P.D. James, Writer of Detective-Novel Series, Dies at 94

By David Henry

Photographer: David Levenson/Getty Images

Author P.D. James poses for a portrait at the Oxford Literary Festival in Oxford, on... Read More

P.D. James, the British writer and member of the House of Lords who was best known for more than a dozen mystery novels featuring Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh, has died. She was 94.
She died today at her home in Oxford, England, according to an e-mailed statement from her family.
A former civil servant, James rose to literary prominence in the early 1960s with “Cover Her Face,” the first of her novels with Dalgliesh as the protagonist. Over the next four decades, she wrote tales that followed the poetry-writing policeman’s search for elusive killers, often against the
backdrop of U.K. bureaucracy. Ten of her novels were adapted for television, including “Death of an Expert Witness” (1977), “A Taste for Death” (1986) and “A Certain Justice” (1997).
James “is the greatest living writer of British crime fiction, and probably that genre’s most talented practitioner ever,” Charles McGrath wrote in a New York Times review in 2011.
The author, who became a life peer for the Conservative Party as Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991, spent 30 years in the U.K.’s civil service, including the police and criminal-law department of the Home Office, according to her profile at publisher Random House. She also served as a magistrate and as a governor of the BBC from 1988 to 1993.
“A detective story can give a much truer picture of the society in which it’s written than a more prestigious literature,” James said in a 2011 interview with the Guardian newspaper. “I wanted my books to do the same; to be unambiguously set in the present day, so that they give a picture of the life we’re living.”

Literary Influences

Influenced by writers Jane Austen, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, she found inspiration for her novels in local settings that ranged from a lonely Dorset coastline in “The Black Tower” (1975) to an Oxford church near a canal in “A Taste for Death.” She wrote by hand and plotted a novel’s sequences out of order before putting the book together at the end, she said.
“The critics have forecast the death of the classical detective story at every decade, but the form remains remarkably resilient,” she said. “It can provide catharsis, a means by which both writer and reader exorcise irrational feelings of anxiety or guilt.”
Phyllis Dorothy James was born on Aug. 3, 1920, in Oxford. She attended Cambridge High School for Girls, according to her profile on the website of Faber & Faber publishing house. Leaving school at age 16, she married Ernest Connor Bantry White, an army doctor, in 1941. Eight years later, she began her civil-service career in the National Health Service.
Her autobiography, “Time to Be in Earnest,” was published in 1999.
With her husband, James had two daughters, Claire and Jane. White died in 1964 after suffering from mental illness.