Shouts from a Third Act

One year ago mystery lovers and writers lost one of their brightest stars. British novelist Phyllis Dorothy James died at her home on November 27. She was said to be working on a new piece of detective fiction. If you’re wondering why that’s remarkable–the woman was ninety-four! As a reader and ardent admirer, I’m still mourning the loss.

“The Queen of Crime,” she was called, and not just in England. Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard captured the hearts of an international audience. Elegant and cerebral, he was sensitive (a published poet, no less) yet aloof. “There’s a splinter of ice in his character,” James said of him. Fascinating. If only he, a widower, could meet the perfect woman! Eventually he did: a beautiful and brainy literature professor.

James took murder seriously. The “Golden Age” of detective fiction preceded her, but she didn’t want to follow in those writers’ bloody footsteps. For starters, they weren’t bloody enough. Writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers were cozier. James had no wish to prettify or romanticize a ghastly deed. From the beginning (her first novel Cover Her Face was published in 1962) she set out to create a realistic police detective and show the horror and tragedy of murder. Rather than focus on the killer in the act of killing, she shows us innocents stumbling across the dead bodies. “To many of them, it’s a really appalling and dreadful discovery,” James said. “I think that the reader should share that horror and that shock, so I make the descriptions just as realistic as I can.”

She considered the detective novel a modern morality play–and a major reason for its lasting appeal. It seems slightly ironic that I was rereading some interviews with James when the news first broke about the mass shooting in San Bernardino, CA, this week. (The week before it was a mass shooting at an abortion clinic in Colorado Springs; two weeks before that it was the terror attacks in Paris.) In explaining the appeal of her genre, she’d said: “The more we live in a society in which we feel our problems–be they international problems of war and peace, racial problems, problems of drugs, problems of violence–to be literally beyond our ability to solve, the more reassuring it is to read a popular form of fiction which itself has a problem at the heart of it. One which the reader knows will be solved by the end of the book.” If you look at the Best Sellers List last week (Sunday NYT), you’ll see that a majority of the novels are some form of detective story. That’s been true for quite a long time. And yet. . . An alarming statistic was trolling the internet yesterday: 355 mass shootings in the U.S. this year. A little later I saw a different source that didn’t dispute the figure but claimed the context is wrong: there have been only four along the lines of what we witnessed in California. Even so, how much longer before we throw up our hands, surrender to murder-overload, and switch over to fantasy and/or science fiction as our preferred form of escape?

A single blog isn’t enough for what I want to say about this great writer. (Next week, part 2). In the end, death comes to us all. I accept that you’re gone, P.D. James, but you made a difference while you were here. And you continue to inspire.