The Baroness in the Crime Lab

Her Christian name is Phyllis, but she is known to millions as P. D. James. In the House of Lords, the second chamber of Britain’s Parliament, where she sits as a life peer, she is known as Baroness P. D. James of Holland Park. Widely regarded today as the true heir to Agatha Christie, she was over 40 before she published her first book. Now in her seventy-eighth year, she has recently published her fourteenth novel, A Certain Justice (Alfred A. Knopf). Altogether her books have sold more than 10 million copies. P. D. James was born in Oxford on August 3, 1920. She attended Cambridge Girls High School but was not allowed by her tax-inspector father to go on to the university, a matter she still regrets. At 21 she married a young Anglo-Irish medical student, Connor Bantry White. He came back from World War II with severe mental illness, but the army refused to put this down to the war and therefore denied him a pension. From then on Phyllis had to support him and their two small daughters. Her husband died in 1964, and she has not married again. With unending determination, James graduated from secretarial work in the health service to a principal role in the Home Office, running the Criminal Policy Department, where, to quote the title of one of her novels, she caught A Taste for Death. By now she was also rising daily at six to write. Cover Her Face, her first novel, was published when she was 42. “I always knew I wanted to write books, but it just never seemed possible,” she says. “I always just had to concentrate on what I considered was a safe job with a check at the end of the month.” She kept her day job until she was 59, even as her literary career bloomed. She has been awarded the OBE, a life peerage, and a string of literary and cultural honors. James is famed for her unflinching and comprehensive knowledge of violent death. (A frequent visitor to the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, she is said to know the classics of forensic medicine by heart.) But the violence, however horrific, is always seen in a larger context. The hero of most of her books is the detective Adam Dalgliesh. Son of a clergyman, a published poet and aesthete, Dalgliesh lives in a broadly Christian moral universe but does not formally adhere to the faith himself. James’s own historical hero is Thomas Cranmer, author of “our incomparable liturgy.” She is a vice president of the Prayer Book Society and sits on the Church of England’s Liturgical Commission. She recently complained when they wanted to replace Cranmer’s devices and desires with schemes. “They said it’s only because you’ve written a novel called Devices and Desires.”

Your work is quintessentially English but has proved very popular with an American audience.

English in all ways, yes, and some writers whose books are quintessentially English find they do not succeed in America. I find it very mysterious. My American readers seem to be the same kind of people as I have here, people who love the mystery, who love the form of the mystery but want it well written, in a civilized way. They want a good novel but also a good mystery.

You are a Christian …

A very bad one! …

and a writer. Do you put the two consciously together? Do you regard yourself as a “Christian writer”?

No, I don’t. Not at all. To say I am a Christian writer suggests I write to propagate the faith or to explain my own spiritual life. I don’t. I write detective stories and I write them as well as I can. I love the form, I love the structure, and within that I hope I say something true about human beings, about life. Inevitably my own view of life—which is fundamentally religious—tends to come through. And it’s true that in all the books there is a religious element; for me that’s a very important part of life, so that it would be very odd to leave it out. But I never think, “Look, you’re a Christian, you need to make more Christians or better Christians.” That’s not the kind of writer I am.

I do the best I can to write well, and in a sense that is Christian. I feel that the gift I have is God-given and nothing for me to be proud of. Also, I have been given the energy to pursue it and given much good fortune. That brings with it obligations, and one obligation is to write as well as I can—never to give way to temptations such as pornography, because violence has a pornography of its own. Or slovenly writing, or writing in a certain way because it would be better for television, or for this market or the other. That is to be false to one’s talent. It’s very much about the Parable of the Talents: if you are given it, you must make use of it. That seems to me a Christian concept.

Is there such a thing as Christian fiction?

Well, it tends very much—if we are talking about good writing—to be Roman Catholic writing. Graham Greene is one example; Evelyn Waugh is another—people one would describe as Christian novelists. The exploration of faith and the inspiration of God’s mysterious way with human beings is what they very largely concern themselves with. To that extent there are Christian novelists. [Anglican writer] Susan Howatch is, of course, the modern example of the Christian novelist.

You spoke a moment ago about the pornography of violence. How do you avoid that while still showing the reality of violent death?

It’s very much a matter of how violence is treated—the tone and perspective. For example, although I describe the finding of a body very realistically, I always describe it through the eyes of the character in the novel who actually finds the body. It’s a moment of great horror for that person, and the reader should be able to share that.

But there are in fact very few descriptions of murder in my books, of the act itself taking place, where it is difficult to avoid a certain voyeurism. I don’t think that the classical detective story is primarily concerned with violence. It is concerned with bringing order out of disorder, with exploring human nature under the impact of this unique crime. It is interesting that a great many people who write in this form have been gently brought up women—Agatha Christie, preeminently—whose lives have been very remote from violence. Many of us, and I’m certainly one, are very frightened of violence. There is a pornography of violence as there is of sex. I don’t want to be part of it. I can’t watch scenes of people being tortured on the screen, big or small, nor can I read such scenes. They are repellent.

Is there any reason why a Christian should be particularly interested in evil?

I am interested in evil; I don’t pretend to understand it, but I am attracted to it. I think any Christian would be interested in evil because we can see it in ourselves, can’t we? We believe in original sin, not—at least for me—that we are all born wicked, but we know we are born selfish, that we have to be taught that other people have rights as well as ourselves. I don’t find it difficult to believe that, nor do I find it difficult to believe that we need grace in order to be good, or to attempt to be good. We are aware that, if put to the test, we are capable even of the things that we most deplore. Look at Bosnia: people who lived together as neighbors turning to butchering each other, or in Northern Ireland shooting each other down in the same community. That has to be evil, doesn’t it? These are not monsters but ordinary people.

You tend not to write about psychopaths but about ordinary people committing evil?

Yes, we’re not talking about the crime novel here but about the detective novel. It seems to me that, in the classical detective story, what is interesting is how ordinary, so-called responsible people, educated people, valuable people, useful people can cross over that line that makes one a murderer. The psychopath after all kills for no particular reason; he just feels like killing. That may be very evil, but it is not very interesting. What is interesting is temptation and how people succumb to it and how people make their choices. That is what is interesting to me.

You have said, “The crime novel reassures us of the sanctity of life (if you get violently killed, someone cares) and of the fact that we live in a world in which human authority and human skill and integrity (the detective, the police) can put things to rights.” But isn’t this itself a fiction? While crimes are solved and perpetrators brought to book in crime novels, in real life, often they are not. Order is not restored.

Quite right, which is what I deal with in A Certain Justice. The crime novel reassures us that we live in a morally comprehensible universe. It reassures us of our belief that good is stronger than evil, that we have an obligation to try and put things right. But I have said many times that though you may get an apparent justice at the end of your modern detective story, all you get is the fallible justice of men; you don’t get divine justice, you can’t achieve that. It is very reassuring to have a form of fiction which says that every form of human life is sacred, and if it is taken away, then the law, society, will address itself to finding out who did it. The attitude is not, “Well, one more chap’s got murdered—hard luck.” Infinite pains and money are spent trying to find out who did it because we still have the belief that the individual human life is sacred; we all have a right to live our lives to the last moment.

Would you suggest that the fallible justice of men that you get at the end of the detective novel is a signal that behind it all is an infallible divine justice?

Yes, that there is a greater justice than we can understand, that God is a just God, and that when we try to achieve justice we are at least trying to act as his servants. We long for justice, don’t we, even as children? If something is unjust it gets under our skin. This popular form of fiction speaks to that instinct.

Your hero, Commander Adam Dalgliesh, is seen by some as having godlike qualities. He may not be all-seeing, but he is all-deducing.

The form of the detective novel inherits this hero figure. You feel confident that this man is going to solve the crime. One of the problems is that in real life, police work is a team effort, and yet the hero in the detective story has always been a lone individual who manages to fight evil.

Dalgliesh is not a Christian figure; he is an agnostic. But he is very sympathetic to Christianity—he is almost a Christian agnostic, in a sense—and has been brought up in and imbibed Christian beliefs and a Christian code of ethics. He has this knowledge in his bones. In the new book the girl detective cannot understand why the priest, who has heard the confession of one of the murder victims, will not even answer a few simple questions that would help the police immensely.

A Certain Justice
by P. D. James
Alfred A. Knopf
364 pp.; $25

Dalgliesh knows absolutely that priests don’t violate the trust on which confession depends.You never read of him taking the sacrament, although if he went into a church during a service, he would stay for the full service.

There is a theological discussion between two of your detectives in A Certain Justice where one questions the live-and-let-live world-view of the other—a theological graduate at that. She points out that the chief weakness of this outlook is its failure to address the problem of evil.

Yes. What do you say when you are faced with a raped and murdered child? This live-and-let-live philosophy is a perfectly respectable code for living, but it doesn’t go anywhere near answering the fundamental questions. I’m not sure you can answer them without a religious view of life. It is not easy to do so even with a religious view of life. I have never had a satisfactory answer to the problem of evil, except that it would be a very odd world if it had no pain and evil in it; it is necessary to have the darkness to recognize the light.

One of the soundbites of the new British government is “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” Talking of your work you have said that “the causes of crime are simply the Seven Deadly Sins.”

I believe this profoundly. There has been this view that the causes of crime are poverty and deprivation and poor education. They are certainly associated with crime, but any of my generation have known an England where there was much greater poverty and deprivation, and the crime rate was lower. Children were brought up to know the difference between right and wrong. So that although social factors are associated with crime, and indeed may be causal, it seems to me that a great deal of crime has to do with the deadly sins like anger and envy. You must try to inculcate children with moral values—but now, of course, to inculcuate Christian values in schools is no longer happening; that is regarded as being morally offensive to people of other faiths.

When I was a child at school, every day began with an act of simple Christian worship, a reading from one of the Gospels, a hymn, the Lord’s Prayer, and everyone took part. I’m not saying that made us all good, but every day a certain set of moral aims, a certain view of goodness and what you should be trying to do in your life, was put before you.

Your novel The Children of Men was sparked by a newspaper clipping about falling sperm counts. In it you seem to be portraying a world where there is no future, so that the moral order is in jeopardy because people have nothing to live for.

Even if there is no future I would not say there is no obligation to behave in a certain way. My humanist friends don’t believe in the fear of hell, but most of them live lives at least as good as Christian lives and some better. They would say there is nothing afterward, but you still have a duty to each other in order to create a civilized society, for purely pragmatic reasons. That’s the only way that people can reasonably live together in a decent, caring, and humane way. But religious people, like myself, say there is another reality, and another reality than just trying to live well.

You have long been a champion of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the Bible, notably fighting for their continued use in Church of England services. Is this a cultural battle for a disappearing language or a religious one for a disappearing faith?

I think it is both. There are real problems here because the theology of the Prayer Book is Cranmerian Protestant theology, and there are quite a number of people in the church who find that theology not as attractive as other more up-to-date theologies. But it represents a unifying force for the church. Because these are incomparable prayers, they meet spiritual needs in a way that inferior prayers simply don’t. As a writer, I feel strongly that God ought to be offered the best; I think a musician would feel that, too. It’s not good being too elitist about it; if people want to worship with happy-clappy jingles and so on, then who am I to say they shouldn’t? But I think that those who would like to worship him in the beauty of holiness, with these incomparable collects and prayers, should not be denied that.

I would like to see the Prayer Book used far more, because unless people get to know it, what is the point of offering the choice? Unless at theological colleges young ordinands come to love and respect it, they won’t use it in their churches. Great literature has a spiritual force. And the Prayer Book and the Bible are great literature.

There is an argument that so-called Prayer Book religion is exclusive and elitist. What is interesting is that for over 300 years, the English people grew up with the Prayer Book and knew it by heart. They did not find it impossible to understand; they did not feel that it was remote from their lives. I made a fuss on the Liturgical Commission by objecting to the replacement of devices (in devices and desires of our own hearts) with schemes. The phrase devices and desires perfectly captures what sinning is. When I think of the time I have spent devising little ploys and pleasures for myself—that to me is precisely devising my own desires. But they dropped it—and blew the alliteration, too.

You see the same mindset at work in modern Bible translations—replacing still small voice with low murmuring sound, for instance. OK, I don’t know the Hebrew, and low murmuring sound may technically be a more accurate translation, but still small voice says something much more important. It goes beyond the poetry.

What hope do you see for institutional Christianity in Britain, given the continued slide in churchgoing throughout this century?

That astonishing outburst of grief when Princess Diana died was almost of a nation that was seeking after some religious belief. It seemed at times like a substitute religion. I don’t really understand that at all. If you have someone who is really seeking the truth and trying to struggle toward faith, they used very often—my literary friends—to pursue that within the Church of England, that search for Christ, for God, for a meaning to life. But now they go and find themselves repelled. They go to a parish Communion and hear lots of noisy children, and it makes them feel that this isn’t for me.

I have a deep, deep affection for the Church of England and a great regret about what has happened to it. In my Christian faith, a great deal of the dogma I find difficult. My faith is grounded on what seems to me the most important thing that Christ said, that we call God Abba, father—that is of immense importance, an incredible concept of God: someone who holds space and time and eternity in his hands and yet invites us to pray to him as our father. That seems to me the heart of Christianity.

Martin Wroe is a writer for The Observer, a British national Sunday newspaper. He is a church warden in inner-city London and a director of the Greenbelt Christian Arts Festival.