PD James remembered by Nigel Williams

Author Nigel Williams remembers his friend, the queen of crime fiction, who died last week aged 94

• Nigel Williams  - The Observer, Sunday 30 November 2014

PD James: 'funny, warm and self-critical'. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Phyllis James was not a writer who simply viewed murder as an excuse for a story. All her crime novels – whether starring her tall dark and handsome detective Adam Dalgliesh, who has not only written but actually published poetry, or her female detective Cordelia Gray – are serious explorations of the world in which they are set. An Anglican theological college in Death in Holy Orders or a long-established publishing firm in Original Sin provide the backdrop for a rigorous and unsentimental look at how English society works. She had a background as a civil servant in the criminal section of the Home Office and, later, as a life peer and governor of the BBC, that brilliantly qualified her for the task of analysing how the establishment works.

Her hero Dalgliesh, unlike so many other gentlemen detectives, is a serious and substantial figure, while Cordelia Gray is a totally credible struggling private eye who owes more to Raymond Chandler than the golden age of the English detective story.

Her original fiction, such as Innocent Blood, or her brilliant piece of dystopian science fiction The Children of Men, reveals a writer of true originality. The first is a dark study of an adopted girl finding out about her real parents and the second portrays a world in which human beings are finding it harder and harder to reproduce. What she shows in both novels is the ability to put together a suspenseful narrative that has nothing whatsoever to do with the crossword puzzle.
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