Appreciations: P. D. James’ Holiday Crime Fiction

You can have your sunny Christmas entertainments. As the holiday comes just as the cold, dark winter season descends, it seems to me that the literature of the season has to somehow acknowledge the darkness inside and outside ourselves.

It took her husband’s mental illness and her consequent need to provide for her family that led P.D. James (1920-2014) to work for Britain’s National Health Service and the Police Department, where she developed the medical and criminal expertise that underlay her detective novels. Well into middle age when her first novel was published, she continued until her death a half century later.

I don’t know why I haven’t read more of James’ work, since I have enjoyed what I have gotten around to—notably, The Black Tower and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Maybe it’s because she wrote so many Adam Dalgliesh novels, and the prospect of reading another, after seeing Roy Marsden on TV in the role of the solitary, depressed poetry-loving detective, was more than I could take.

But when I saw James’ posthumous collection, Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales offered on sale as a used hardcover at Barnes & Noble recently, I snapped it up quickly. Reading it has made me anxious to try to get hold of a similarly themed holiday collection of hers, The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories.

One friend has told me she prefers  up in an entirely different world. In contrast, I find that short fiction—from the simple tale to the more complex novella—suits my schedule better. And, truth be told, it is easier for an author to achieve perfection on a small than a sprawling scale.

Unlike Agatha Christie, James creates suspense not so much through carefully planted clues and artful indirection, but through setting and psychology. These virtues transferred from the Dalgleish and Charlotte Grey detective novels that made her reputation to more general crime fiction—like the novel Innocent Blood and the tales (which appeared originally in various anthologies from 1976 to 2006) in this slender volume. 

Two of the six tales in Sleep No More are set in the holiday season. With extraordinary vividness in these two tales, James evokes a time and place shadowed by a gathering storm: specifically, the class-conscious England of the late 1930s, with the desperation and evil of politics paralleling the same qualities in individuals. 

“The Yo-Yo” is narrated by a 73-year-old lawyer and judge whose discovery of the title object leads him to recall a murder he witnessed 60 years before. That crime involves, at least initially, a decidedly unsympathetic victim: Michael Michaelmass, or “Mike the Menace,” “easily the most unpopular master in the school, pedantic, over-strict and given to that biting sarcasm which boys find more difficult to bear than shouted insults.”

But by the time the tale is over, all will be changed utterly:

“I began to grow up during that Christmas week. I realized for the first time the insidious temptations of power, the exhilaration of feeling in control of people and events, the power of patronage. I learnt another lesson, best expressed by Henry James: ‘Never say you know the last word about any human heart.’”

The first-person narrator of “The Murder of Santa Claus” is even more ironic—just what one might expect from a writer of second-tier detective fiction who does “a workmanlike job on the old conventions.” (In an aside that must have greatly amused his creator, this author remarks, “I’m no H.R.F. Keating, no Dick Francis, not even a P.D. James.”)

My only complaint is that the description that follows is too deft to have come from a hack like Charles Mickledore:

“My arrival at Marston station, the silent drive through the darkening village, the school with the Christmas chains of coloured paper gleaming against the windows. The first sight of my uncle’s dark judgemental face. The carol singers creeping out under the blackout curtain. The game of hunt the hare. The silent figure of Santa Claus at the foot of my bed.”

Just as the elderly lawyer recounting “The Yo-Yo” reveals how his schoolboy self displayed the ability to explain away the unjustifiable that would inform his future profession, Charles Mickledore—described by another character as a “shy, unattractive, secretive boy”—shows the capacity to link action and circumstance that underlay his writing career. He figures out the culprit, then coolly deals with both the killer and the policeman investigating the case.

James can also render an appearance concisely but unforgettably, as in the second impression that Mickledore receives when he manages to raise his eyes from the decolletage of a famous actress—his wealthy uncle’s mistress, Gloria Belsize—to her face: 

“Now I saw what tactful touching-up had concealed: the deepening lines under the eyes, the sagging jawline, the hectic flush under the remarkable eyes. Then I wondered why she should be so excited by Christmas. Now I realise that she was half-drunk for most of the day and that my uncle saw it, was amused by it, and made no attempt to curb her.”

Above all, James depicts the devastating impact of crime on the human personality—including an impression that can scar the young for life.

In the last few years, British crime fiction has lost two female titans: James and contemporary Ruth Rendell. Both were geographers of human landscapes touched by violence: its perpetrators, its witnesses, and its victims. In particular, James’ Sleep No More reminds readers that death—very much including the kind associated with mayhem—never takes a holiday, even the one that mall jingles invariably remind us is the “most wonderful time of the year.”