Writer Reveals Mysteries of Her Craft at UCI Seminar

She doesn’t look like the “Queen of Crime.”

Passing out copies of her class outline to a group of writing students gathered at UC Irvine, British mystery writer P.D. James comes across as your genial great aunt come to visit on a holiday.

She’s wearing a tan skirt and matching tan sweater over a rose-colored blouse. Her brown shoes are low-heeled and sensible. Her brown hair is conservatively coifed and her plastic-framed glasses thick and owlish.

Which just goes to prove that appearances can be deceiving.

This is, after all, the writer who, in 10 best-selling mystery novels published over the past 25 years, has dispatched her victims in a variety of coldblooded ways: hanging, poisoning, strangulation and, in the case of one disabled older gentleman, sabotaged wheelchair brakes that caused the poor fellow to run off a cliff.

In her latest best seller, “A Taste for Death,” the two victims--an ex-member of Parliament and a tramp--have their throats slashed with a straight razor. The grisly murders take place in a church vestry.

“Often a murder is more horrific if it is in a peaceful setting,” observes James, 66, gesturing with a black pen in one hand and a white hankie in the other. “So in your setting, remember the power of contrast. It can be extraordinarily potent.”

The 20 writers were seated in a semicircle facing her, listening intently and dutifully taking notes. The class is Murder and Mystery: The Art of the Detective Story. And for three consecutive Tuesday evenings the celebrated James, a writer in residence at the university, will be their guide.

By the end of the first session last week, James had, in providing a brief history of the genre, demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of past and present mystery writers and their works. She also had begun her exploration into the essential ingredients--plot, characters, dialogue, clue making--that make a good mystery.

In the process, she offered her views on such topics as:

- Motives: “In the 1930 mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren’t credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets . . . it isn’t regarded as a strong enough motive for this time. Money (however) is always a good motive. . . .”

- Writing a successful mystery: “What I want to emphasize, of course, is what we’re talking about really is writing a novel. That’s the most important thing of all to recognize and to understand--that the mystery is not a kind of sub-literary genre. A good mystery should be a good novel.”

- The creative process: “With me, it is a very strange feeling indeed when I’m writing a book. It does seem to me as if the book and the characters, the plot--everything about the story--already exists outside myself in some limbo of the imagination, and what I am doing is getting in touch with it and getting it down on paper.”

From the point of view of the writers in the class, who were chosen from among 60 applicants, it had been an eventful evening.

Observed La Habra retiree Bill Melton, a published writer who wants to try writing a mystery: “I figured if you can’t learn from P.D. James, you can’t learn from anybody.”

She had left her four-story, 150-year-old Regency house in London’s fashionable Holland Park district two days earlier and was now ensconced in UCI’s new faculty housing complex--a cluster of cream-colored apartments on the outskirts of the campus.

Cheerfully greeting a mid-morning visitor to her temporary digs on the day of her first class, James immediately set about brewing a pot of coffee on an automatic coffee maker in the kitchen. “I drink tea in the morning, but I must say I enjoy coffee,” she said.

With its freshly painted white walls and untrampled beige carpet, the furnished apartment has the feel of an unlived-in model home--except for the large dining room table.

Posters to Autograph

A plate of red apples had been set out on the center of the table and, on the far end, next to where James had neatly laid her class notes and two pens, was a stack of red-and-black posters that had been dropped off for her to autograph.

The posters announce her upcoming lecture, at 8 p.m. Friday at South Coast Community Church in Irvine, by proclaiming: “The Grande Dame of Mystery Returns!”

James, who lectured at UCI two years ago, laughed good-naturedly when asked how she feels about such appellations.

“Oh, yes: ‘Grande Dame of Mystery,’ ‘the Queen of Crime,’ ‘Agatha Christie’s Crown Princess,’ ” she said in her lilting English accent as she sat down at the table. “I don’t think you like them or dislike them. It’s a sort of journalistic thing.”

Her three-week stay at UCI, during which she also is working with writers in a graduate fiction-writing workshop, is actually somewhat of a respite. James has been promoting “A Taste for Death” at home and abroad since it was published in England in June. The book marks the return of her popular poet-detective, Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard. All but one of her novels, “Innocent Blood,” feature either Dalgliesh or Cordelia Gray, her young amateur detective.

Although James is unable to accept all of the many invitations she receives to teach, she acknowledged that she does enjoy teaching.

“I think it depends, of course, on the pupils,” she said. “If you’ve got an unresponsive (class), oh, God, it must be dreadful. If they’re responsive and keen, you get this exchange of minds, which is lovely.”

While acknowledging that “you cannot teach people who have no creative writing ability to write,” James emphasized that the techniques peculiar to writing mysteries can be taught.

“Absolutely,” she said. “Put at its lowest level, for example, the question is when does the murder take place? Anybody who is going to have a murder mystery--which is going to be a real mystery with clues and a denouement--and you don’t get to the corpse until near three quarters of the way, is going to (have) a book that is structurally out of sync.”

Stresses Energy, Persistence

But what’s more important than whether or not someone takes a writing class, James maintains, “is the talent, the originality, and the energy to do it. And the persistence to do it. You learn writing by writing. But I think the thing about classes is that they encourage you to do it; they encourage you to keep on, encourage you to look critically at what you’ve done.”

James said she never took any writing classes herself. And, although she had read widely all her life and had literary ambitions at an early age, she did not begin writing until she was in her mid-30s.

World War II had already begun when Oxford-born Phyllis Dorothy James was married, at age 20, to Dr. Connor White. She was pregnant with their second daughter and living in London when her husband was sent to India with the Royal Army Medical Corps. He returned from the war mentally ill, and James, with two young daughters and a husband to support, went to work.

She was a medical record keeper for the National Health Service in the late 1950s when she began writing for two hours before going to work each morning. “I can remember what started me off: the acknowledgment that I’ve got to get down to it or I’ll never get it done,” James said.

It took her 3 1/2 years to write her first novel, “Cover Her Face,” which was accepted by the first publisher she submitted it to. “My husband was quite ill at the time, and it tended to be put (aside) . . . and then picked up again,” she said.

Despite her growing success as an author, James continued to work full time in the British Civil Service, drawing upon her experiences working in the Police and Criminal Law Departments of Britain’s Home Office for realism in her novels. She continues to serve four days a month as a magistrate, one of England’s unpaid, trained justices of the peace, who try the majority of minor cases.

James, whose husband died in 1964, two years after her first novel was published, firmly believes that such varied life experiences are essential for a writer.

“Absolutely,” she said. “It’s living that makes a writer. Living perceptively, living with your mind and your heart open to experience and to other people. It is no disadvantage. . . .” She paused.

Need Something to Say

“I’ll pour your coffee now,” she said, getting up. From the kitchen, she continued:

“It is no disadvantage not to be able to settle down and be a full-time writer. In fact, I agree that if a young person comes out of college and has enough money to say, ‘I am going to write,’ well, I musn’t be dogmatic. I mean I’m not going to say they couldn’t be a good writer because, you see, there are people who break all the rules. But myself, I would wonder what they have to say to the rest of us?”

She returned to the table and poured the coffee.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing is ever wasted to a writer,” she said firmly, cupping her hands around her cup. “No experience is ever wasted. But, you know, there are moral issues to it, aren’t there? I think you need humility and sensitivity to other people’s sufferings, to other people’s conditions. I’m not sure that having a very privileged life, being a rich kid, is the best foundation (for becoming a writer). I don’t mean that you can’t, when you’re rich and privileged, be a writer, but you need to know how the rest of the world lives.”

James said she lives a “fairly average life style” in London.

“Oh, yes, I do take good care that I do,” she said. “I’m rich, but I don’t live rich. It’s not good for you as a writer to do that. Anyway, the government takes most of it. But, you see, I don’t drive, and I do my own shopping, and, as I live under my married name of White, in a sense I can be fairly anonymous. Not in the literary world, of course, unfortunately, but with ordinary people.”

James said it wasn’t literary fame and fortune that she sought when she started writing.

“I think I set out to write because I needed to write--(it was) a psychological need to write. And you don’t think, why, this perhaps will make me money; this will make me famous. The satisfaction of having your first book published is that you can say: I am a writer. I have written and published my first book. Then you hope that people will like it. Of course, if it (fame) comes, it’s a bonus, really.”

By the end of her three-week seminar at UCI, James said she hopes the writers in the class “take away a real enthusiasm for tackling the genre, which isn’t a word I like; a real desire to write their own (novel), some clear idea of what they’re aiming at and, perhaps, some idea of how they’re going to get there.

“But basically it’s the enthusiasm, feeling (that), ‘Yes, I can do it.’ ”

Despite her success and critical acclaim as a novelist, James said she still considers herself a writing student.

“I think you’re always learning; that’s the fascination of it.”