Forget literary criticism. Forget any righteous rage against the algorithm. P.D. James, one of the greatest crime novelists of the last 100 years, published her first novel in December of 1962, and we are gathered here today to venerate her with listicle fanaticism.
In 2021, I read almost all of P.D. James’s work in order. The only texts I skipped were two of her mysteries which I’d read in previous years, and a nonfiction book she authored with a co-worker at her day job. She helped me through one of the lower periods of my life, and through the tailend of the worst of the pandemic. My brain is on ice: this is pure, loving tribute.
Born in 1920, Phyllis Dorothy James was a titan of her genre, eventually a baroness, and sharp enough at 89 to embarrass the head of the BBC as a guest editor for one of the BBC’s own radio shows. Temperamentally, she is your favorite Tory grandma. As a writer, she’s rooted equally in the Golden Age mystery queens (Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh) as she is in Jane Austen, her idol. Trenchant, witty, she takes the pulp seriously, and makes the serious exciting. If you want to read her, start with Shroud for a Nightingale, and if you love that, read anything else you can reach; even the duds are worthwhile distractions. Her main series is based around the character of Adam Dalgliesh, reserved poet-detective who is probably the most interesting sleuth the English crime canon has produced.
Most of the commentary below is taken from my 2021 reading journal. Rankings are by whim and memory, but reading her as chronologically as possible is most rewarding. Some spoilers are present throughout.
1. A Taste for Death
I read this novel before I became a P.D. James stan, and only with last year’s re-reading did I realize how foundational it was for me as a young writer. Featuring a possible case of stigmata, fate and prophecy loom over the detectives, raising many of the usual mystery clichés to a spiritual plane: what are gut hunches if not true-seeing at a lay level? This was written after James took a crucial, career-defining break from the Dalgliesh series, and the gothic verve and heavy character focus which make Taste for Death so incredible are a direct result of the non-Dalgliesh stand-alones. An unqualified triumph, not least because it introduces one of her most enduring characters in Kate Miskin.
2. Devices and Desires
Not just a thunderbolt, but a vast horizon of stormy brilliance. Dalgliesh is present for the crime and the investigation, but sidelined as an actual detective. Set on the coast, the plot neatly parallels the impersonal threat of a decaying power station with the impersonal threat of a serial killer called the Whistler. James is diagnosing the modern anxiety, the way that an excess of knowledge, an excess of news and technology and worse, have penetrated daily life. It’s her most explicit foray into the big, baggy mode of Victorian novels, and all the better for the extravagance. An ideal read in today’s cultural and political atmosphere, as well.
3. Death in Holy Orders
In many ways, this was the best “Dalgliesh takes a vacation and people die” story. The setting, an old theological college on another coast, suits her: the closed community, the bureaucratic structure, the issue of faith and the seriousness of ritual—at least culturally—are all hallmarks of her best work, and each is taken to its fullest expression here. Dalgliesh is likewise his own kind of priestly presence more than ever, a refined and ice-sharp Episcopalian who can almost be taken as a purposeful foil to the legacy of the Father Brown stories. Both men of faith, but representing wholly different expressions. The opening death brilliantly pays homage to The Moon Stone’s most gruesome demise. She really, really enjoys the Victorians. Unironically.
4. Shroud for a Nightingale
Adam Dalgliesh meets his Irene Adler. WWII also plays a vital part in the uncovered evils, a theme which will return. There are a few of James’s books where the murderer gets away with the crime, but never any mystery where Dalgliesh is actually hoodwinked. Nursing students die at an alarming rate in this novel, and the first death is a reminder that James is committed to the shocking nature of the genre. The agony, the near body horror, of someone dying while “playing patient” is an absolute plot bomb. Every mystery needs its small bombs, and for all her refinement and literary reputation, James is happily and fiendishly violent whenever the moment requires.
5. Black Tower
The book that began my 2021 James kick is a genre masterpiece of flitting through the POVs of the possible suspects. That’s a technique she only expands as the series continues, and which climaxes in Devices and Desires. A gothic strain exists throughout her work, but this was the first full-throated sounding. The Black Tower is a literal Black Tower! Death shows all its faces in this one: the brutal, the quiet, the self-imposed. Along with Shroud for a Nightingale, this should be near the beginning of your Dalgliesh adventure, though not first.
6. The Lighthouse
Probably ranked too high. In fact, 100 percent ranked too high, except for the ending, which gives Kate Miskin a proper hero’s highlight. I can only account for its place in this list by emphasizing the importance of Kate Miskin to the Dalgliesh universe. One of his junior detectives, she’s the most important character besides Dalgliesh in the whole series. She’s his longest-serving underling, and a valve James seems to open whenever her desire to write another Cordelia Gray novel recurs (more on those in a bit). This novel was also a rip-roaring read in 2021 because it features an outbreak of SARS (the original SARS), and also takes to task the bad men of British literature in the form of its primary victim. She thinks you’re a drag, Martin Amis! And that great writing doesn’t require great boorishness!
7. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
This was the book that convinced me James was a paragon of what most writers attempt to produce: intelligent entertainment, in which the two sides are held equally in balance. Cordelia Gray is, on paper, a perfect rebound after living with Adam Dalgliesh for so long in one’s head: young, female, and an outsider in the noir rather than the crime tradition. And yet Dagliesh haunts this novel. He’s on Cordelia’s mind the whole time , and not only does she worry about his influence, her worry is a parody (an imitation?) of the reader’s awareness, if not James’s own hope to leave the Yard’s wonder boy behind. And yet, James’s possible anxiety aside, this is a different kind of romp. Uneven in a way the Dagliesh novels mostly aren’t, but for the better in the end. The best summary I have for the actual plot is something like Charles Ryder Drops Out of School and Solves a Murder (As a Woman). I loved it.
8. Innocent Blood
9. The Skull Beneath the Skin
If An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is a rebound from the Dagliesh series, Innocent Blood is a rebound from the detective mode in general. It’s almost a negative image of the kind of plotting she regularly deploys. We know one murderer, she’s been convicted and is living in prison. We know the other to-be murderer, we’re tracking his plan from start to finish. We have the aftermath of murder done years ago, and the open-eyed attempt to murder in progress—no mystery, but lots of crime. A detective novel turned inside out, Innocent Blood is James’s attempt to produce a compelling read on the strength of her psychological profiles alone. And she does.
The Skull Beneath the Skin, meanwhile, is the sole Cordelia Gray sequel. While it serves as a bridge back to Dalgliesh—complete with a detective team taking over the second half from Cordelia—it’s an experiment in gothic semi-horror. By dressing her Victorian and architectural obsessions in historical travesty, she makes them the center, rather than the periphery, of the drama. An island with a famous British house that features a secret torture dungeon/execution cave are only the beginning of the aura she composes.
I’ve paired these two works, though, because they are a tandem breakthrough. Published in 1980 and 1982, and during the longest break she ever took from writing Dalgliesh novels, James is testing her limits. Innocent Blood stretches her powers of portraiture to the same degree that Skull Beneath the Skin stretches her use of settings. Both, what’s more, feature her POV switching at its (to that point in her career) apex—Cordelia Gray, our hero, is actually sidelined for much of her own novel, a move James re-uses with Dalgliesh not two books later.
I feel torn about these texts being placed so high, but I think about them more than most of the work to come, so to hell with it. If nothing else, I am confident A Taste for Death and Devices and Desires would never have reached their potential without these complementary forays into the wild.
10. Original Sin
Her mystery novels always begin and end with a bang (or almost always), but something like 90 percent of the text comprises parlor-room drama. She uses her police interrogations as drawing room tête-à-têtes in the Austen style. Snarky aristocrats, preening dandies, social sniping, but instead of a looming romantic crisis, it’s a body in the hallway. For this book, the body is in an old Publishing House, another chance for her to indulge her architectural obsession. The real atmospheric winner, though, is the Thames, which is a kind of vehicle for ghostly vibes. Kudos to James, too, for teaching me that the Thames River Police existed before their landlubber cousins.
11. Death of An Expert Witness
Great mystery! If it’s not as refined as its immediate predecessor, The Black Tower, Expert Witness nonetheless drove me through its plot with greater intensity (possibly). Honestly, the deftness of her style is testified to by how ridiculous this entire plot becomes. The unknown secret ex-wife living in a lesbian affair with her ex-husband’s cousin who’s the ex-lover of the boss’s sister who’s in an incestuous (sort of) relationship with her brother and who is also shtupping the forensic pathologist in a secret rendezvous ritual that was also used for the murdered expert witness ( who is the ex-husband cousin boss’s sister’s lover)—[inhale!]. I mean... come on! And yet—it all fell over me easily, thrillingly even. Possibly a case in point for her “refinement” being the ultimate, and proper, purveyor of pulp.
12. Cover Her Face
The whole reason for this list, and it’s honestly only this low because I read it years before I read the rest of her canon, and she herself didn’t like the book. But from what I can recall, the entire skillset is there at the beginning. A flamboyant know-it-all suspect, a nearly baroque social context that makes the murder possible, even a cool and collected Dalgliesh whose personal life flits across the horizon of the text, pulling the reader’s thoughts beyond the usual mystery grind. If I ever redo this list, I’m moving it up the ladder!
13. A Mind to Murder
This is the one book that sees Dalgliesh—and if not Dalgliesh, then certainly the reader—fooled about the murderer for longer than usual. What I found most daring is a scene about halfway through that, if read carefully, tells you exactly which person killed a client at a psychiatric clinic, and it’s not the sociopath who Dalgliesh ends up essentially battling in the climax. She loves her closed environments! And I’m not sure she thinks much of doctors!
14. The Murder Room
There was something bathetic about the unmasking of the murderer in this tale. Dalgliesh is the most private of detectives; he hates disturbing the victim’s rooms, which James mentions almost every book, as an outgrowth of his own (and James’s) intense need for privacy. But the idea that privacy is perhaps a way to mute vital revelation never receives more blunt an assertion in James’s oeuvre than the murderer of this story insisting Dalgliesh can’t know their mind and he shouldn’t expect to try. And that’s what we’re left with, basically. It’s an escalation of the Dalgliesh privacy conundrum, to some extent, but it also felt like a copout. Bonus points, though, for this one accurately describing the horrifying sex-cult-like practices of the elite decades before we were all talking about how Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself! Also, for those playing the P.D. James bingo along at home, her hatred of hanging and her interest in Victorian culture and art have never been more prominent.
15. Children of Men
Possibly a much better novel than I’ve internalized. Certainly provocative and deserving of its (very different) film adaptation. A fable in favor of natalism, but perhaps more pointedly a fable about the moral decay of England specifically and Britain at large. Golden, preternaturally beautiful youths roam the country as the last generation to be born. They do so, however, in order to commit acts of random, degrading gang violence. The Isle of Man is a prison and the elderly and hopeless are being euthanized more or less against their will. And this was in the 90s, well before Canada had the same idea! Not her top outing, but given the out-of-character plot, another testament to the consistency of her style and temperament.
16. The Private Patient
This is the last Dalgliesh novel, and P.D. James’s last serious literary effort. It’s pretty much a mess, but the final chapter is a deserved benediction, a testament born of her personal and artistic integrity, and worth the chaos that precedes it. Annie is a lesbian, a victim of rape, a side character: it’s through her eyes James chooses to tint the traditional marriage of Dalgliesh, and her voice which gives the last word on both crime and the entire Dalgliesh series. Annie is a victim without qualification, and yet when she stands in court and sees her assailant, she witnesses his powerlessness. It’s a banality of evil moment, “just a local lad,” but it’s also James’s last plea for a kind of stoicism that her upbringing, and her fraught (tragic) marriage, demanded of her. No one is suggesting that the rape be minimized, but James is unyielding on behalf of the idea that Annie’s life, its joy and its heartbreak, still lies in Annie’s hands. James quotes scripture to this effect, which actually suggests of course that Annie’s life lies in God’s hands, but P.D. James never goes quite that far. She can’t.
Still, there’s a central idea here that floats in and out of the entire series: the paradox of crime is that the criminal is eventually mistreated as well—what an unflinching, actually radical position for someone so thoroughly committed to the idea that people are capable of great evil and we should stop excusing them because they were poor. You can try to reduce her to a partisan brain hack, but she refuses this prison. Whatever else the book achieves or fails to achieve, she gets the exclamation point exactly right.
17. A Certain Justice
Despite some really excellent set-pieces toward the end, this novel never quite escaped its polemical premise. Are defense attorneys, in fact, just abetting serial killers? Leaving aside the possibility that this is the one novel where James’s politics override some of the actual writing, there was something a tad incoherent about the murders throughout, especially one key character’s elaborate plot to… honey-trap the victim’s daughter using a murderer? James is attentive to her own lapses, and even has a timely confession unravel the convoluted plot in the name of emotional closure. (She’s so good even when she’s bad!) But there was more than a whiff of right-wing table-thumping re: the justice system. America’s system is not the UK’s, but the idea that we shouldn’t be designed to protect the innocent more than convict the guilty—the right-wing talking point of, “got off on a technicality”—was crucial to every element of the plot in a way that began to undermine the art of it all.
18. Unnatural Causes
The first Dalgliesh vacation to feature bodily dismemberment! My mom insists I’m wrong to dismiss this one so thoroughly. She might be right. There’s a lot of memorable elements in play—the initial murder itself, the humor of a bunch of mystery writers being annoying, the way Dalgliesh fights against the elements to survive, and more. Still, didn’t like it. Won’t return to it any time soon. Feel free, in my opinion, to skip it entirely.
19. Death Comes to Pemberley
20. Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales
21. The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories
An obituary for James in 2014 called Death Comes to Pemberley a “Christmas Feast”; that is, a light, sometimes sumptuous offering, but ultimately an “unserious effort.” The same is even more true of her two posthumous collections of short stories. All the same, P.D. James was my most reliable (nonliving) companion over a year ago, and I ended my run through her work with Pemberley, the last words she wrote for the public’s perusal. It changed my respect for her not one iota. I will always admire how much care she put into her writing, and yet I will also always admire the sensationalist hidden in the respectable, grandmotherly smile. Incest! Suicide! Poison! Ghosts! Martyrs! And even stigmata! Give her an unending round of applause, fellow readers.
In Pemberley itself, I was surprised how well the story worked not just as Austen fan-fic, but as P.D. James fan-fic. Imagine a murder mystery in Pemberley, yes! But also imagine Dalgliesh reborn in the age of Bonaparte! He must withstand dinner appointments as well as chase a murderer! In fact, I was never more convinced of how much Dalgliesh is an Austenian hero, particularly in the Darcy mold. But Elizabeth fits as a forerunner for the detective, too, and a few of her scenes in Pemberley struck me as the most Dalgliesh-esque, partly in how she reflects on nature, but more in how she reflects on those around her (and is never wrong once the narrative runs its course). Dalgliesh, like both the married Darcys, is sensible and strong-feeling. But as with Darcy, he thinks the more a man feels, the less he can gibber about it. Despite the evidence of this newsletter, I agree with both characters, and with James, more every year.
Merry Christmas!
Reading:
Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson: Atkinson is probably the best of P.D. James’s literary progeny, and my pick for heir to James’s kingdom. Atkinson has more range, arguably, but a surprisingly similar bag of tricks. They’re also both top-drawer when it comes to titles. Look at the above list of James’s work! The Skull Beneath the Skin alone proves my point!
Podcasting:
Bill and I recently read and talked about the Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant! Bill carries the show, but I really enjoyed this one, and possibly got a little P.D. James-esque in my defense of moral rectitude and personal integrity scaling up at one point. Ulysses S. Grant ending a wannabe slave empire—it’s good!
Thanks for reading. I love you all.