R.I.P. novelist P.D. James, author of Children Of Men
British novelist P.D. James died last Thursday, November 27, at age 94. Best known for her crime novels, particularly the Adam Dalgliesh Mysteries, she didn’t start writing until she was in her 40s, and even then she said she only wrote detective fiction as “practice for a serious novel.” James was in many ways a link between the slightly earlier generation of crime novelists Dorothy L. Sayers (who died in 1957) and Agatha Christie (who died in 1976). After Christie’s death, James reigned as the “Queen Of Crime.” Many of her novels were adapted for television by BBC in the ’80s, starring Roy Marsden in the role of Adam Dalgliesh. In the early ’00s, the BBC also adapted her books Death In Holy Orders and The Murder Room, starring Martin Shaw.
James said that she knew she would be a novelist from the time she could read, but wasn’t able to start until after World War II and after securing a more stable job in hospital administration. Her first novel, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962, when James was 42; though she apparently did not intend to make a career of detective fiction, she admitted that crime suited her natural skepticism and “perhaps slightly morbid imagination.” James sought to provide excitement to a tired form, and was interested in both the mechanics of detective fiction and the examination of human emotion and the society in which we live.