A Grandmotherly Briton and Her Unlikely Novel

”. . . They lay like butchered animals in a waste of blood . . . ,” P. D. James wrote. “One corpse had slipped from the low single bed to the right of the door and lay staring up at her, the mouth open, the head almost cleft from the body. . . .”

The grisly description continued, not at all suggesting that the author is a benign-looking grandmother who on a recent gray, wet morning served coffee in her antique-furnished drawing room and chatted cheerily about her life and her latest book, “A Taste for Death.”

‘A Lot of Blood’

“I think I do describe the corpses very realistically,” she said, sipping her coffee. “There is a lot of blood and in some of them a great deal of horror, I suppose. But basically I’m writing the classic English detective story. I’m not specifically setting out to be particularly bloody or horrific. I’m most interested in the people and the effect of the crime on them.”

James had shaken the whodunit world with her literate style of detective fiction. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic are crowning her the new Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie’s successor, and crediting her with sparking a revival of the mystery novel. Her awards include two Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Assn. and the Edgar Allan Poe scroll.

Three-Month Best Seller

“A Taste for Death,” published in London in June, stayed on Britain’s hard-back best-seller list for three months, and has won enthusiastic acclaim, many critics praising its likeness to a straight novel. To coincide with its U.S. publication last week (Knopf: $18.95), James, 66, has embarked on a three-week promotional tour of the United States and Canada. She will be appearing Friday and Saturday in Los Angeles.

Like her other nine books, “A Taste for Death” is notable for its complexity of characters and setting, while adhering to the conventions of the detective story genre: the mysterious murder, a closed circle of suspects, and a detective who solves the crime from the clues in the narrative.

A recently resigned member of Parliament and a local tramp are found with their throats slashed in a dingy church vestry. As James’ cerebral hero, Commander Adam Dalgliesh, and his staff launch their investigation, a skein of motives including adultery, inheritance, politics, revenge and familial estrangement begins to unravel. The events culminate in a heart-thumping siege near Holland Park, the well-heeled neighborhood where James lives.

The author has set much of the novel in Central London, within walking distance of her three-story town house. The book is sprinkled with references to shops, parks, antique stalls and other neighborhood places that James frequents. She doesn’t own a car and does her shopping with a grocery cart. Her habits of strolling in the nearby parks, browsing antique stores and secondhand bookstores, and exploring church architecture plus her eye for detail and creative imagination work together to create the palpable atmosphere found in her books.

In “A Taste for Death,” James took the liberty of moving an Oxford church to London, placed it a few miles from her house and made it the scene of the crime.

From her buff-colored living room, with its floral-patterned sofas and polished tables, is a view of Camden Hill Square, a leafy park bordered by houses. It’s here that James places the palatial mansion of the murdered politician. The mansion is a Sir John Sloane house uprooted from another area.

“I suppose living in this area, it’s one I know intimately and it seemed to me that that would be a good place for him,” said James, who was born in Oxford and grew up in Cambridge and London.

Despite her almost 25 years as a published writer James has maintained a degree of anonymity and prefers it. To neighbors she is Mrs. Phyllis White, a genial, doting grandmother who plays a challenging game of Scrabble and collects porcelain figurines. A widow, she lives alone but has recently acquired two playful Burmese kittens. To relax she walks by the sea, watches television and reads a lot, but her main source of pleasure is visiting with her two daughters, their husbands and her five grandchildren, ages 8 to 21.

“I don’t see them as much as I would like,” she said. “We are very close.” Another side of the “benign grandmother,” as she modestly describes herself, is a fiercely intelligent, literate woman who, without benefit of a college education, supported her family through some hard times and never lost sight of her dream to become a writer.

A Late Beginner

James, the daughter of a income-tax official, said she always knew she wanted to be a writer from age 7 or 8, but was “just a late beginner.”

“I was 19 when the war broke out. We lived in London and there wasn’t a lot of expectation of surviving,” she said.

“There was no paper for new books to be published and it wasn’t a good time to begin. After the war my husband came back from overseas service mentally ill. I had two small daughters and a husband to support so I had to do something that was rather safe.

“The years slipped by and the time came when I realized that if I didn’t settle down and write my first book, I would be a failed writer. There was no good waiting for a convenient time; there never was going to be a convenient time.” At 39, James began a morning routine of writing two hours before going to her full-time job as a medical record keeper for the National Health Service. Her first book, “Cover Her Face,” 1962, was accepted by the first publisher she submitted it to. “So I was spared a great deal of disappointment,” she said smiling.

Choosing the pen name P. D. James was not a deliberate red herring to deceive readers as to her sex, said Phyllis Dorothy James White.

“As a woman it would never occur to me to write under my married name. By family, by genes I’m a James. Once settled it was going to be James, it could be Phyllis James, Phyllis D. James, or P. D. James. And I like it best. It’s neat and it’s short and I suppose I did think it somewhat enigmatic,” she said with a chuckle.

Learning on the Job

Although James needs solitude at times, she said she could never be a reclusive writer. “Being in the mainstream of life and having a full-time job has really helped,” she said, citing experiences in her 30-year career as a hospital administrator and civil servant that she’s woven into her novels.

Her second book, “A Mind to Murder,” reflects knowledge gleaned while she was in charge of five psychiatric units. Working in a nurse’s training program she absorbed atmosphere and a clever way of poisoning a victim for “Shroud for a Nightingale.” In 1968 she took a job in the Home Office in the forensic science service, which became a valuable source in writing her vivid realistic descriptions of bodies. Her only non-mystery book, “Innocent Blood,” the story of an adopted girl looking for her biological parents, was inspired by her work in the juvenile courts.

James did not retire from her job until 1979, just six months before required by law, even though she had already written eight successful books. She never wanted to have to write for her income, she said. She regarded the money from her books as “a useful addition.”

A clear analytical mind is a good quality for a writer, said James, who plans her books in considerable detail before sitting down to write.

“A book almost always begins with a place,” she said. “You start with the setting and it grows from there. It incubates so very many months.

“The most recent one started when I visited a church in Oxford. I had this visual image of the dead bodies in the vestry. Then you decide who’s been killed and when and why and who the suspects are going to be and what their various motives are going to be. It develops from that original visual image of a particular place or reaction to a particular place.”

As a girl, James was an avid reader of Dorothy L. Sayers’ whodunits, and was influenced by her work in deciding to write detective fiction. She reads other mystery writers--Dick Francis, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, “but I’m not an addict.” She is no fan of Christie, whom she has called a “literary conjurer” and “such a bad writer.” Among Americans she admires the hard-boiled school of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet and Ross MacDonald. Her overall favorite authors are Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.

Modern mystery novels have become more complex, with writers showing a greater interest in people instead of just plot, while staying within the formal structure of mystery writing, James said.

Old Writing Style

“In the ‘30s it was almost the tradition in the detective story that the plot was everything: extraordinary ingenuity of plot, ingenuity of clue, bizarre unusual methods of dispatching the victim. These were what counted really. No one expected much characterization; certainly the writers didn’t give it. I think that’s one of the changes nowadays. Characterization is tremendously important because we really have moved closer to a straight novel.”

She regards the dichotomy between detective fictions and serious fiction as “rather foolish. Certain people who write genre fiction are reviewed as novelists--John Le Carre, Eric Ambler. If you write a good spy story or a novel of espionage, it’s genre fiction, but it’s regarded as a novel. I think it’s the same with detective stories. I think it depends on the quality of the writing.”

Among her own works, James names “A Taste for Death” and “Innocent Blood” as her best efforts. Another favorite is “An Unsuitable Job for a Woman,” which features her amateur female detective Cordelia Gray. “I rather enjoyed writing that,” she said.

As for a new book, James said she has a germ of an idea, but it won’t be developed until next spring or summer when “life is more peaceful.” After the U.S. tour, she will do some promotions in northwest England and on the Continent and then a three-week teaching stint at the University of California at Irvine.