A couple of posts ago I mentioned attending a lovely event celebrating P D. James, and ever since have been intending to write something about her… Somewhat delayed as work has been a bit fraught and Substack is my writing relaxation, so I didn’t want it to be a chore, rather than a pleasure, to think about an author I admire so deeply. And there is still so much more to say. Huge subject! But for now, allons-y….
The event was held in Cambridge University Library, on the site of the Murder by the Book exhibition (which has just closed). It included, among the displays, the correspondence between Phyllis White - the married name of P.D. James - and Faber & Faber, regarding the 1962 publication of her first novel, Cover Her Face, when she was in her early forties.
All so civil and - compared with today - so simple! But what struck one most was her unassuming tone: I do hope you don’t lose money on me, she wrote. How one can hear her saying it, the brisk, firm voice that brimmed with smiling good sense, like the best possible schoolteacher. That was her persona. It was true to life - she really was kindly and sensible and without pretension, and called people ‘dear’ in a way that was charming and levelling and somehow confident - but, as with Agatha Christie’s matronly Queen of Crime facade, a great deal lay beneath. I remember visiting her home in Holland Park, back in 2005, to talk to her for my Agatha biography, seeing a box set of The Office next to the TV and being entranced by the image of the venerable Baroness (as she then was) watching Gareth and Finchy and David Brent’s inspirational speech. I remember, as do many, her lethally courteous Radio 4 takedown of the then director-general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, when he blusteringly defended the vast salaries paid from the public licence fee to layers of bureaucracy doing near-identical jobs. ‘One wonders, Mark, what actually is going on here?‘ I remember a TV programme, which I wish I could find on YouTube, in which she and her friend Ruth Rendell talked about their shared profession; and a particular moment in which Phyllis, crisp and neat, eyes shining like a blackbird’s, said something along the lines of you know, Ruth, I’ve always loved the idea of holding a gun.
She wrote violence extraordinarily well. The student nurse in Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), poisoned by the substitution of milk for disinfectant during a demonstration of intra-gastric feeding - ‘she was out of bed, teetering forward on arched feet in a parody of a ballet dancer, and clutching ineffectually at the air as if in frantic search of the tubing’; the novelist in Original Sin, hanging from the strap of her handbag at the edge of the Thames, the top of her head ‘something grotesque and unreal, like the domed head of a gigantic insect, its millions of hairy legs stirring gently in the tide’; the actress in The Skull Beneath the Skin, whose battered face is ‘a darkening, sticky mess which had even seeped into the two eye-pads’. This is not the conjuring of gratuitous horror. Rather it is the writing of somebody who took death seriously. By which I mean she wrote detective fiction that never forgot the endgame. Her corpses were not so many Dr Blacks on the Cluedo board, nor objects of sub-pornographic fascination. Through her detective, the cool sombre Dalgliesh, whose personality is forged by the deaths of his wife and baby - the woman in giving birth to the dying son - P.D. James created a take on her genre that was defined by respect for its realities.
‘We can vulgarize everything, but not this’. So Dalgliesh tells himself as he contemplates a pair of bodies, murdered in a church vestry, in A Taste for Death (1986).
‘I can’t imagine myself writing a book that doesn’t include death’, wrote Phyllis, in her obliquely revealing ‘fragment of autobiography’, Time to be in Earnest (1999).
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