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Knowing P D James as a great fellow enthusiast for the novels of Anthony Trollope (James is a member of the London Trollope Society and has presented talks to them), when I find a James novel featuring an archdeacon, a warden, a church college created in a past century with funds donated by a local benefactor, some powerful adversaries attempting to change drastically the hallowed traditions of the institution, and religious participants choosing sides, I know I'm about to read a novel influenced by Trollope's Barchester series. Not that the former is a copy of the latter – far from it. Rather, it is that the setting and atmosphere are right, the timing is well measured, and the characters are carefully constructed with a view toward third dimensional reality. Trollope's Barchester was not, however, created for murder (although he occasionally wrote a book where a mysterious homicide occurred, such as AN EYE FOR AN EYE or PHINEAS REDUX), while James's ability to create descriptions of murder scenes is one of the hallmarks of her novels. In DEATH IN HOLY ORDERS, Dalgliesh is asked to look into the death of a young ordinand of St Anselm's Theological College in Norfolk, be it accident, suicide, or murder. Even before Dalgliesh arrives, another person, a woman who writes in her diary that she recently noted something suspicious, is murdered in a way that makes her death look like natural causes. An East Anglican clergyman's son himself, Dalgliesh has been acquainted with the school since childhood, and he looks forward to his informal stay there. But on his first night in a cottage next to the church, a visiting archdeacon is brutally murdered, and Dalgliesh must send formally for his team from London. The archdeacon, a severe man, had been a leading voice in wanting to abolish the college and sell two extremely valuable art works. He had also been hated by some of the school's staff and students for various other past acts, such as being highly instrumental in securing a prison sentence for a staff member who molested young boys. Dalgliesh's investigation leads to a lukewarm love interest between himself and Emma, a lovely young lecturer from Cambridge giving a seminar at the college. The investigation reveals an incestuous love relation between a college handyman and his half sister, plays up the disappearance of another visitor, an ailing police inspector at the college for a mental rest, and shows a split among both staff and students in those who believe in a traditional god and those who have obtained their positions in spite of the fact that they do not believe in god at all. Being a James book, it is highly literately written. There is especial regard to Trollope, but also frequent mention of other very well known people of letters. At a reading during lunch, one student with particular hatred for the archdeacon, whose wife had died under questionable circumstances, quotes from Trollope's BARCHESTER TOWERS – the passage where Trollope's archdeacon's father, the dying bishop of the diocese, must expire quickly if the archdeacon is to succeed to the bishopric before the government falls in Parliament. James writes: "It was a powerful passage, that proud ambitious son sinking to his knees and praying that he might be forgiven the sin of wishing his father would die." Later the college's warden accuses the student who read the passage of bad behavior to a guest by using a Hamlet ploy: "I must consider whether I can in conscience recommend you for ordination. You must consider whether you are really suited to being a priest." Later Dalgliesh's not-so-educated assistant, Inspector Kate Miskin, reflects on a subordinate who quotes Henry James: "Why can't they send me a sergeant whose idea of a literary challenge is reading Jeffrey Archer?" Chalk up another high success for Baroness James. She was 80 when this book was published in 2000, and she's published two more books since. DEATH IN HOLY ORDERS shows she is still tops in her field. I sometimes wonder of all the myriad books available these days, which will still be read in the next millennium, or even the next century? Not many, I believe, and that's especially true of the mystery genre. But no pantheon of written fiction would be complete in its permanent acquisitions until it had enshrined virtually all of the P D James's works.
Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, January 2007
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