P. D. James: Stylist

Nov. 27: Phyllis Dorothy James White, who became Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991 but was better known as “the Queen of Crime” for the multi-layered mystery novels she wrote as P.D. James, died at her home in Oxford, England, today. She was 94.

James’s death was announced by her publisher in Britain, Faber & Faber. James was one of those rare authors whose work stood up to the inevitable and usually invidious comparisons with classic authors of the detective genre, like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham.

A consummate stylist, she accumulated numerous awards for the 13 crime novels produced during her 33-year writing career. Seven of her mysteries were adapted for the public television programme Mystery! and were broadcast in Britain and the US.

James bristled at the frequent comparisons to genre authors who wrote during the golden age of the English mystery novel in the 1930s. “That kind of crime writing was dull,” she once said in an interview, “in the sense that it was unrealistic, prettifying and romanticising murder, but having little to do with real blood-and-guts tragedy.

“One simply cannot take these as realistic books about murder, about the horror of murder, the tragedy of murder, the harm that murder does.”

Indeed, many of her peers and critics have said that by virtue of her complex plots, the psychological density of her characters and the moral context in which she viewed criminal violence, James surpassed her classic models and elevated the literary status of the modern detective novel.

She is often cited, in particular, for the cerebral depth and emotional sensibilities of Adam Dalgliesh, the introspective Scotland Yard detective and published poet who functions as the hero of virtually all of her novels.

Her intention with Dalgliesh, she told the British critic and writer Julian Symons in 1986, was to create a detective “quite unlike the Lord Peter Wimsey kind of gentlemanly amateur” popularised by Dorothy L. Sayers. The author envisioned a realistic cop as her protagonist, a dedicated and skilled professional — and yet “something more than just a policeman, you see, a complex and sensitive human being.”

Her readers found this brooding, morally conflicted character profoundly romantic. Even James thought he was sexy. “I could never fall in love with a man who was handsome but stupid,” she said. Still, Commander Dalgliesh (pronounced Dawlgleesh) remained a self-contained, even aloof figure. “There’s a splinter of ice in his character,” his creator said.

In An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, she introduced Cordelia Gray, a young private investigator whose professional competence and independent spirit put her in the vanguard of an emerging generation of female sleuths.

These included Liza Cody’s Anna Lee in Britain, and Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone in the US.

But it was Commander Dalgliesh who won their hearts — and the author’s. “Perhaps Adam Dalgliesh is an idealised version of what I’d have liked to be if I had been born a man,” she once said.

Roy Marsden played Dalgliesh on the Mystery! adaptations. James found him to be a “good actor, but he’s not my Dalgliesh”. Unlike Marsden, Dalgliesh had a full head of hair and no moustache. And James was troubled by “the class thing”.

Her commander, she said, “wouldn’t wear some of the clothes Roy does, he wouldn’t wear his signet ring on the wrong finger, he wouldn’t have talked to Lady Ursula Berowne with his hand in his pocket, as he did”.

Phyllis Dorothy James White was born on August 3, 1920, in Oxford, the eldest of three children of Dorothy James and Sidney James, a civil servant who did not believe in inflicting too much education on his daughter.

The family settled in Cambridge when she was 11, and before she left the Cambridge High School for Girls at the age of 16, she already knew that she wanted to be a writer and that mysterious death intrigued her. “When I first heard that Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall,” she was fond of saying, “I immediately wondered: Did he fall — or was he pushed?”

But an early marriage to Ernest C.B. White, a medical student, and the outbreak of World War II halted her plans for a writing career.

It took her three years to write her first mystery novel, Cover Her Face, by working in the early morning, hours before going off to her hospital job. She was 42 when it was published. The realistic hospital settings of three early novels, A Mind to Murder, Shroud for a Nightingale and “The Black Tower” (Faber, 1975; Scribner, 1975), owe much to her 19 years of administrative experience with the National Health Service.