park in west
London,
Commander Adam Dalgliesh felt a shiver of apprehension. It was the same
slightly nervous curiosity he experienced when entering a country
church,
pushing at the heavy door to find darkness, sweet with incense, that
filled
nave and chancel but also held, at its heart, a mystery. That was, he
knew, an
analogy his creator P.D. James would relish. The season
was her favorite, when the light faded early and council leaf-carts
lurked like
tumbrels in the parks between the borders of brown, withered plants.
Her
Regency house stood white and elegant among the almost leafless trees.
He rang
the bell, noticing as he did so that every lower window was
crisscrossed with a
metal grille. This world-famous author of 18 murder mysteries evidently
feared
for her own security. The warmth of her welcome, too, was preceded by
the sound
of a key turning several times in the lock. Greetings
exchanged, she led him to the drawing room for tea and shortbread. The
room was
as elegant as the house, white woodwork contrasting with sage-green
walls and
comfortably upholstered chairs in a William Morris pattern. Framed
photographs
showed her with George and Barbara Bush and in her ermine-trimmed robes
at the
House of Lords, where since 1991 she was an energetic member. A walnut
cabinet
housed her collection of Staffordshire figures, and one bookcase held a
complete set of “Notable British Trials”. He looked for the first
editions of
Jane Austen, her favorite author, whose work she had happily imitated
in 2011
in “Death Comes to Pemberley”. But then he turned his detective’s
attention to
the woman herself. She sat
upright, small and spry, with no need for the stick that rested by her
side.
Her hands, folded in her lap, were strongly veined, almost tough. An
Indian
silk scarf was carefully draped around a scrawny neck. She wore a heavy
pendant
and a large ring, each of which appeared to be a Victorian memento
mori. From
beneath her silver hair she gazed at him with an expression that
combined
intelligence, good humor and, vitally, detachment. These were eyes that
could
look unflinchingly on the corrugated pipes in a slit throat, on the
gooseflesh
of rigor mortis and on the strangely colourful coils and pouches pulled
from
the human abdomen during a post mortem. She had worked, after all, for
some
years in the forensics department at the Home Office. Long before that,
too,
she had been fascinated by death, looking for drowned corpses on the
way to
school and wondering whether Humpty Dumpty really fell, or was pushed.
She had
often noticed, as Dalgliesh had, an expression of faint surprise on the
faces
of the dead. The drawing
room, he knew, was not her sanctum. That was the kitchen, where every
morning
after tea and bath she would spread out her notes and dictionaries and
weave,
in black biro, the intricacies of a violent crime. Rising early was a
habit.
Her arduous marriage, to a man who spent his last two decades shuttling
between
psychiatric hospitals and left her, at 44, a widow, had required her to
keep
working full-time in hospital administration, as a nurse and then in
policing
policy. Her books were a snatched joy until, in 1980, “Innocent Blood”
made her
a star. Stiletto and razor The business
of writing, the obsessive, daily observation of people and things, the
meticulous plotting, remained a private matter. She and Dalgliesh did
not
disturb each other’s privacy. Since 1962, when he had first swung out
of a
police car in “Cover her Face”, she had never described his sex life
nor quoted
his poetry, an odd sideline for a detective. She had let slip, however,
that he
was the man she would like to have been. The poetry was part of it, for
she
felt crime fiction was undervalued as literature. She wrote it
differently,
using the confined English settings she knew but introducing, as well
as bloody
disruption, exact science, note-perfect backgrounds and exquisitely
worked
motivation. The room in
which they now sat held clues enough to her activities. On a table
behind her
stood a bust of veiled Night, or Sleep, or Death, with closed eyes. On
a small
desk by the window lay a magnifying glass and a long stiletto, perhaps
the very
one she had used for the barrister’s murder in “A Certain Justice”. She
had
also been photographed admiring a switchblade razor, cousin perhaps to
the
Bellingham used for the near-decapitation of an MP in “A Taste for
Death”. But
then almost anything might be a weapon, including, not least, a pair of
hands
pressed forcefully over the cornu and cartilage of the thyroid. And
almost
anything—a button, a fibre, a crumb—could be the single piece of
physical
evidence that would solve the crime. Their
conversation passed so quickly, in a gale of shared experience and
enjoyment,
that Dalgliesh did not notice the darkness falling. He saw it only when
his
hostess, drawing on the phrases of the 1662 Prayer Book deeply stored
in her
head, mentioned the “perils and dangers of this night”, and briskly
drew the
damask curtains. The pages of his notebook were empty, save for a
dusting of
sugar from the shortbread. He had had no need to write anything, since
they
inhabited each other’s minds; and as much as she had created him he had
also,
perhaps, created her.
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