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About PD James

PD James was born in Oxford in 1920. From 1949 to 1968 she worked in the National Health Service and subsequently in the Home Office, first in the Police Department and later in the Criminal Policy Department. All that experience has been used in her novels. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of the Arts and has served as a Governor of the BBC, a member of the Arts Council, where she was Chairman of its Literary Advisory Panel, on the Board of the British Council and as a magistrate in Middlesex and London. She has won awards for crime writing in Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia, including the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award. She has received honorary degrees from seven British universities, was awarded an OBE in 1983 and was created a life peer in 1991. In 1997 she was elected President of the Society of Authors.

PD James, The Private Patient

(Faber & Faber; 416pp paperback; $32.95)

In The Private Patient, the  latest (and perhaps last) novel featuring Scotland Yard sleuth Commander Adam Dalgliesh, author PD James has lost none of her tease.

For tease us she expertly does by opening the story with this sentence: “On November 21st, the day of her forty-seventh birthday, and three weeks and two days before she was murdered, Rhoda Gradwyn went to Harley Street to keep a first appointment with her plastic surgeon ... which would lead inexorably to her death."

Immediately, the crime reader tragic is placed on alert. As amateur detective we must pay close attention for tips and clues. We must piece the leads and suspicions together, and be ready with the Commander and his team, to arrest the culprit when the final telltale slip is revealed.

It is a sure fire way to create frisson from page one and make it hard, once started, to put this good crime story down.

James then proceeds to build the bones of the case. Rhoda Gradwyn is an investigative journalist of the kind that must create enemies. She has succeeded despite a dysfunctional family life and a disfiguring facial scar.

Mysteriously, after 30 or so years she has decided to have her scar removed. Her unlikely friend Robyn Boyton, a dissolute, perpetually broke, and rather callow young man recommends the aloof Harley Street specialist plastic surgeon, George Chandler-Powell, who operates outside London in a converted country manor house built near a set of ancient mythical stones. 

When Rhoda is asked why have the operation now, after all these years, she responds cryptically because "she no longer needs it".

Maddeningly, half a book later, with red herrings and suspicious characters laid down galore, the murder finally occurs. Maddening (and teasing) for the crime story tragic who wants to get on with WHODUNNIT there is no way to tell whether all that happens along the way counts or not.

Attention must therefore be paid to everything — the wedding of Rhoda's mum, even the coming nuptials of Dalgleish and Emma and their visit to her father.  The reader cannot afford to skip over any parts of a PD James novel, for any event just might matter.

Finally, Commander Dalgleish and his well known team, Detective Inspector Kate Miskin, and Detective Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith arrive in the Dorset countryside and the real detecting begins. As ever, the Commander is intelligent, subtle and discerningly astute as he follows the trail. The team are dedicated and painstaking in their pursuit of answers.

The facts are sifted and sorted, theories emerge and are overturned. It is all skillfully executed. And in the end, like other PD James crime fictions the resolution satisfactorily arrives.