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THE QUEEN OF CRIME: P.D. JAMES October 5, 1986, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 6; Page 48, Column 5; Magazine Desk
Byline:BY JULIAN SYMONS; Julian Symons, a British crime writer and critic, is the author of ''Bloody Murder,'' a history of the crime novel.
Lead:THE BODIES were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18 September by Miss Emily Wharton, a sixty-five-year-old spinster of the parish of St Matthew's in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged ten.''
These are the opening lines of P. D. James's new book, ''A Taste for Death,'' and they are typical of her work in their factual exactness, their brisk presentation of what we need to know about two characters who are there not just to discover corpses. The bodies, of a tramp and a Minister of Parliament, are in the Little Vestry of the church. The scene is horrific, the room a shambles, blood everywhere. And it is all garishly lit by the long fluorescent tube that disfigures the Little Vestry's ceiling. Brightening the blood, making the figures seem unreal, the ghastly light is the particular P. D. James touch that makes the reader shudder a little.
Text:''A Taste for Death'' is the longest, most ambitious and the best of Phyllis James's 10 novels. Her first, ''Cover Her Face,'' was written 25 years ago under the influence of the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, and for a while James stayed in the gentlemanly (or ladylike) tradition of the British detective story. She broke away from it decisively in 1980 with ''Innocent Blood,'' which contains no puzzle element at all. And now, in the new book, she has blended a whodunit and a fully-realized modern novel. In Britain it has been given the long, respectful reviews generally accorded only a major novelist. In the United States, Alfred A. Knopf will publish it on Nov. 1, and it is already a main Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and has been sold to Warner Books for mass-market reprint for a sum said to be in the high six figures.
The Queen of Crime - a title awarded by publishers, which she would never dream of claiming for herself - lives in an elegant flat-fronted house in London's Holland Park. There, in a partly covered patio garden, we talked about her books, her life, her feelings about detective stories, and about Adam Dalgliesh, the central character in most of her novels. Dalgliesh, who began as a detective chief-inspector, and by her sixth novel, ''The Black Tower,'' had risen through the ranks to commander, appears once again in ''A Taste for Death.'' He is a dedicated professional policeman, supremely efficient, sensitive but with reticence verging on coldness in personal matters. In James's first book, we are told that Dalgliesh's wife died in childbirth, his infant son shortly thereafter. His withdrawal from any subsequent emotional commitment has been almost total. Throughout another book, ''Unnatural Causes,'' he is unable to bring himself to propose marriage to a woman he loves, and when at last he does so, it is too late. She has already written a letter saying no. Dalgliesh is also a respected poet, which substantiates the complexity that makes him unique among the professional detectives of crime fiction.
I wondered how much of all this P. D. James had initially conceived. Had Dalgliesh been based on anybody she knew?
''Absolutely not,'' she says. ''Except for the surname, which was that of my English mistress at school. An odd spelling, isn't it? People often get it wrong. I used him in my first book, and I was chiefly concerned then with creating a detective quite unlike the Lord Peter Wimsey kind of gentlemanly amateur, though I admire Dorothy Sayers. I didn't imagine that years later people would be asking questions about his origin and his background. But I knew I wanted a real professional. And Dalgliesh, no doubt about it, is a good cop.''
About his remoteness, she says, ''I wanted him to be something more than just a policeman, you see, a complex and sensitive human being. Perhaps that's partly why I also made him a well-known poet, though I've only dared to quote a few lines he wrote, and that was in an early book. What else? I wanted him to be quite obviously very intelligent. I hope I'm not any kind of snob, but if I am - and I suppose we're all snobbish about something or other - I'm an intellectual snob. I do like clever people, and I admire intellect.''
Reminded that she had said once that nothing seems to her more sexually attractive than intelligence and talent, she gives her hearty laugh. ''Yes,'' she says. ''I'd stick to that. I could never have fallen in love with a man who was handsome but stupid. Perhaps Adam Dalgliesh is an idealized version of what I'd have liked to be if I'd been born a man.'' I F ONE WERE CREAT-ing a character sketch of Phyllis Dorothy James purely from a reading of her books, it would be of a cool, collected figure, friendly enough, but probably difficult to know and talk to. But that is not the person who opens the door when you go up the steps and ring the bell of her house. She smiles, arms outstretched in greeting, and says, ''How lovely to see you, dear.'' Fellow crime writers, asked for a word or phrase to describe her, said ''hospitable,'' ''unpretentious,'' ''marvelously extrovert,'' ''wonderfully friendly,'' all of which are on the mark. Yet they do not convey her utter lack of affectation and pretension, or the way she radiates good nature and pleasure in whatever she is doing, whether it is cooking for a large party (''I'm a good plain cook, emphasis on the plain''), talking to fans at a book signing or discussing intricate points of criminal detail at a conference of mystery writers.
She is a little under average height, with a high color, mobile features, observant eyes. A ready and excellent conversationalist, she is inclined to call friends and even acquaintances, like myself, ''dear.'' She is the kind of person any friend would consult in trouble, with the certainty that she would offer practical, sensible, emotionally sympathetic advice and help. If that makes her seem an unlikely creator of Adam Dalgliesh, one can imagine her having a strong fellow-feeling for her second-string detective, the private investigator Cordelia Gray, a courageous but vulnerable-seeming young woman who appears in two previous books.
''A Taste for Death'' introduces the prickly but likable Inspector Kate Miskin, who seems destined to have a part in a future novel. In James's books, women of very different ages and social class are (Continued on Page 54) treated with understanding and in considerable depth.
The London house is sizable, with four bedrooms, a handsome drawing room housing her considerable collection of ''Famous Trials'' - all taken from courtroom transcripts -and a pleasant kitchen leading out to the patio garden. The author lives in the house alone, except for two recently acquired Burmese kittens. Her emotional life is strongly linked to her two daughters and their families -she has five grandchildren - who often come to stay.
''It suits me to live alone,'' she says. ''I sometimes think of turning the top floor into a self-contained flat and having a lodger, but I'm not sure I'd want somebody coming in and out. I really don't like anybody about when I'm working.''
Her habits, like those of many writers, are slightly obsessive. If she is writing, she gets up at 7, makes a pot of tea, settles down to work until midday. Then she shops, goes for an hour's walk, perhaps has a friend to lunch. If her grandchildren are visiting, she plays canasta with them in the evening; if not, she watches television.
Does this portrait of her seem altogether like the work of those Victorian painters who made any subject appear to be a picture in a stained-glass window? Certainly there is another P. D. James, the woman whose imagination sparks off some of the most memorable scenes in the literature of crime.
In her 1971 novel ''Shroud for a Nightingale,'' for example, the death of a student nurse during a demonstration of intragastric feeding provides one of the most effectively chilling scenes in any crime story. It had occurred to her as a possible method for murder when she witnessed just such a demonstration.
''That was an exception,'' she says. ''My books hardly ever start with an ingenious method of murder. That's not the kind of thing that particularly interests me. Almost always the idea for a book comes to me as a reaction to a particular place and setting. Sometimes it's East Anglia, where I love the wide skies, the marshes, the estuaries, the little villages. Not pretty, but full of character. I like to create in books some kind of opposition between places and characters. 'Death of an Expert Witness' was set at a forensic science laboratory in East Anglia, and I got great pleasure out of placing a crime in that strongly institutional setting, and contrasting the discipline of the institution with the undisciplined - anarchic, if you like - nature of murder, and showing how it affected the people.''
She says that, as a result, her books are often long in the preparation. It has been four years since her most-previous book, ''The Skull Beneath the Skin,'' was published. Before sitting down to write, she spends considerable time going around with a notebook. The length of her research varies, but ''I always seem to know,'' she says, when the time comes to begin writing, which she does partly by hand, partly on the typewriter, and finally by dictating the whole thing onto a recording machine for a typist.
S HE WRITES AND SPEAKS with much affection about East Anglia and has a cottage there, in the charming small town of Southwold, but still spends most of her time in London.
She says: ''I love Southwold, but I'm an urban person. I'm at home in London, though of course there are things I dislike.'' She gestures at the bars on the windows in her basement dining room. ''Those, for instance. Unfortunately, they're necessary, and so is the burglar alarm. I hate that, and I hate the fact that I can't walk up Notting Hill, five minutes away, in the evenings without the likelihood of being accosted. I dislike violence, I'm frightened of it, and life in this country has become much more violent in recent years. There's an underlying unrest, and it's no longer rational.''
Rationality, the desire for order and reason, is something she values very highly, in small and large things equally. One woman interviewer watched in surprise as Phyllis James, after giving her coffee in the kitchen, briskly put on rubber gloves and washed up the coffee cups. She has no car. (''Where would I put it? This house doesn't have a garage. I wouldn't want to leave it in the street.'') Normally, she travels by (Continued on Page 58) train and arrives much too early at the station. The forensic and other details in her books are accurate, and a feeling for rationality and common sense is behind several of her public activities. She tends to play down the importance of these, but she is, at present, chairman of the management committee that runs the British Society of Authors, and is also a justice of the peace, which in England is a local magistrate. These are time-consuming activities.
Asked if she enjoys them, she says: ''I don't think 'enjoy' is quite the word. Perhaps I enjoy the Society of Authors. One meets interesting people. But much of the time spent on the bench is incredibly dull. I regard that as a public service and think I'm quite good at it. I hope I'm not prejudiced, and I believe I'm compassionate. I'm in favor of the greatest possible intellectual freedom in our lives, but I do also very much believe in the rule of law. The two things are not contradictory. In spite of the support the state gives the poor, I'm afraid we're individually less compassionate than we were in my youth. I don't want to romanticize the past. Don't think that. When I was a child, at Ludlow in Shropshire, I saw children going to school without coats or shoes. There was real poverty in a lot of homes. Nobody would want to go back to that. And yet, you know, I'm sure people were kinder to each other then.''
Are her feelings political? A laugh. ''I don't think so. In my time I've voted for all three political parties, Conservative, Labor and Liberal.''
Her love of the rational extends to literature. Her favorite novelist is Jane Austen, whom she rereads every year, and she names Trollope and George Eliot among others who appeal. She has recently become immersed in Henry James. It is no surprise, perhaps, that she doesn't much care for Dickens: ''I suppose I'm a classicist, not a romantic. I don't really like the caricatures he makes of characters.''
Among modern novelists: ''I like Penelope Lively, Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner. I think C. P. Snow's 'The Masters' is a fine novel, and I respect the whole achievement of the 'Strangers and Brothers' books. And I admire Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, admiration rather than enjoyment, although I think Waugh was a wonderful stylist.'' Joyce and his followers, modern American novelists? No. Her taste is for literal realism, not caricatural exaggeration or modernist experiments.
An Anglican, not a Roman Catholic, she has referred to herself on occasion as ''quite a religious person.'' She goes to church not every Sunday, but sometimes.
Usually, she talks briskly, with very few hesitations or qualifications, but asked exactly what does she believe in, she answers slowly and carefully:
''I think a religious sense is like an esthetic sense. You're born with it or you aren't, and I don't mean that those born without it are less good people. I can only speak for myself. I have a need for the assurance that some beneficial power exists. I do believe in that.''
Does she believe in an afterlife?
''I don't know. I'm not sure that I do.''
And the existence of a personal God?
''That's a different question too.'' A pause. ''What I will say is that I have had in my own life personal experience of the love of God.'' Would that have been in difficult times?
''Yes. In difficult times.''
T HE DIFFICULT times are now a long way back. She is in her middle 60's, and says with typical cheerful common sense that she has at most four more books left to write. Her immense success has come in the last decade, with the publication in 1977 of ''Death of an Expert Witness,'' followed three years later by ''Innocent Blood,'' which was a bestseller in America. Before that she sold well enough, but not in such numbers that she felt ready to give up her demanding and enjoyable job as a principal in the criminal policy department of the Home Office. That job was a triumphant culmination to a life that had contained more pain, unhappiness and struggle than most. When she says some things in it were ''rather appalling,'' the words are spoken matter-of-factly, without self-pity.
P. D. James was born in 1920, the eldest of three children in a family that was, she says, not very close. She recalls her early years as not particularly happy. Her father was an Inland Revenue officer, a restless man of whom she was sometimes frightened, although in retrospect she admires his courage and independence. And she remembers with pleasure summer holidays when he put up his old Army bell tent on the cliffs outside the East Anglian fishing port of Lowestoft, and parents and children explored the area by bus and on foot. There was not much money, and although Phyllis was sent to the excellent Cambridge High School for Girls, she left at 16, and that was the end of her education.
Phyllis James was 19 when World War II began, and not quite 21 when she married Dr. Connor Bantry White, who served during the war in the Royal Army Medical Corps. She looked after their two daughters, born in 1942 and 1944, and waited for her husband to come home.
But Dr. White returned from army service a mentally sick man, suffering from what was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenia. Until his death in 1964, he was in and out of mental hospitals, from which he sometimes discharged himself and then had to be compulsorily readmitted. Like many other schizophrenics, at times he was violent.
When his widow speaks of him, it is with affection, even tenderness. A man who was obviously temperamentally very different from his wife - his favorite novelist was Dickens, his favorite book ''Ulysses'' - he lived long enough to see her first two books published, and was delighted by them and proud of her. But the later 1940's are a period she doesn't like to talk about. Her husband received no war pension, and the family was extremely poor. She went to evening classes and studied hospital administration, and she got a job as a $:300-a-year clerk, which still left the family close to poverty. Her daughters, age 5 and 3, were sent to boarding school. For a time she lived with her in-laws, and in summer they looked after the children. It must have been a hard and bitter time. She once said that success had come to her 30 years too late.
Yet she enjoyed her professional life, and her intelligence and determination took her upward through Britain's Civil Service. In 1968, already the author of three novels, she took an examination to become a principal in the Home Office.
Asked how high on the Civil Service scale a principal is, she says, ''Above an assistant principal and below a deputy secretary, dear. Are you any wiser? I was a bureaucrat. Or, if you're being polite, an administrator.'' Hearty laughter.
Bureaucrat or administra-tor, her work was important, and it has been immensely useful to her as a crime writer. She was responsible for the appointment of scientists and pathologists to all of England's forensic research laboratories - a role that put her in touch with police authorities throughout the country - and an adviser to ministers on the intricate legal problems relating to juvenile crime.
This successful career, though, was never all that she wanted. She started to write in the early 1960's, when the stringencies of making a living had eased a little, beginning with a crime story because she thought it would be useful practice for the novel she would begin the next year. But in 1962, ''Cover Her Face'' was accepted by the first publisher who read it, and by the time she had written two more mysteries, she had come to think that the detective story's restrictions (the necessity of a plot, a puzzle, a solution) were really a useful discipline.
The first books are well told and enjoyable but, to use her own term, they are formula writing. With the fourth, ''Shroud for a Nightingale,'' she had the confidence to make full use of her background and the kind of people she knew well. The scene is a general hospital in the National Health Service, and she set out to create real characters with genuine motives for the way they behaved. She indulged also her intense interest in the appearance and history of buildings through her account of the hospital, ''an immense Victorian edifice of red brick, castellated and ornate to the point of fancy, and crowned with four immense turrets.''
In ''A Taste for Death,'' she has invented two buildings: the church in which the bodies are found, which has ''an extraordinary Romanesque basilica'' designed by the Victorian architect Sir Arthur Blomfield; and a house, designed by the great Sir John Soane, in which several of the principal characters live.
''The church, anyway the exterior, is St. Barnabas in Oxford, and some of the interior comes from a church near Marble Arch,'' she says. ''The house is based on the marvelous Soane Museum, in Lincoln's Inn Fields. I just transferred church and house to the part of London where my story was set.''
Where people live is important to her in the creation of her characters, more important, she says, than what they (Continued on Page 70) wear: ''I'm interested in the clothes of my women characters, less so in those of the men. I believe you can describe people, and understand them, through the houses or apartments they live in, the furniture they choose to buy, the way they decorate rooms. However humble or ordinary the place may be, there are still distinctions between what people do. Do they put wallpaper or emulsion paint on the walls? What's the design on the paper or the color of the paint? What sort of pictures are on the walls? All these things tell you something.''
''A Taste for Death'' is her best book in part because she has imagined in detail the settings in which she has placed even the minor characters. One lives in a dismally ordinary block of modern flats, brought to life for us by the observation of twin flower beds outside, filled with variously colored dahlias that ''glare upwards like a bloodshot eye'' at the inhabitants. When Dalgliesh visits a private clinic to interview a suspect, he looks at a painting by the Victorian Sir William Frith, admiring the meticulousness with which the painter shows military heroes returning from some colonial adventure, and their mantled ladies and pantalooned daughters waiting to greet them.
The concern with religion, apparent in her comments and exhibited in some earlier books, is treated boldly in the new novel. Did Sir Paul Berowne, one of the victims found in the vestry, have a religious experience a day or two before his death that would have changed him? Dalgliesh is skeptical, but the possibility adds the element of seriousness about death that James is intent on bringing to her crime stories. Looking down at the bodies, Dalgliesh thinks ''We can vulgarize everything, but not this,'' then reflects that even so, this corpse will quickly cease to be a man and become ''an exhibit, tagged, documented, dehumanised.''
Although James hopes her own books will be treated as more than light entertainment, she is quite undogmatic about whether a crime story should be serious or frivolous.
''I don't think there's any one thing it should be. If it's to satisfy readers it must be excellent of its kind, and there are several kinds. I very much enjoy Edmund Crispin, who's extremely frivolous, with a marvelous comic sense. I like Sayers in spite of her social snobbery. She wrote very well. Agatha Christie wrote badly, but I respect her ingenuity. I take a lot of pleasure in Dk k Franci I I don't like Patcicia Highsmith's books about Tom Ripley, a psychopath who is made the hero. I think a crime story should be in favor of rationality. That's what the form is all about.'' Among Americans, she admires Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and particularly Dashiell Hammett, who, ''at his best was a very fine novelist,'' she says. ''I haven't read Elmore Leonard. And of course I couldn't write like an American, or like any of the others, for that matter. But I don't think that's the way to put it. Our books are an expression of our personalities. I write detective stories. I hope they're novels, too, and I don't see any contradiction in that. But if I felt there was a contradiction, if the detective element got in the way of the novel and I had to sacrifice one or the other, then the detective element would have to go. I hope and believe I shan't have to make such a choice. I believe you write as you need to write, and you do the best you can with your particular talent. You're lucky enough to have been born with a gift, and you should be grateful for it.''
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