Cosy as a Scalpel

‘We never say what we mean, and you’ll never know what we’re thinking. And by the time you work it out, someone is murdering you with a bow and arrow at an antique fair. That’s just how we are I’m afraid.’ This is an arch piece of marketing from Richard Osman, promoting his detective novels to an American readership. There’s no reason to suppose that British people are better at hiding in plain sight than anyone else. However, they do like a murder story, and a thriving industry has grown up around this appetite for blood. The popularity of crime fiction in Britain has been understood as a response to the fragmentation of 20th-century social structures, as old assumptions around class and gender dissolved. But the 20th century is long behind us, and the stream of novels, films and TV series based on homicidal skulduggery and its detection shows no sign of diminishing. After all, there’s plenty of scope for innovation. Serial killings are now more common than crimes of passion, while amateur sleuths have largely been replaced by careworn professional detectives. Forensic pathologists are cast as agents of justice; so too are psychological profilers. Tortured, raped and slaughtered women have become routine. The business of detecting continues to flourish.

Murder as amusement seems like a modern invention, but the idea has a long history. The fictional speaker in Thomas De Quincey’s ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1827, concedes that the loss of life is always tragic. But the members of his murder appreciation club ‘dry up our tears, and have the satisfaction, perhaps, to discover that a transaction, which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance’. This mischievous essay delighted its readers, and in a second paper De Quincey pushed the joke to the point of absurdity: ‘Believe me, it is not necessary to a man’s respectability that he should commit a murder. Many a man has passed through life most respectably, without attempting any species of homicide – good, bad or indifferent.’ De Quincey’s fascination with murder wasn’t just a matter of drollery. He was drawn to fact-based tales of violence – ‘true crime’, as it would now be called – and a final postscript from 1854 includes an unsparingly graphic account of the notorious Ratcliff Highway murders. His description of the killer’s execution of his plans for a ‘grand compound massacre’ couldn’t be less funny. Thomas Burke called it ‘the finest “horror” short story in English’.

A century later, George Orwell thought the quality of murder was on the slide. ‘Decline of the English Murder’, a glum little piece written for Tribune in 1946, blamed this development on the combined influences of war and America. Murders were formerly a product of middle-class life, frequently involving poison, and primarily sexual in their motives. But such carefully planned crimes had been supplanted by dispiritingly casual killings, often the product of random encounters and passing impulses. Orwell hankered after the ‘old domestic poisoning dramas, product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them’. To lament the worsening of standards in murder may be perverse, but the indiscriminate killings that now darken news bulletins – teenage stabbings, or the destructive consequence of neglected mental illness, or squabbles over drugs – recall Orwell’s point. They are terrifying because they seem to have no weight of meaning.

Murder is the most repugnant of all crimes, and yet we continue to relish murder stories. As I immerse myself in a new crime novel or detective drama, I sometimes wonder whether my own partiality for fictional murder is corroding my view of human nature. Can it be good for me to begin so many hours of evening relaxation with a corpse? Why do I not object to having my imagination regularly assaulted with the grisly details of murder? Is it a kind of exorcism – a confrontation with what I most fear? Or am I more enthralled by cruelty than I am willing to admit?

Most crime writers are reluctant to discuss the contradictions of their trade. But Phyllis James, who published under the gender-neutral name P.D. James, was unusually ready to share her views on murder as a literary vocation. In describing the origins of her own successful career, she adopts a matter-of-fact tone that has no truck with the incongruities of De Quincey and Orwell, or Osman’s mannered comedy. Murder mysteries provided her with a clear structure: a puzzling death, a closed circle of suspects with means, motive and opportunity, an astute detective, a solution with clues laid down in the text. The history of detective novels confirmed that, unlike rival genres such as spy fiction or action thrillers, the form could provide a congenial home for women. Agatha Christie’s primacy as the queen of crime was unassailable, and Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh had numerous devoted followers. Here was a genre where James could make a name for herself and earn money. Her literary career began with a huge stroke of luck when she took over from Cyril Hare as Faber & Faber’s leading crime writer at just the right moment. Cover Her Face, her first detective novel, was published in 1962. James retained her prominence for more than half a century, and Faber has now reprinted some of her best-known novels, featuring Adam Dalgliesh as the lead investigator.

James was content to work within the parameters of her chosen form – but not entirely content. John Lanchester, writing in the LRB of 20 December 2018, pointed to Agatha Christie’s focus on technical experiment as the key to her global appeal, securing a readership of a magnitude that dwarfs the scale of James’s own impressive career. Christie had no interest in fine writing, nor did she engage with the cultural or ethical issues of her age. Her characters are as flat as her prose, and Poirot is little more than a caricature. But her skill in devising variations on the classic detective novel was astonishing, and it is in this inventive capacity that readers find their reward. This wouldn’t do for James. Though her books discard some of the more rigid conventions of classic detective fiction, they don’t break the basic rules, and she never claimed that novelty was among the virtues of her writing. But she had a stubborn belief in the aesthetic value of her books (‘I don’t see why escapist literature shouldn’t also be a work of art’), and she was still more convinced that a worthwhile purpose lay behind their capacity to give pleasure. Her memoir, tellingly entitled Time to Be in Earnest (1999), explains that she wrote in order to allow her readers to experience ‘the catharsis of carefully controlled terror, the bringing of order out of disorder, the reassurance that we live in a comprehensible and moral universe and that, although we may not achieve justice, we can at least achieve an explanation and a solution.’ The murderer is identified and will be punished, while a chastened but enlightened community returns, as far as possible, to its former peaceful condition. Eager to camouflage the artful brutality of her craft, James does her best to present it as an endorsement of cultural and political conservatism.

James’s analysis of crime novels in her Talking about Detective Fiction (2009) reflects a thoughtful engagement with the parameters of the genre. She has less to say about the circumstances that led to her own devotion to murder. Born in 1920, she was an administrator in the NHS before working in the Home Office’s police and criminal law department until she was almost sixty. There she acquired a solid grounding in police procedures and learned about office life. The alliances and deadly enmities of the workplace often form the backdrop of her fiction. Expertise in health-related occupations was equally useful, and like Christie (who trained as a pharmacist) she was careful to ensure that the details of her poisonings, suffocations, shootings and strangulations were medically accurate. Later, she was smoothly absorbed into the institutions of the British establishment, entering the House of Lords as Baroness James of Holland Park and serving as a governor of the BBC. She took these responsibilities (and there were others) seriously, but they did nothing to interfere with her relentless productivity as a writer, and she continued to publish into her nineties. The passing decades made a difference to her work. She was alert to new methodologies, including the use of forensics, and they change Dalgliesh’s gentlemanly world. Her books, largely though not exclusively featuring the English middle classes, had always challenged complacent concepts of class division and gender difference, and this inclination became more prominent in her later works. Her women are never idealised, nor simply victimised. They are usually forceful, and often murderous. She toyed with a female working-class detective – Cordelia Gray – but Cordelia lacked staying power, and features in only two novels.

Adam Dalgliesh​ is in part a version of James herself. This is something of a problem. If the reach of her books is to extend beyond the cunning machinery of detective fiction, Dalgliesh must be more than a simple policeman. He is accordingly given a side hustle as a poet, moving in a literary world where he is neither a celebrity nor entirely unknown. Brief references to his activity as a writer, alongside a scattering of erudite quotations, imply that he has a more cultivated sensibility than most fictional detectives – but they hardly qualify him as a poetic soul. He never really wavers from his identity as a cool and ruthless analyst. Readers are told of a troubled personal life, but the mentions of it often seem half-hearted, as formulaic as Dalgliesh’s life as a poet. James was not the first to point to an imaginative hinterland in a detective’s mind, and there’s an element of wry self-reference here. A character in Cover Her Face makes the point: ‘The cultured cop! I thought they were peculiar to detective novels. Congratulations!’ Dalgliesh is at his most predictable in his supposed eccentricity.

James would not have claimed the poetic ambition that she imposes on her detective. She wanted to be seen as a tough-minded realist. And in many ways she was just that. I should declare an interest here. I knew her in her later years (she died in 2014), and found her to be the best of company. She embodied the qualities that she chose to characterise Dalgliesh’s nature as a detective, rather than a poet – ‘intelligence, courage but not foolhardiness, sensitivity but not sentimentality, and reticence’. But she seemed to enjoy life more than the austere Dalgliesh ever could. She liked hearty lunches (sticky toffee pudding was a favourite), bookish talk, gossipy family updates. James described herself as a ‘plump, generally benign grandmother’, and she was the sort of friend whose generosity makes you feel good about yourself – though not necessarily about the world. She once told me, disconcertingly, that her experience in the Home Office had persuaded her that murders are more common than people think, and that with level-headed planning they could remain undetected with relative ease.

James might well have been able to bring such real-life crimes to justice, had she been so inclined, for she would have made a capable detective. Any social occasion was an opportunity for noticing small things – an unfortunate haircut making a timid waiter seem still more gauche (comic, but with an undertow of pathos), or a clumsy picture on a restaurant wall (pretentious and inept, but an original piece, giving the impression of artistic aspiration). No doubt she observed a good many things about me, though I’ll never know what they were. Her commitment to a daily regime of work often cropped up, and her schedule always sounded exhausting. She had no patience with those who choose not to earn a living. Money matters in her plotting, and it mattered in her life. Like Trollope, a writer she admired, she was never embarrassed to discuss the financial foundations of the literary world. In Time to Be in Earnest she notes that the desire to make money is not ‘an ignoble aim’.

Talking about Detective Fiction describes the crime writer’s wish to entertain in similar terms – ‘a far from ignoble aim’. James had a clear sense of what was ignoble and what was not, and she needed to assimilate the omnipresence of sudden death in her writing into an ethical framework. ‘I can’t imagine myself writing a book which doesn’t include death.’ Adversity and loss had shadowed her early years. Her parents’ marriage was unhappy, and she had taken refuge in her imagination: ‘When I was a child I couldn’t settle to sleep until I had entered into my private world.’ That secure retreat continued to be a necessity. Her mother suffered a catastrophic breakdown when James was in her early teens and spent time in hospital. James had to share responsibility for the care of her younger brother and sister with her father, a hard-pressed official with the Inland Revenue. Patiently shouldering what must have been wearying domestic obligations, he remained a distant figure. A lucky move to Cambridge allowed her to attend the high school for girls there, and she looked back on those years as transformative: ‘we were taught, as much by example as precept, to respect our minds and to use them.’ Her teachers had used their minds and created independent lives for themselves. She would do the same. Adam Dalgliesh was named after her much admired English teacher, Miss Maisie Dalgliesh.

James left school at sixteen. University was out of the question. Her father wasn’t keen, and in any case had an ‘almost pathological reluctance to part with money’ – a trait which explains some of James’s determination to establish an income of her own. If this was a disappointment, after years spent in a city bustling with privileged students and dons, it didn’t sour her respect for the value of disciplined thinking. Pride in her own intellect was central to her self-respect, and the ingenuity needed to create original plots – and to provide clues for readers with brains (almost) equal to her own – was for her one of the chief attractions of detective fiction. But she knew that minds are precarious. Her husband, Connor Bantry White, was an Anglo-Irish doctor who went to war with the Royal Army Medical Corps and came back incapacitated by mental illness. He died in 1964, after years of unhappiness that echoed the suffering of her mother. James is among those women writers (Penelope Fitzgerald, Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns), born in the early 20th century, whose work was marked and in part motivated by the painful discovery that the generational assumption that men would deliver lifelong emotional and financial support had turned out to be a mirage. She tried various forms of office life, but the realisation that White was not going to be able to support her or their two young daughters was a turning point. ‘I was going to need, not a job, but a career.’ She has little to say about this sorrow, but it haunts her writing. Mental distress, often concealed in the interests of self-protection before erupting in calamitous action, is a recurrent theme.

Personal familiarity with the shaky mental health support offered by the NHS was amplified by operational experience. She was for a time in charge of the administration of psychiatric clinics, gaining the knowledge that led to A Mind to Murder (1963), set among a medical community that is haphazardly and often ineffectively responding to novel methods in psychotherapy. James had a sceptical view of psychiatric practice, and even Dalgliesh is bamboozled by the tangle of duplicity and arrogance he encounters among the staff. Unsurprisingly, the clinic produces a particularly ruthless murderer. This is one of the few occasions where James’s intimidating detective is out of his depth, finding himself patronised rather than feared: ‘You did your best and there’s no harm done to speak of.’ Logic is no match for the self-deceiving muddles that James had encountered among psychiatrists.

James in A Mind to Murder doesn’t flinch from an explicit description of the process of killing, nor from the visceral shock that makes the discovery of a body traumatic. She adds horrific details, as she often does in evoking climactic violence – here involving a fetish for carved wooden figures that seems to mock the victim. Readers are not permitted to shelter behind the image of a safely sanitised corpse. An unexpected encounter with a death is always the moment in her fiction when the story jolts into motion. In Unnatural Causes (1967), a body is found drifting in a dinghy. Both hands have been chopped off – one cleanly removed, one crudely hacked away. The solution to the mystery turns on the murderer’s reasons for this bizarre mutilation. Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), another novel with a medical setting, includes a particularly harrowing description of a murder. The victim is fed poison through a rubber tube:

One second she was lying, immobile, propped against her mound of pillows, the next she was out of bed, teetering forward on arched feet like a parody of a ballet dancer, and clutching ineffectually at the air as if in frantic search of the tubing. And all the time she screamed, perpetually screamed, like a stuck whistle. Miss Beale, aghast, had hardly time to register the contorted face, the foaming lips, before the girl thudded to the floor and writhed there, doubled like a hoop, her forehead touching the ground, her whole body twitching in agony.

Val McDermid, whose own crime fiction assumes that readers have strong stomachs for such scenes, notes that the details of this grim passage have stayed with her. ‘People who know no better sometimes describe her work as cosy. If a scalpel is cosy, then so was Phyllis.’

The notion that murder stories can ever be cosy is rather odd. Whatever the motivation of those who produce them, their proximity to what James refers to as ‘the devastating amalgamation of hatred, violence, tragedy and grief which is real-life murder’ necessarily lends them some degree of weight. This is part of their appeal, both for those who create them and for their consumers. ‘The indignity is that we die at all, not what happens to our bodies.’ Detective novels offer a means of rehearsing the fearful reality of death, and in this sense the conventions of the genre, with its distracting intellectual puzzles, is a kind of play. John Ruskin, thinking about cultural forms of the grotesque in The Stones of Venice, tells his readers that ‘the mind, under certain phases of excitement, plays with terror, and summons images which, if it were in another temper, would be awful, but of which, either in weariness or in irony, it refrains for the time to acknowledge the true terribleness.’ A capacity to balance the ritual forms of play within detective novels with an acknowledgment of the ‘true terribleness’ of the events that drive their plots is what James wants to achieve.

All detective fiction​ plays with death. But the boundary between play and moral purpose is increasingly uncertain in James’s work, as she distances herself from Christie’s formalist model. The Black Tower (1975), yet another novel set in a medical institution (here, a care home for people with disabilities), is so preoccupied with the miseries of its doleful cast of characters that the unravelling of the mystery risks becoming perfunctory. The reader is compensated by Dalgliesh’s dramatic brush with death as the murderer is unmasked – a stirring conclusion, but not unduly upsetting, since it is always apparent that he will survive. Energetic action distracts from some weakness in the plotting, but owes more to the strategies of the thriller than to the detective novel.

There are other distractions. James insisted on the value of sharply realised settings, and images of windswept countryside, or lonely beaches, often supply a contrast to the stifling institutions where the emotions of her characters swell to lethal intensity. Perhaps because of what happened to her mother and husband, James developed a lifelong dislike of enclosed spaces, and the locked doors and narrow corridors of the institutions she describes convey a sense of dread. Not that fresh air brings safety – far from it. Her victims frequently meet their fate under the open sky. Versions of the coast of Suffolk, where she owned a house, recur. The action of Devices and Desires (1989), where a complex plot grows out of the tension between the remembered past and an unknowable and perhaps threatening future, is set against the vast indifference of the sea. A serial killer shadows a community, while a nuclear power plant (a version of Sizewell) hides a web of political and personal conflict. The resolution is ambivalent, dividing the reader’s sympathies among a vivid group of characters.

Suffolk’s coastline is unstable, and throughout James’s fiction the sea represents both escape and destruction. Clifftops crumble; houses slip into the waves. This is among the ways in which she signals that no border, real or imagined, is fixed. Her books often end with a move towards compassion for the murderer, while bystanders bear their own burdens of guilt. The Children of Men (1992), a dystopian thriller, might be seen as a bid to defy the necessary constraints and underlying optimism of the detective novel. What if the order on which her crime fiction rests were to collapse, and contemporary civilisation, with all its wrong-headed folly, turns out to be done for? What then will be the point of detectives, no matter how shrewd their insights?

James was a staunch Anglican, but the theology of last things that shapes The Children of Men is excluded from her crime fiction. Thoughts of any conceivable afterlife (damnation, or redemption) do not intrude on the human agency of Dalgliesh’s calming presence. And yet the reader is never wholly comforted by the final exposure of the murderer, nor by the explanation, however painstaking, of the motives and arcane methods that lay behind the crime. We have come to know a great deal about both victim and villain, and they are, only too clearly, made of the fallible and irrational stuff that we recognise in ourselves. Ian Patterson, thinking of Ngaio Marsh’s novels, noted that ‘when we’re reading a detective story, our anxious, paranoid curiosity is directed towards discovering why someone else has died. The body in the library is never our own.’* This is true; but in reading James’s novels our uneasiness is still more deep-rooted. We can’t quite forget that eventually, inevitably, that body will be our own.