Talking about Detective Fiction by PD James

Reviewed by Curt Evans

Nearing her ninetieth year, modern-day "Crime Queen" P. D. James has published a book of her thoughts on the genre in which she has written for nearly half a century now. It's quite a short book--a small, highly selective tome of 160 pages with no footnotes or endnotes--and some sentences in it appear to be lifted from earlier critical pieces published by James (if my memory serves me), but critical observations from a writer of James' caliber are always wroth reading; and I would recommend this book to people interested in the genre.

Mostly the book is about the British Golden Age, with greatest emphasis on the celebrated Crime Queens of that day, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.  The latter get a chapter that comprises about 17% of the total book, and six of the seventeen books consulted by James for this study concern specific Crime Queens.  People familiar with James' views will have no huge surprises here. 

Although James lists as a source Laura Thompson's recent biography of Christie, Thompson's forcefully argued thesis that Christie should be taken more seriously as a crime novelist (as opposed to a puzzle-maker) makes little headway here with James, who asserts, for example, that her illustrious predecessor "employs no great psychological subtlety in her characterizations" and that "the last thing we get from a Christie novel is the disturbing presence of evil."  This is the usual line that James (and most English critics) have taken on Christie's work, in defiance of the evidence provided by Laura Thompson in her recent biography and by John Curran in his new book on Christie's writer's notebooks. 

Yet it is beyond doubt that there was a shift in emphasis and tone in a number of Christie's books beginning in the late thirties, with several of them taking on the features commonly associated today with what is called the "crime novel."  There very much is a sense of evil--sin, I would say--in Endless Night, for example, or And Then There were None, books as bleak as any penned by James.  There is more complex characterization in Sad Cypress, say, or Five Little Pigs or The Hollow.  Academic critics have come round to recognizing this; it would be nice to see more mainstream critics and graceful writers like James do so as well.

James does admit having reread some Christie for this study.  Some titles she found unreadable, we learn, while others surprised her by being "better written" than she recalled.  She cites A Murder is Announced as a specific example of the latter.

James is quite kind to the other Crime Queens.  She recognizes qualities people dislike about their work, such as intellectual and social snobbery, but she makes clear she holds these writers in greater esteem for, in her view, moving the detective novel closer to the realistic novel of manners.  Like Julian Symons, who is cited here several times, James clearly ranks the "realistic" modern crime novel higher on the artistic scale than the often "artificial" Golden Age detective novel.  Like Dorothy L. Sayers, who also is cited many times in her capacity as a literary critic, James also uses the Victorian-era novel as guide, praising Collins, Dickens and Trollope in these pages.  Readers familiar with the increasing girth of and detail in James novels over the last forty years again will not be surprised.

James finds Sayers' Gaudy Night the great achievement of the Golden Age in terms of combining a puzzle "with the novel of social realism and serious purpose."  Critics Q. D. Leavis and Edmund Wilson would turn over in their graves at the notion of Gaudy Night as an example of "social realism," though there's no question the novel has a "serious purpose."  Interestingly we learn James first read this novel in 1936, 73 years ago.  Manifestly, it had a great influence on her future writing career.

Sayers' greatest weakness in James' eyes seems to be that the murders in her tales often are "unrealistic."  "Today, in choosing how to despatch our victims," writes James, " we are less concerned with originality and ingenuity than with practical, scientific and psychological credibility." No doubt, though one might raise some similar questions about the mechanics of the James murders in, say, Unnatural Causes, Shroud for a Nightingale and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman.  Of course these all were books that were written still under the setting sun of the Golden Age, when people were not yet ashamed to flaunt ingenuity at the expense of "realism."

James has a chapter on the Golden Age itself, where she talks about some of the other writers of the period.  E. C. Bentley, Michael Innes, H. C Bailey, Gladys Mitchell, Edmund Crispin, Cyril Hare and  Josephine Tey all get a paragraph or more.  Nicholas Blake and the Coles are mentioned, for being intellectuals who wrote detective novels.  Ronald Knox is discussed, for his detective fiction writing rules.  S. S. Van Dine is ignored, confirming a marked Anglo-centrism in James' focus (Besides Poe, the only Americans I believe discussed are Chandler and Hammett--one would get the impression, if one did not know better, that only hardboiled mysteries were produced by Americans in the Golden Age).

The main discussion of pre-Golden Age writers is given over to Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton. R. Austin Freeman is omitted, which is a shame since James values scientific realism in the modern crime novel. Similarly, the Golden Age "Humdrum" writers are omitted, except for G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, who really aren't Humdrums anyway.  Usually Freeman Wills Crofts will get a perfunctory mention in surveys, but not here (unless I missed something--there is no index).  More surprisingly John Dickson Carr seems to be omitted too.  Most regrettably to me: no Henry Wade, a sober Golden Age writer actually more of a precursor to James, in my view, than any of the Crime Queens.

So, generally, I would say that no great new ground is broken in Talking about Detective Fiction, and the opinions expressed in it are pretty familiar to those familiar with James, but it's a pleasure to have it all collected in one small, smoothly written volume.  I should note that James is occasionally wryly amusing, as when she writes about Baroness Orczy's rather antiquated Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (James has always had an excellent sense of humor, something we don't get see as much of as I would like).  At the end of James' "talk," she deems detective stories "unpretentious celebrations of reason and order in our increasingly complex and disorderly world" that we read for "relief, entertainment and mild intellectual challenge."  The Moonstone may not be Middlemarch, concludes James, but we can honor the genius which produced the one without devaluing the ingenuity and artistry that produced the latter.  Fair enough.  I for one shall continue to reread my clever Golden Age favorites in the years to come, just as I shall reread certain ingenious detective tales by P. D. James.

Curt