A Mind for Murder: The Passing of P. D. James.

Davis, J. Madison

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ONE OF THE GREAT PLEASURES of teaching in a university can be revisiting particular writings that have become old friends. Dropping by once or twice a year, you find that your friends--or you--have changed slightly, that the familiar things they have said before have taken on new colorings. In the best writings, there are always small things you haven't noticed before and new understandings of phrases you thought were not especially meaningful. You find yourself again engaged in a conversation with a person who lights firecrackers in your mind that pop randomly, inspiring new insights and thoughts.

One such book for me is P. D. James's Talking about Detective Fiction. Like many good books about writing, it is less than two hundred pages and written in a comfortable, conversational tone. It has none of the pomposity or prescriptiveness of many critical books. The author expresses her opinions but doesn't seem to be angered that you might disagree with her, and she earns respect in the clarity and simplicity of her expression. As she was one of the best crime novelists of the past half-century, she would have deserved to be listened to, but "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" is never her attitude. She says in her foreword that this subject is one of the few on which she felt "competent to pontificate." Such modesty is beguiling, even though anyone who has read her knows she knew more than enough to pontificate a flood. At the age of ninety-four, James passed away last November.

Talking about Detective Fiction originated in 2006 when the Bodleian Library at Oxford University asked her to help support its activities by writing a volume on the mystery. Perhaps the idea was inspired by the memory of another influential and never-out-of-print little book on writing, Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster, consisting of a series of lectures he gave at Cambridge University in 1927. James was finishing a novel--probably The Private Patient, her last Adam Dalgliesh novel--but took to the task afterward, publishing it in 2009. I immediately saw that it filled a need in my class for a reading that discussed the "traditional" mystery, as opposed to the variously labeled hardboiled, noir, or American mystery, which was amply represented by Raymond Chandler's brilliant essay "The Simple Art of Murder."

For all their differences, James and Chandler show some interesting parallels. Both were educated in English schools and interested in writing from an early age but postponed it for various reasons. Chandler did not go to college. He did some newspaper work but lacked confidence in his talent and worked as a bookkeeper and accountant before his firing in the Great Depression for drinking and absenteeism compelled him to try selling pulp fiction. Phyllis Dorothy James had a father who did not favor a college education for women, so she worked in a tax office and as a manager for a theater company. She married a physician in 1941, but her husband returned from the war suffering from mental illness. James supported her husband and two daughters by taking a position in the civil service. She attended night school to improve her prospects, and when she decided it was time to write, rose at six to write for two hours before work. She remained in government service until she was fifty-nine. Chandler did not publish his first novel, The Big Sleep, until he was fifty-one; James published Cover Her Face when she was forty-two. Both of them, however, believed that detective fiction had much greater literary potential than was being shown by their contemporaries. And both of them showed they were right.

"When I began Cover Her Face," James told the Guardian, "I didn't foresee a writing career primarily as a crime novelist. However, as I continued with the genre I became increasingly fascinated with its possibilities, and in particular how one could use what some might see as an outworn form to produce a contemporary novel which would provide excitement and mystery and yet say something true about contemporary men and women under the trauma of a police investigation for murder." While she was highly aware of the artificial nature of the traditional, often-called "Golden Age" mystery, she was as aware of the subgenre's many weaknesses. In "The Simple Art of Murder," Chandler ruthlessly trashed the form, particularly eviscerating A. A. Milne's The Red House Mystery as representative of the type. He also pointed out, however, that the traditional mystery was and would continue to be a profitable commodity. There is no getting around the point that the form fulfills readers' need to see order come out of disorder and justice out of evil. This is a particularly Anglo-Saxon fantasy: we shall expose the killer and afterward have our tea as usual. Chandler was one of the writers trying to introduce more realism into the detective novel, to write "one true sentence," as Hemingway put it, but, ironically, a different set of fantasies polluted the honesty, making the hardboiled style often comic. Most portraits of the trench-coated private eye depicted mean streets as far from the corner of Reality and Substance as Milne's red house.

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Reviewers called James (along with Ruth Rendell) a young Agatha Christie, but this provoked her to go beyond being a popular throwback to a "more innocent time," as the cliche puts it. "Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?" Edmund Wilson once asked of Christie's fictional victim and all Golden Age mysteries. Ackroyd, like Mr. Boddy in the game Clue, is invented merely to provide a crime to create a puzzle. As a consequence, who really cares why he was killed? An inheritance? Infidelity? It is merely an excuse. James, on the other hand, strove to put the murder back in murder mystery. Over and over, writers had produced ingenious puzzles but failed to "explore the compulsions and complexities of the murderer's mind," as she put it, or even the devastation and horror that is the result of murder. "That kind of crime writing was dull," she said, "in the sense that it was unrealistic, prettifying and romanticizing murder, but having little to do with real blood-and-guts tragedy. One simply cannot take these as realistic books about murder, about the horror of murder, the tragedy of murder, the harm that murder does." Golden Age writer Dorothy L. Sayers, convinced the problem of concealing the identity of the murderer and revealing his inner self was insoluble, abandoned mystery writing. James saw the possibilities inherent in the form and revitalized it.

She regarded the problems as matters of technique. She retained the tradition of the closed site for the crime scene but often chose institutions, like a psychiatric clinic, a hospital nursing school, a theological college, a plastic surgery clinic, or a retreat for the elite, always incorporating detailed research on how those institutions function now. She retained the traditional "play fair" rule, in which the text conceals none of the essential clues from the reader, but was particularly deft at concealing them. She also retained the "Great Detective," a character who provides a commercial attraction and a story focus. However, she pushed this character toward realism by making him (Adam Dalgliesh) a policeman and poet with an aloof and complex personality. All characters must seem like living, breathing human beings, she demanded, "not pasteboard people to be knocked down in the final chapter." As Stephen Knight remarked after pointing out James's examination of the psychology of criminals, suspects, and aberrant desires in Devices and Desires, "The parsimony of character on which Christies plots depended is replaced by a less simply resolved sense of human complexity."

Perhaps if James had been writing in Chandler's time, he would have found it harder to vilify the traditional mystery. Forms of art often seem to be dying only to be resuscitated by alternative treatments. By thinking of herself as a novelist first, James breathed new life into a popular but in many ways moribund subgenre. Her ability with style surpassed that of many respected literary writers, and her potential range was demonstrated by Children of Men, a science-fiction novel; her two Cordelia Gray mysteries; her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest; and her last novel, Death Comes to Pemberley, a continuation of Pride and Prejudice with a mystery element.

Several years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Phyllis James at a public event in London. She seemed tiny, frail, but consummately gracious, as befit someone who had been honored with the OBE honorary of Baroness James of Holland Park. Some giants are physically quite small. I can hear her and still feel important to be in her presence whenever I open her novels, but especially when I look again into Talking about Detective Fiction.

University of Oklahoma

J. Madison Davis is the author of eight mystery novels, including The Murder of Frau Schutz, an Edgar nominee, and Law and Order: Dead Line. He has also published seven nonfiction books and dozens of short stories and articles, including his crime and mystery column in WLT since 2004.