It's Killing Time
Time, It's Killing
It’s Killing Time Only the most ‘sensitive and important’ murders for Adam Dalgliesh. BY JAMES GRANT An editorial in the Times (London), written to mark the publication of P.D. James’s...
...In this book the squad is called in by No...
...But Lady James daintily maneuvers around this problem by placing him in a special, elite squad...
...Perhaps it’s arrogant,” Dalgliesh ponders after uncovering the murderer, “this need to know the truth...
...In fact, the two sides are inseparable...
...it just tells us who is going to die, which we already knew from the blurb...
...He has been around for some time (this is his 14th outing since James’s fi rst novel in 1962, Cover Her Face), and normally a detective of his rank would not be doing the sort of work he does here...
...For him the job always comes fi rst...
...Of course, with crime fi ction, this idea can only be taken so far...
...Having been partly converted into a plastic surgery clinic, the manor is renowned for its seclusion and, of course, attracts a high calibre of patients...
...Phyllis Dorothy James—otherwise known as the mistress of mystery or the queen of crime or, since 1991, Baroness James of Holland Park—wrote in her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest, that all autobiography is fi ction, and that all fi ction is autobiography...
...It is true that she brings her traditional values to bear on some of the problems that blight modern society...
...Pirouetting through her prose, James often indulges in thoughtful meditations on the nature of things...
...For it is the quality of the prose that keeps you coming back for more, even when the plot, artifi cially concocted as most detective fi ction is, does not quite reach the same height...
...The murder is of a distinguished investigative journalist, Rhoda Gradwyn, who is a very private person...
...Even when the plot takes the characters to London, it tends to be done, fl eetingly, in the quiet of a Sunday morning...
...Perhaps the most loved aspect of James’s books, however, is not the fact that they are good, old-fashioned, classic crime novels, but that she writes with an eloquence that transcends the genre and lifts it to a level where the word “literature” can legitimately be used...
...After Dalgliesh has gathered the closed pool of possible suspects for questioning in the Clue-like library, it soon becomes clear that several of them have strong motives to want Gradwyn dead...
...We eventually begin to lose ourselves...
...This is true of The Private Patient...
...So when his fi anc?e, Emma Lavenham, intrudes on his investigation to ask him to help a friend who was the victim of a rape, he does not hesitate before saying no...
...James’s latest novel, The Private Patient, praised Lady James as “a perceptive chronicler of the changing landscape of London...
...The scar was caused by her drunken father, and while she has lived with it for 34 years, she now “no longer has need of it”—a point the reader is repeatedly reminded about...
...In 1654, so the myth goes, a woman was tied to the tallest stone and burnt as a witch, thus adding to the mystery...
...Gradwyn becomes a patient at the clinic in order to have a horrible facial scar removed...
...We know the death is coming, and when it fi nally comes, after almost 90 pages and much, maybe too much, characterization of Gradwyn as a withdrawn enigma, it comes as a relief...
...James Grant is a writer in Glasgow...
...I am speaking to Adam Dalgliesh the poet,” somebody tells him, “not Adam Dalgliesh the detective...
...But I’m not sure James’s chronicling of modern Britain should be the fi rst thing about her novels to celebrate...
...From the opening sentence, we know it is a decision “which would lead inexorably to her death...
...Later he decides that what is arrogant is thinking we can both know the truth and understand it, “particularly the truth about human motives, the mysterious working of another’s mind...
...BY JAMES GRANT An editorial in the Times (London), written to mark the publication of P.D...
...James has given Dalgliesh all the qualities she admires: intelligence, compassion, but not sentimentality...
...These settings all add to the sense of comfort which is a hallmark of P.D...
...All the classic techniques are in place, and James does not disappoint...
...That said, during the writing of The Private Patient, James, who is in her 88th year, was herself hospitalized by a heart failure and yet continued— through what she describes as a “happy period”—to write a book which her fans will love...
...This was obviously meant to create an ominous sense of foreboding...
...It may not be a particularly profound observation, but it does lend weight to the claim often made about James’s books: That they are not only whodunits, but also whydunits...
...Also intertwined with the investigation is a myth behind the Cheverell Stones in the grounds of the manor...
...10 Downing Street to investigate the murder...
...Indeed, in a nod towards the classic crime writing of the 1950s, James pays homage to Cyril Hare’s Untimely Death throughout...
...Rather, they tend to have the elegant settings of quaint English villages or, as in this one, a luxurious Elizabethan manor house in Dorset...
...Sometimes she pulls these digressions off...
...But it doesn’t...
...Dalgliesh’s compassion is always evident...
...either that or they are having lunch at The Ivy, the famous and fashionable restaurant...
...It would, however, be wrong to mistake this for coldness...
...Although, like Gradwyn, James ended up in a private room, it is with Dalgliesh that she is most closely akin, and it is his attention to detail, his intelligence, and his compassion that fl ow from every page...
...Like many genre writers, James is determined to escape from the confi nes of crime fi ction, and to bring more depth to her characters and literary fl ourishes to her prose...
...other times not...
...But most interesting is Dalgliesh himself, a character that James’s fans will by now know quite well, but that nevertheless manages to intrigue...
...And so we wait patiently for the patient to die—or at least we try to wait patiently (if I’m being honest, I was thinking: “get on with it...
...Commander Adam Dalgliesh—that much loved poet-detective of Scotland Yard—investigates a murder in the exclusive surroundings of Cheverell Manor...
...Even her own mother seems indifferent to her death: “You don’t expect it to happen to someone you know,” she says, expressing a lack of closeness...
...Dalgliesh only tackles the most sensitive and important crimes, naturally—though quite what is so sensitive and important about this particular murder is not especially clear...
Vol. 14 • December 2008 • No. 12
