The Clinical World of P. D. James

Abstract

The prominence (and even pre-eminence) of women authors of detective fiction is neither unusual nor particularly significant, but the emergence of an accomplished writer of any subgenre is worth attention. As the Golden Age of Mystery Writing, that halcyon period between the two world wars, has long since vanished, publishers and reviewers have been lavish in passing down the mantles of the royalty of that era (whether Dorothy L. Sayers’, or Agatha Christie’s, or even Ngaio Marsh’s) to members of the newer generation. The renaissance of excellent and original crime fiction during the last two decades in England should eventually tarnish the significance of that artificial Golden Age, and among this new generation (Nicholas Freeling, Ruth Rendell, Colin Dexter, Peter Lovesey) P. D. James may well reign supreme. Her seven novels to date (Cover Her Face, A Mind to Murder, Unnatural Causes, Shroud for a Nightingale, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, The Black Tower, and Death of an Expert Witness, published between 1962 and 1977) present a body of superior fiction that, as good detective stories invariably do, extends beyond the limitations of the subgenre of crime fiction. The assumption that a wide gulf inevitably exists between all ‘serious’ writing and the writing of detective novels has long been open to question: inept writing is equally bad in every fictional format, and good crime fiction ranks with some of the best fiction, usually because it transcends the basic requirements of the format.