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Several years ago, the Bodleian Library asked P D James if she would care to write a book about detective fiction in aid of the library. At the time, James was working on THE PRIVATE PATIENT and had to delay the undertaking for several years. The present slender volume is the result of that original request. Reading it, one suspects that were it not for her charitable impulse, James would not have taken on the project at all for there is little here that sounds as if she were burning to say it. She defines "detective fiction" rather narrowly, as a branch of the English novel that could only come into being with the establishment of a regular police force. In her view, it is essentially a quite conservative genre, "seeing crime, violence, and social chaos as an aberration, virtue and good order as the norm for which all reasonable people strive, and which confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible and moral universe." Even if we confine ourselves to Golden Age mysteries, which do take up much of James's attention, the description is not absolutely accurate. Did those who voraciously consumed the puzzle novels of the 1930s as Europe lurched painfully to disaster really believe they lived in the universe James describes or did they only wish they might? James singles out four women authors of the period for careful attention - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. Her comments on Agatha Christie have already given rise to distress in some quarters though they are certainly far from uncivil. Along with many other readers, the Baroness notes the improbabilities of certain of Christie's murder methods and plot devices, the frequent thinness of characterization, and, most tellingly, the absence of a genuine sense of evil in a genre that would seem to rely on it. Her touchstone for all of these novelists is the moment the corpse is discovered. Too often for Christie, she maintains, the body is a simple inconvenience, whereas for the other three, it represents a terrible and shocking rupture in the fabric of everyday life that the discoverer will not soon get over. James views these four women as indicators of social change in the detective novel, though in truth, she makes less of a case for it than she might have. All four, she notes, had inherited the social consequences of the Great War, which had left so many women "surplus" as the unlovely phrase of the time had it, unwed and unweddable, due to the deaths or catastrophic war injuries of the men of their generation. Three of these four did indeed marry, though only one of them apparently happily; three of the group wrote series which featured fantasy marriages between upper-class or aristocratic men and accomplished, artistic women. But none of them managed to imagine an independent female detective - we had to wait for Cordelia Gray for that, though James is too modest to point it out directly. All four of these women had their secrets, though I am not sure what they might have been in Allingham's case. Still James, herself a private person, observes that they were successful in guarding them until after their deaths, when all secrets "fall prey to the insistent curiosity of the living." Certain James is giving nothing much away here in terms of the influence of these writers on her own work, though she does admit to learning from their example not to create too bizarre a hero in Adam Dalgliesh (named, I was enchanted to learn, after her high school English teacher). Perhaps to avoid offence, James touches only lightly on more modern tendencies in detective fiction. But perhaps she forbears from comment because much of modern detective fiction does not fit into her fairly strict set of definitions. Readers today, I suspect, turn to crime novels, at least the best ones, less to escape the real world than to find a means of imaginatively coping with it. Our is not a "moral universe" that can be restored to order by the application of reason, nor, I suspect, has it ever been so. And it is for this reason that the often vexed distinction between crime fiction and "literary" novels continues to erode.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2010
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