P.D. James

August 3rd is the Birthday of British crime novelist P.D. James (books by this author), born Phyllis Dorothy James in Oxford (1920). The child of a civil servant, she was raised to believe in the security of a good job. Her mother went into a mental hospital when James was a teenager, so the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings fell on her.

She knew when she was in high school that she wanted to become a writer. But she married a medical student and worked as a Red Cross nurse during World War II. She gave birth to their first daughter during a bomb attack. Her husband came back from the Royal Army Medical Corps with a mental disability that made him violent, so he had to be confined in an institution. James supported the family by working as an administrator for the National Health Service. She still wanted to write, and would get up early to do so before she went to her day job.

James was 42 when she published her first crime novel. It took her three years to write. That book was Cover Her Face (1962). She chose the mystery genre because she’d always had an interest in mysterious deaths; she also thought it would be good training, because it’s easy to write a bad mystery novel, but difficult to write a good one. Her first book was a success, so she decided to stay with that genre. In spite of her fascination with violent crime, it troubled her. “I think I’m very frightened of violence,” she once said. “I hate it. And it may be that by writing mysteries I am able, as it were, to exorcise this fear, which may very well be the same reason so many people enjoy reading a mystery.”

Her husband died in 1964, two years after her first book was published. James took the difficult civil service exam and received the third highest score in the country. She later remembered: “I’ve still got the pre-printed letter which says: ‘Dear sir’ and ‘sir’ is crossed out and ‘Madam’ has been written in by hand. It was so rare for women to take the exam.” She went to work for the Home Office, taking a series of administrative jobs in the forensic science and criminal law departments. Her job gave her lots of useful information about the procedures involved in a murder investigation. She retired in 1979 and went to work full-time on her novels. Her big international breakthrough came in 1980, with her eighth book, Innocent Blood.

In 1991, she was given a title and was thereafter known as Baroness James of Holland Park. She had a seat in the House of Lords and also worked as a local magistrate — a title she earned through her years of civil service, not her writing. She also served on a number of arts councils and was one of 10 governors of the BBC.

Her work was often compared with other mystery authors like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, but she didn’t think very highly of her predecessors’ brand of crime writing that was popular in the 1930s. “That kind of crime writing was dull,” she said, “in the sense that it was unrealistic, prettifying and romanticizing murder, but having little to do with real blood-and-guts tragedy.” She created her character Adam Dalgliesh as an antidote to amateur gentleman detectives like Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey. Dalgliesh is a detective with Scotland Yard; he’s intelligent, dedicated, and unsentimental. He publishes poetry when he’s not solving crimes. “He is a male version of me,” James said. “Brainier than me, but his emotions are mine. The empathy is mental rather than physical.”

James died in October 2014 at her home in Oxford. She was 94.

- Writer's Almanac