This Day in Literary History (P.D. James, Who Went From Trauma Survivor to Bestselling ‘Queen of Crime,’ Born)

Aug. 3, 1920—P.D. James, who was thrust into the workforce as a result of trauma, then became known as “The Queen of Crime” through mysteries that dealt with the violent aftermath of such crises, was born in Oxford, England.

Many fans of Phyllis Dorothy James (as she was christened) would be astounded to know that this creator of graceful prose—not to mention of a hero-detective who writes poetry, Adam Dalgleish—was entirely self-taught. Despite her birth in Oxford and residence in Cambridge later in childhood, she never graduated from a university, as her impecunious father saw little value in girls going on for higher education.

The most powerful impetus for her career, in fact, was not education, but her need to provide for her family because of the mental illness afflicting those closest to her.

When a full-scale biography finally tells the story of “Baroness James of Holland Park” (her title when she was created a life peer in 1991), her longtime readers will surely want to know how she shouldered and survived two traumas in relatively quick succession—first, her mother’s placement in a mental hospital in Phyllis’ mid-teens (forcing her to care for two younger sisters), and, in her late twenties, her husband’s mental illness (requiring that she become the sole breadwinner for her two young daughters).

In the case of the latter incident, she married medical student Ernest Connor Bantry White in 1941. While serving as a doctor in WWII, White suffered a mental breakdown, but his condition was not deemed war-related, so he received no disability pension. Now needing to provide for him and their daughters, James began to work for the U.K.’s Hospital Service in 1949.

 

Fifteen years later, White died. Over the years, James was reticent about his death. But, in a 2010 interview with Nigel Farndale of the U.K. newspaper The Daily Telegraph, she admitted that his demise in 1964 was related to his mental illness and that she had discovered his body.

By this time, James was already six years into writing detective fiction, but—much like T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens before her—she pursued writing after her day job had ended. In 1968, she began serving in the Home Office—first in the Police Department, then as a senior civil servant in the Criminal Policy Department, focusing on juvenile crime.

James’ combined three decades in the workforce not only inspired particular elements of her plot (e.g., watching a patient being fed through a tube led her to use this as a murder method in Shroud for a Nightingale) but enabled her to gain knowledge of organizational environments, especially how individuals reacted in these settings.

Consequently, James remembered later, settings became the starting point of her imaginative process. They were varied, and sometimes quite unusual: a private nursing home, a nuclear power station, a Church of England theological college, even an island fortress where a Jacobean tragedy would be performed.

Growing critical acclaim and book sales—as well as revenues from TV adaptations of her works—enabled James to leave the civil service in 1979 and concentrate on writing full-time. In the remaining years before her death in 2014, James became more prolific and more ambitious, moving away from detective tales into more general psychological suspense (Innocent Blood) and even dystopian fiction (Children of Men). 

Although Scotland Yard policeman Commander Adam Dalgliesh represented her most consistent and frequent source of remuneration (14 books over 44 years), I suspect that James may have invested most of herself psychologically in a different detective: Cordelia Gray. 

In An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), Gray, like her creator, finds herself thrust by a tragedy involving a male partner into a position far outside her comfort zone: in this case, as sole owner of a private detective agency. Moreover, like James, Gray triumphs over doubting males through hard work, piercing intelligence, and undaunted courage.

The concern with individual psychology that is the wellspring of James’ fiction inevitably widens to wider consideration of how the social fabric is torn by those who suffer early on. In her late-life Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, James concluded: 

“What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give….Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.”

A crime, James told NPR’s Linda Wertheimer in a 2009 interview, is solved “not by good luck or divine intervention. It's solved by a human being. By human courage and human intelligence and human perseverance. In a sense, the detective story is a small celebration of reason and order in our very disorderly world."

In the interwar “Golden Age” of detective fiction, four female predecessors had combined to "[lift] a rather despised genre into a form which could be taken seriously," James once explained: Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers. The latter two especially influenced her by setting her standards for style and characterization.

Perhaps even more than Allingham and Sayers, though, James demonstrated that she was not just a superb genre writer but a superb writer, period—one unafraid to pick up her life after crushing tragedy, and to depict how society, in the form of detectives, reassert the social order sundered by personal traumas.

(Thanks to my friend Holly for alerting me to James' quote about children.)