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Skilfully worked into The Private Patient’s ingenious plot is a homage to Cyril Hare, Faber’s star detective writer of the 1940s and 1950s. His death in 1958 left a gap at the top of the crime list that James’s novels have triumphantly filled ever since Cover Her Face, in 1962. It introduced Adam Dalgliesh, the detective she has endowed with the qualities she most admires — “high intelligence, sensitivity but not sentimentality (which I loathe), compassion, courage and reticence”. Since then, her distinctive achievement has been to retain the features that make crime mystery an addictive genre while deepening it emotionally, psychologically and morally. At the end of a James novel, the reader can be confident that the murder puzzle will have been cleared up with impeccable authorial fair play, but ethical and social dilemmas often, as in life, are unresolved. Besides the moral ambiguities that give her novels nuance, there’s emphasis on physical and emotional pain — highlighted by the settings (a hospital, a hospice, a psychiatric clinic). She doesn’t usually describe the actual murder. The Private Patient is an exception. Because of “the degree of hatred” for the victim, she “wanted something hands-on” — as it graphically is.

She prefers to spotlight the finding of the body. Macabre tableaux — a handless corpse floating in a dinghy off the Suffolk coast, a minister of state sprawled in a church vestry with his throat slit — are the starting point for investigations not just into the killer’s identity, but into what she calls the “contaminating” effects of murder. “Contaminating” is a word that recurs in her novels and conversation. “Evil is contaminating,” she states. Murder is “a deeply contaminating crime”. A whodunnit writer “must limit the number of suspects — you can’t let the stain of suspicion spread too far”.

The strain of suspicion receives attention, too. “There’s huge fascination in examining the human personality under the trauma of a murder investigation. All of us present a carapace to the world that conceals things we wish to keep to ourselves. In a murder investigation, these defences are often torn down.” This gives a novelist “a huge opportunity”, one particularly valued by this writer, who, besides filling notebooks with “plotting and planning”, sets store by knowing her characters intimately. “I move in with them. I sympathise with the view Trollope expressed that you have to get up with your characters and live with them all day.”

Although recent health problems prompted the thought “I hope I get this book finished and see it published”, she is forging ahead with a study of murder-mystery fiction in aid of Oxford’s Bodleian. Almost half a century of immersion in homicide hasn’t darkened her disposition. “I’m a happy person,” she says. James may have made a distinguished career out of what one of her titles calls A Taste for Death, but she has always accompanied it with a zest for life.

To buy The Private Patient for the Sunday Times BooksFirst price of £17.09 (inc p&p), call 0870 165 8585

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