P.D. James is 88. Commander Adam Dalgliesh must be well into his eighties; he
was already a chief inspector when first encountered in the pages of Cover
Her Face, James's first novel. It is possible that The Private Patient
will be the last collaboration between Baroness James of Holland Park,
usually accorded the even grander title of Queen of Crime, and the most
misspelt senior policeman in crime fiction.
But I wouldn't bet on this being the end of the wonderful partnership.
Dalgliesh has managed, through being fictional, the luxury of being able to
retard the ageing process. James, living in real time, appears to have lost
none of her acuity, subtlety and inventiveness. Certainly The Private
Patient shows no signs of author fatigue. There is just one possible
indication - which I will not reveal for fear of spoiling your enjoyment -
that this fourteenth appearance by the Scotland Yard sage is destined to be
his swansong. But the formula is no different from most in the Dalgliesh
series; the quality is averagely excellent James, although not among her
best three or four.
It opens with a magnificently Jamesian 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 ...” She's asking the surgeon - George
Chandler-Powell, the most fashionable in his field - to remove a prominent
and ugly facial scar that her father had drunkenly inflicted on her when she
was a child. But why - the first mystery - had she waited so long to want to
rid herself of the disfigurement? “Because I no longer have need of it” is
all she would say.
Her murder takes place in a gloomy historic manor house in Dorset (slightly
less sinister than James's usual scenes of homicide, although there are
haunted stones near by), which the surgeon has converted into an expensive
private clinic where his clients can be operated on and recover.
Chandler-Powell was proud and satisfied with the work he'd performed on
Rhoda Gradwyn's face. It was unfortunate - and bad for business - that she
was strangled in her bed that very night.
Dalgliesh's job in charge of a special squad at Scotland Yard requires him to
investigate serious crimes so sensitive that they cannot be handled by the
local police force. 10 Downing Street has insisted that this was such a
case. As he has been for many years, Dalgliesh is assisted by Detective
Inspector Kate Miskin, the spiky working-class girl from a deprived,
dysfunctional family, and the more recent addition to the unit, the
ambitious Anglo-Indian Detective Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith.
All the usual James hallmarks are present: an unpleasant victim, a further
death in a place of worship, references to the work of Jane Austen,
discussions on the nature of good and evil, guilt and innocence; and a
strange assortment of suspects, none of whom seems to have a motive.
Rhoda Gradwyn had been a famous investigative journalist, much hated by many
victims of her exposés; but what avenger would have known of her movements,
or been able to penetrate such an isolated house? Or was her death part of a
plan to ruin Chandler-Powell's medical practice and reputation? Various
members of the domestic and medical staff come under the scrutiny of
Dalgliesh's team, as does a troublesome guest claiming close ties with the
dead woman. A subsequent killing fails to add much light.
Adam Dalgliesh (named after one of James's teachers) has been one of crime
fiction's most interesting and original creations. No copper has been more
learned, more intellectual or more sensitive; no other has been a published
poet (though James has made sure that readers have not, with one short
exception, been offered examples of his poetic talent). In addition to his
mental prowess, James gave him good looks and wealth (by way of an aunt's
legacy).
That wasn't all. By the time of his appearance in Cover My Face,
Dalgliesh had already been touched by tragedy. His wife had died in
childbirth, his baby son soon thereafter. James once said that she had made
him a widower so as not to have to worry about his love life.
It was also a brilliant ploy, clothing him with the aura of sadness and
occasional anguish that made him so attractive to women readers. But even
grief-stricken solitude has its limits, and James has from time to time
granted him relationships and even a near-marriage. Four books ago, in Death
in Holy Orders, he met the Cambridge don Emma Lavenham, and in The
Private Patient the phone call ordering him to go to Cheverell Manor
interrupts him in the act of formally asking Emma's father for her hand in
marriage.
What has set James apart from every other woman writer of crime fiction is her
style - unhurried, elegant, mannered and a touch verbose; her characters
tend to speak correct English. She is the most literary of crime writers -
men and women - and the one of whom it is most often asked: “Why has she
never been listed for the Booker?”
It is sometimes said against her that her plots and solutions are not always
realistic and convincing - a criticism that can be made about virtually
every writer in the crime field. It comes with the territory. In James's
case it is a small criticism to make in the context of her many grand
virtues, in particular her mastery of atmospheric setting (she has always
claimed that she decides on the setting first, then characters, then plot) -
and, of course, her creation of one of the great police detectives in the
history of crime fiction.
The Private Patient by P. D. James
Faber & Faber, £18.99; 395pp Buy
the book
Extract
At half past ten on that Saturday morning, Commander Adam Dalgliesh and Emma
Lavenham had an appointment to meet her father. To meet a future
father-in-law for the first time, especially with the purpose of informing
him that one is shortly to marry his daughter, is seldom an enterprise
undertaken without some misgivings. Dalgliesh had somehow envisaged that, as
the suppliant, he was expected to see Professor Lavenham on his own, but was
easily persuaded by Emma that they should visit her father together.
“Otherwise, darling, he'll keep asking what my views are. After all, he's
never yet seen you and I've hardly mentioned your name. If I'm not there I
won't be sure he's taken it in. He does have a tendency to vagueness
although I'm never sure how much of that is genuine.”
“Are his vague moods frequent?”
“They are when I'm with him, but there's nothing wrong with his brain. He does
rather like to tease.”
Dalgliesh thought that vagueness and teasing would be the least of his
problems with his prospective father-in-law. He had noticed that men of
distinction in old age were given to exaggerating the eccentricities of
youth and the middle years, as if these self-defining quirks of personality
were a defence against the draining away of physical and mental powers. He
was uncertain what Emma and her father felt for each other, but surely there
must have been love - in memory at least - and affection. Emma had told him
that her younger sister, playful, biddable and prettier than she and killed
in childhood by a speeding car, had been his favourite child, but she had
spoken without resentment. Resentment was not an emotion he associated with
Emma. But however difficult the relationship, she would want this meeting
between father and lover to be a success. It was his job to ensure that it
was, that it didn't remain an embarrassment or a lasting disquietude in her
memory.
