Queen of Crime: Who is Phyllis Dorothy James?

Phyllis Dorothy James, a detective novel writer and public servant, was born in Oxford on 3 August 1920, as the eldest of three children of revenue officer Sidney Victor James (1895-1979) and his wife Dorothy May (1893-1966).

According to Dorothy, her parents' marriage was going badly. Her father was extremely cold and authoritarian. Her mother fell ill and was admitted to a gloomy Victorian mental hospital. When she was fourteen, Phyllis was helping run the household and take care of her siblings.

Due to the family's poor financial situation, she was forced to leave Cambridge Girls' High School at the age of sixteen and followed her father into a job with the Internal Revenue Service. She hated the job and later started working as a 'dog sitter' at the Festival Theater in Cambridge. It was there that she met (Ernest) Connor Bantry White (1920-1964), a medical student, and married him on August 8, 1941. The couple moved to London and built a happy home despite the bombing.

Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, (3 August 1920 – 27 November 2014), known professionally as P. D. James, was an English novelist and life peer. Her rise to fame came with her series of detective novels featuring the police commander and poet, Adam Dalgliesh.

However, her husband, Connor, returned from the war with a form of schizophrenia after serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps in India and Africa. That's why her two daughters - Clare (b. 1942) and Jane (b. 1944) - went to boarding school when they were very young. She worked in hospital administration for the NHS from 1949. She applied to the civil service in 1968 and was offered a department selection because she came third in the country in the qualification exam. She chose to serve as director of the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and later moved to the Criminal Department. Both were "a gold mine" for their fiction, she said. She retired in 1979 to write full-time.

As a child, James was both eager to write and a questioner of other people's stories. When she heard of Humpty Dumpty's death, she asked, "Did he fall or did someone push him?" Her question was an example of this. Her literary career began when her agent, Elaine Greene, learned from Charles Monteith, the director of Faber and Faber, that they were looking for a replacement for the recently deceased prominent crime novelist Cyril Hare. Greene sent him the draft of her first novel, Cover Her Face (1962), which James read. She described the phone call informing James of Faber's acceptance of the novel as the most exciting moment of her life in her autobiography Time to Be in Earnest (1999).

Faber's choice to fill the gap at the top of the criminal list could not have been smarter. James, who published fourteen novels featuring poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh between 1962 and 2008, and two novels featuring a young female private detective, Cordelia Gray, in 1972 and 1982, gained both acclaim and an extremely wide readership. . Innocent Blood (1980), a psychological thriller, Children of Mankind (1992), a dystopian science fiction novel, and Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), a detective story that was a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, attracted great attention.

In addition to Time to Be in Earnest, she also wrote a non-fiction book, The Maul and the Pear Tree (1971), which she wrote with a police department colleague, Critchley, about the brutal murders in Wapping in the early nineteenth century. After her death, two short story books, The Mistletoe Murder (2016) and Sleep No More (2017), were published. The first twelve of the Adam Dalgliesh novels were shown on television, and the first of the Cordelia Gray novels, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), was made into a film (1982), directed by Chris Petit and starring Pippa Guard and Billie Whitelaw. Again, the science fiction novel Children of Humanity was adapted to the big screen by the famous director Alfonso Cuarón in 2006 and received great acclaim.

James's aim was to take the murder mystery novel, which had its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, and deepen it emotionally, complicate it psychologically and morally, and give it another golden age. All the ingredients that make the classic detective story an addictive genre (as she fascinatingly described in her 2009 monograph Talking about Detective Fiction) were present in its pages: a masterful murder in a highly closed community, a limited circle of suspects, clues scattered everywhere, diversions, excuses, plenty of motives, tools, and opportunities... At the end of each novel, the puzzle of who committed the murder was solved masterfully and with impeccable writing skills. However, ethical and social dilemmas often remained unresolved, as in life. “Maybe that's the appeal of the genre,” James commented on this situation.

She liked to emphasize physical and emotional pain, as well as the moral ambiguities that gave her novels nuance. This emphasis was often increased in environments such as a hospital, a nursing home, or a psychiatric clinic. It was unusual for the actual murder to be described. What the author chose to highlight was the discovery of the body. A neatly dressed, handless corpse floating in a boat off the Suffolk coast, an actress bludgeoned to death with a marble arm torn from an antique statue, a minister of state lying with her throat slit in a church aisle, a female lawyer found dead at her desk wearing a court wig without her own blood, An archdeacon executed in front of the medieval painting Doom was the starting point for investigations not only into the identity of the murderer but into what James often called the 'contaminating' effects of murder.

According to James, one reason a crime writer would limit the number of suspects was to 'not allow the suspicion to spread too far'. The tension created by suspicion was also remarkable. It was instinctive for James to be wary of murder. Her two non-detective novels, Innocent Blood and Boys, concerned a woman involved in child murder and forced euthanasia, respectively.

It may seem appropriate that one of her novels is titled A Taste for Death (1986), but James also had a tremendous zest for life. She remained interested in public affairs throughout her writing career. In addition to being a member of the Royal Society of Literature, she was president of the Writers' Association between 1984 and 1986. She served on the British Council Literary Advisory Committee between 1988-1993 and on the Arts Council Board of Directors between 1988-1992. She also chaired the Booker Prize judging panel in 1987. She received numerous literary awards and honorary degrees. She was an honorary fellow of three colleges at Cambridge (Downing, Girton, and Lucy Cavendish) and two at Oxford (St Hilda's and Kellogg's).

She was made OBE in 1983 and became a chamberlain in the House of Lords in 1991. She was appointed to the BBC's Advisory Council in 1986 and served as governor from 1988 to 1993, after which she continued to be involved with the institution. James is remembered for her polite rebuke of chief executive Mark Thompson in 2009 when she was guest editor of the Today program.

Embedded in her Anglican faith life and values, James was vice-president of the Prayer Book Society and a member of the Church of England Liturgy Commission between 1991 and 2000. A 2005 sermon she gave at St Edward's Church in Cambridge, where she prayed as a child, eloquently described her devotion to the Prayer Book and the nourishment it provided throughout her life (it also inspired her to read "Devices" in one of her novels, Devices, and Desires). and Desires, 1989).

Shortly after being told she did not have long to live, she hosted a luncheon to celebrate the last Tudor murder mystery novel by Sansom, whose work she admired. This was the last public event she attended, and no one who heard her lively, humorous eulogy would have guessed that she was terminally ill.

James died of cancer on 27 November 2014 at her home at 88 Foundry House, Walton Well Road, Oxford. The intense pleasure she took from writing continued until the end. During the previous year, a new novel had begun to take shape in her imagination. Although the novel was unfinished, it was a well-known fact that her talent remained strong and cheerfully alive until her death.