P. D. James. Talking About Detective Fiction (2009)

     P. D. James. Talking About Detective Fiction (2009) The blurb refers to a :perfect marriage of author and subject”, which is hyping this nicely produced book a bit too much. But it was a pleasant read nevertheless. P. D. James breaks no new ground, I’d be surprised if she did. She clearly loves detective fiction more than other crime fiction, and she drops a few useful hints about how she does her own work. It begins with a setting, progresses to the characters, and (we infer) only then do the victim, the perpetrator, and the method emerge from her imaginings.
    James writes a clear and elegant style. What we may have suspected from her fiction, that she’s a cool and sometimes ruthless observer human evil, is here confirmed. Like Poirot, she has a bourgeois attitude to murder: she disapproves of it. She admires Christie’s puzzle-setting plots, but like most readers notes that Christie is weak on psychology and character. I first realised this when I noticed that Christie’s  characters all talk the same bland upper middle class English. James prefers Sayers, Allingham, and Marsh, in that order. I’d put Allingham last, but James’s comments have persuaded me to read more of her work.
All in all, a very pleasant read. ***