Mystery novelist P.D. James remembers the moment of shock.
She had gone to a police crime lab to learn about new techniques for identifying and analyzing the splattering of blood at murder scenes. One technician had a scrapbook of photographs of blood that had splashed across an expanse of brightly colored wallpaper from a particularly gruesome case, and James was leafing through the book.Then she turned a page and saw the bodies.
“The victims were two young people who had just set up house together,” she recalls. “They were killed by psychopaths. It was a motiveless crime. And there were their bodies, both naked, two very young people with blood all over.
“It was truly horrific. That is what murder is. That is reality too. You had a sense of (feeling) anger and frustration and impotence. It was just savagery, reminding me — I don’t think I needed much reminding — what real-life murder is in its brutality.”
P.D. James is an expert in pretend death, the murders committed in her highly respected and widely popular mystery books, the puzzles that her protagonists, particularly Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh, solve.
But, from childhood, she’s also been a student of the real thing, keenly aware of death — for herself, for others — as ultimately unavoidable, arbitrary and uncontrollable. “I’d see an old movie or old news things, like the funeral procession of George V, and I’d think, `Look at them. They’re dead now. They’re all gone.’ “
Sitting on a comfortable sofa in her hotel room in Chicago while on tour promoting her latest murder mystery, “A Certain Justice” (Knopf), the very British James seems the antithesis of a worrywart. She is a sturdy woman, solid, self-contained. Under a crown of unruly reddish-brown hair, her face is animated, her eyes wide and filled with intelligence.
She looks to be what she is: a cheerful grandmother. And one who, though 77 years old, appears at least a decade younger.
“In a way,” she says, “we live as if death didn’t exist. We’re extremely frank about sex. Yet, we’re not frank about death at all. It’s the great unmentionable.”
James tells of one Roman Catholic school in England that, in response to a survey question, said its goal was “to prepare the students for death.” She laughs heartily as she relates the story, but goes on to point out that it’s not such a silly thing to say — if it means preparing students to live their lives to the fullest so that, when death comes, they’re ready.
An awareness of death “helps you feel that each day is precious and should be lived as much as possible with joy, really. I wake up in the morning feeling it’s a privilege to find I’m here.”
As odd as it may sound, death — rather than plain and simple murder as a plot device — is one of the subthemes to “A Certain Justice.”
In the book’s third sentence, for example, readers learn that Venetia Aldridge, an immensely talented but emotionally stunted barrister, has only “four weeks, four hours and fifty minutes left of life.” To be sure, Venetia’s death will move the narrative forward as the (initial) murder of James’ mystery. But something else is going on here as well.
Poetical musings
As a reader, you can’t look at the cold, hard numbers of Venetia’s remaining lifespan — numbers of which she is blissfully unaware — and not wonder at how many days, hours and minutes you yourself still have left.
Later, two of Venetia’s legal colleagues are discussing her death. For Drysdale Laud, the conversation is a way of passing time. But for Hubert Langton, it’s a moment of deep melancholy.
“Does nothing of us last once we are dead?” asks Langton who, feeling old and deteriorated at 72, fears Alzheimer’s and half longs for an end to life.
“For the lucky ones, perhaps love,” Laud says. “Influence, maybe. But not power. The dead are powerless. You’re the churchman, Hubert. Remember Ecclesiastes? Something about a living dog better than a dead lion?”
In response, Langton quotes two verses from that book of the Bible: “For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.”
Not the sort of poetic meditation that one expects from a murder mystery.
Yet, all such stories — from Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, to Sara Paretsky and Raymond Chandler — are, at heart, attempts at coping with the unacceptable reality of death.
Over the millennia, humans have devised myriad ways of facing the unfaceable. In the ancient world, the Greeks had their tragedies, and the tribes of Israel had the Torah. Other cultures have turned to poetry, to dance, to hymns or art or philosophy. And since the late 1700s, the English-speaking nations (and much of the rest of the West) have used the murder mystery — a humble entertainment, but with an edge — as a means of exorcising those demons.
“In a sense,” James says, “it’s a modern morality play, isn’t it?
“You get the solving of a puzzle. This is very reassuring. In society, you can feel problems are becoming impossible to solve. Here, you get a problem solved. You get vicarious excitement and danger. You get a completely controlled cathartic terror. You know you’re safe. It isn’t happening to you.
“And you’re affirming that life is sacred. In some way, (the murder mystery) distances the atavistic fear of death. It fictionalizes it. It makes it into a puzzle.”
And not just for the reader.
Controlling fear through fiction
James acknowledges her own strong fear of violence, physical and psychological, and that her writing helps keep those fears at bay.
“This distances me. If I’m dealing with it fictionally, I’m controlling it, bringing order out of disorder. People will ask how can a happy grandmother like me write about such appallingly violent crimes.
“It’s probably writing about violence that keeps me a happy grandmother.”
James — whose full name is Phyllis Dorothy James White — always knew she wanted to be a writer. As a young girl, she made up The Adventures of Percy Pig to tell her younger brother and sister at bedtime.
But she was 19 at the start of World War II, and the writing of novels didn’t seem like a sensible way of spending one’s time. “There wasn’t that confidence that you’d be there next week.” At 21, she was married to Connor White, a physician, and was soon caring for two daughters, Clare and Jane.
When her husband returned from the war suffering from a mental illness that he never escaped — he died in 1964 — James went to work as a filing clerk to support the family, going to night school to obtain a degree in hospital administration.
It was a more than full life for anyone. But one in which she wasn’t writing a word of fiction.
“I remember the moment very clearly,” she says, her eyes looking across the hotel room as if to see what she was seeing on that long-ago day. “It just dawned on me, rather like a thunderclap, if I went on like this, I’d be a failed writer. If you’re going to write, you’ve got to write.”
She wrote.
And, after three years of writing at the kitchen table in the early morning hours, her first mystery novel, “Cover Her Face,” was accepted by the first publisher who saw it. It went on sale in 1962.
A public servant as well
Since then, she has published 13 other novels, all but two of which are murder mysteries. About half of those books were produced while she was still working full time. She spent much of her career as an administrator in the Home Office, the equivalent of the U.S. Justice Department, rising to head the Criminal Law division before retiring in 1979.
In 1991, she was awarded — on the basis of her public service, not her literary accomplishments — the title of Baroness James of Holland Park. As such, she has a seat in the House of Lords, and is entitled to be addressed as Lady James (although she pooh-poohs such formality as “unimportant.”)
James is five years older than her character Hubert Langton, but doesn’t suffer from his sense of despair at a life only half-lived.
At one point in “A Certain Justice,” Langton worries about his waning mental powers and rages, like King Lear, against heaven. Then, in a tired acceptance, he quotes Psalm 39: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, . . . O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence, and be no more seen.”
But weeping and wailing aren’t James’ own style.
“You realize that you are now walking down the other side of the hill because no one is going to live forever,” she acknowledges. “I’ve been much more fortunate than (Langton has) been. He wanted to be a judge and never was. His only son died young. His is an unfulfilled life. I’ve got my children and grandchildren. I have a body of work and grandchildren to leave behind me.
“If I died tomorrow, I feel gratified that I’ve fulfilled my talent.”
Isn’t that what preparing for death is all about?
Two excerpts from P.D. James’ new murder mystery, `A Certain Justice’:
An uncomfortable thought
It hadn’t been a comfortable conversation. With an effort of will Kate put the shooting range out of her mind. They were on their way to a new job. As always she felt, along the veins, that fizz of exhilaration that came with every new case. She thought, as she often did, how fortunate she was. She had a job which she enjoyed and knew she did well, a boss she liked and admired. And now there was this murder with all it promised of excitement, human interest, the challenge of the investigation, the satisfaction of ultimate success. Someone had to die before she could feel like this. And that, too, wasn’t a comfortable thought.
Reminders of life
He drew open the two bottom drawers (of the murder victim’s desk) and found little of immediate interest. There were boxes of writing-paper and envelopes, notepads, a wooden box containing a collection of ballpoint pens and, in the bottom drawer, two folded hand towels and a toilet bag containing soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste. A smaller zipped bag held Venetia Aldridge’s make-up, a small bottle of moisturizer, a compact of pressed powder, a single lipstick.
Kate said: “Expensive but minimal.”
Dalgliesh heard in her voice what he himself had so often felt. It was the small chosen artifacts of daily life which produced the most poignant memento mori.
