PD James obituary

PD James, Lady James of Holland Park, who has died aged 94, was the grande dame of mystery. She was a link with the golden age of detective writing that flourished between the wars, the successor to Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham. After Christie’s death, James was called the new Queen of Crime. It was a title she did not at all mind.

Yet Phyllis James had not started writing until her 40s, and said she only wrote a whodunnit as practice for a serious novel. Later on, though, she never fretted about being locked into crime writing. She said she could write everything she wanted while remaining in the genre. She wrote one futuristic satire, The Children of Men (1992, made into a film in 2006), set in 2021, about the human race facing extinction as a result of infertility but, unlike her great rival Ruth Rendell, did not attempt to break away from crime.

She was born in Oxford, daughter of Sidney, a tax inspector, and Dorothy (nee Hone). It was, she said, an unhappy home. The family moved to Cambridgeshire and Phyllis attended Cambridge girls’ high school. She did well, but her father did not approve of education for girls and so she did not go to university. When the second world war came she was employed handing out ration cards in Manchester.

She moved to London, where she met and in 1941 married Connor White, a doctor. He was called to military service with the Royal Army Medical Corps. James said she would probably have had a most ordinary life as a doctor’s wife, had her husband not come back from the war suffering from a serious psychiatric disorder. It became apparent to her that she would have to support him and their two daughters, so she joined the civil service as a National Health Service administrator.

When she turned 40 she realised she must do something about writing a novel. She thought perhaps it was already too late, but started setting the alarm clock for 5am, rising in the dark to work on the book before the serious business of her day began.

She sent the finished manuscript to Elaine Greene, a London literary agent. Greene finished reading the book and went out that night to a dinner party, where she met an editor from Faber and Faber and told him about the novel. It was not the usual way of selling a book, but the man from Faber liked it and James’s lifelong connection with the publishing firm began.

This first novel was Cover Her Face (1962). In many ways it harked back to the cosy murders of the golden age, set in a country house with a body in a locked room and an old-fashioned cast including the village vicar, a genial country doctor and a home for wayward girls. It featured Adam Dalgliesh, the poet-policeman, and he seemed old-fashioned, too, intellectual and a trifle upper-class. It was as if the noir school of hardboiled realism had never occurred.

In 1962, on the verge of the swinging 60s, she was lucky to get such a piece published. But Cover Her Face showed that James had a natural ability to create mystery. The reader was never quite sure what was happening and the uncovering of the murderer came as a complete surprise. James also had the courage to be preposterous. She knew sudden shocks and twists would keep readers engaged. In Cover Her Face, for instance, a prime suspect proves he could not have done it by revealing he has an artificial hand. In Unnatural Causes (1967), there is a specially constructed sidecar in which a man with a weak heart is murdered and taken out of London. At a time when other crime writers were attempting to make their stories more literary, James knew that she was dealing not with real life but a genre that demanded the unbelievable. But while James was happy to remain in detective fiction, the critics often said how literary she was. Kingsley Amis called her “Iris Murdoch with murder”.

Her books always contained at least one religious character, a sign of her devotion to Anglicanism. This gave way to much discussion in her stories about the nature of good and evil, with Dalgliesh, the son of a vicar, often leading the way.

Many of her books were adapted for television, with Roy Marsden playing Dalgliesh in the ITV versions. He was perfect in the part, but the adaptations never seemed true to the books, perhaps because on the page Dalgliesh is such a shadowy figure, often unseen for whole chapters at a time. He has a love life, but it is usually offstage, so, for example, in Unnatural Causes the reader learns that Dalgliesh has been having an affair and is thinking of marriage, yet the woman never appears. An even more unusual romance is the one between Dalgliesh and James’s female sleuth, Cordelia Gray. He meets her very casually in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) and then the reader learns in The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982) that they have had a short but intense romance. Yet this only occurs as an aside.

James’s full-time occupation as a civil servant provided her with material. She worked in the National Health Service from 1949, then at the Home Office from 1968 as a principal working in the police department with the forensic science service, and then in the criminal policy department. She retired from the civil service in 1979. There were few crime writers as well informed about their subject. Nevertheless, she made some mistakes: not seeming to know the difference between hay and straw (Death of an Expert Witness, 1977) or that Hebrew and not Yiddish was the language of Israel (Shroud for a Nightingale, 1971).

She was made a doctor of letters by more than half a dozen universities, and an honorary fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and of both Downing College and Girton College, Cambridge. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, and president of the Society of Authors.

She served as a governor of the BBC, a magistrate in Middlesex and London, a member of the board of the British Council and chairman of the literary advisory panel of the Arts Council. In 1983 she was appointed OBE and in 1991, made a life peer as Lady James of Holland Park. She sat on the crossbenches for a time, but then moved to the Conservative side.

James published her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest, in 1999. She kept writing, bringing back Dalgliesh in Death In Holy Orders (2001) – giving James the chance to display her knowledge of church hierarchy – at which point Martin Shaw became the detective in the TV series for the BBC. In 2003 she published another crime novel with a setting straight out of the murder mystery golden age, The Murder Room. In this, Dalgliesh investigates a killing in a privately run crime museum on the edge of Hampstead Heath, London. In 2005 she set a murder mystery, The Lighthouse, in what is always thought of as Agatha Christie territory, on an island off the coast of Cornwall, with Dalgliesh solving a murder at an upmarket rest home.

In 2011 James turned herself into Jane Austen and wrote Death Comes to Pemberley, a whodunnit set in 1803, six years after the events of Pride and Prejudice. It was televised in December 2013, and Antonia Fraser called it “a Christmas feast”, which seemed to sum it up; it was not a serious effort.

Well into her 90s, James continued to appear at literary festivals and on cruises. She was soft-spoken but could be hard-hitting. In 2009, when guest‑editing the Today programme on Radio 4, she reduced Mark Thompson, the BBC director-general, to stutters when she accused him of dumbing down the corporation’s output and overpaying executives.

She once said she possessed what Graham Greene called “the splinter of ice in the heart”. “If I had a friend in distress I would have no hesitation in putting my arms around her to comfort her,” James said, “but part of me would be observing the scene.”

Her husband died in 1964. James is survived by their daughters, Clare and Jane, five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.