About six months ago I embarked on the entirely pleasurable project of rereading P. D. James’s fourteen Adam Dalgliesh novels in order. I first discovered P. D. James in the summer of 1997 when, as a teen age employee of the Edinburgh Book Festival, I was assigned to take tickets for an event at which she was promoting that year’s novel, A Certain Justice. To my surprise my scholarly lawyer grandfather appeared in the queue filing into the marquee. Afterwards I filched his newly signed copy before he could read it and then began to work my way through the back catalogue in fairly haphazard order.
Not all of P. D. James’s novels feature Commander Adam Dalgliesh, but I quickly discovered that it was her Dalgliesh novels I liked most. Dalgliesh is a policeman who is also a poet. He is dark and brooding, brave and kind, and exactly my kind of hero, then and now. Later that summer, as I kept reading, I fell too for his chief sidekick, DI Kate Miskin, who was just the kind of woman I wanted to be: good at her job, no-nonsense, compassionate, and able to put on a good show despite being quietly in love with her boss. Since I was in love with Dalgliesh too it felt like she and I had a lot in common – a delusion that required only a little magical thinking to skirt round the reality that unlike Kate, I would have been the world’s worst police officer.
In the decades since I have returned to James and Dalgliesh intermittently and have always been intrigued and delighted by the odd disconnect, especially in her later novels, between the trappings of twenty-first century life and an authorial perspective that never devi ates from characterizing women by their levels of buxomness and whether or not they are wearing a hat. Last autumn, after a conversation with a friend about the glorious censoriousness with which P. D. James moves disreputable ‘hatless’ women around the chess board of Dalgliesh’s world, I decided to start the series again at
About six months ago I embarked on the entirely pleasurable project of rereading P. D. James’s fourteen Adam Dalgliesh novels in order. I first discovered P. D. James in the summer of 1997 when, as a teen age employee of the Edinburgh Book Festival, I was assigned to take tickets for an event at which she was promoting that year’s novel, A Certain Justice. To my surprise my scholarly lawyer grandfather appeared in the queue filing into the marquee. Afterwards I filched his newly signed copy before he could read it and then began to work my way through the back catalogue in fairly haphazard order.
Not all of P. D. James’s novels feature Commander Adam Dalgliesh, but I quickly discovered that it was her Dalgliesh novels I liked most. Dalgliesh is a policeman who is also a poet. He is dark and brooding, brave and kind, and exactly my kind of hero, then and now. Later that summer, as I kept reading, I fell too for his chief sidekick, DI Kate Miskin, who was just the kind of woman I wanted to be: good at her job, no-nonsense, compassionate, and able to put on a good show despite being quietly in love with her boss. Since I was in love with Dalgliesh too it felt like she and I had a lot in common – a delusion that required only a little magical thinking to skirt round the reality that unlike Kate, I would have been the world’s worst police officer. In the decades since I have returned to James and Dalgliesh intermittently and have always been intrigued and delighted by the odd disconnect, especially in her later novels, between the trappings of twenty-first century life and an authorial perspective that never devi ates from characterizing women by their levels of buxomness and whether or not they are wearing a hat. Last autumn, after a conversation with a friend about the glorious censoriousness with which P. D. James moves disreputable ‘hatless’ women around the chess board of Dalgliesh’s world, I decided to start the series again at the beginning. The daily news was grim, and I could think of no more comforting response than to curl up with a succession of novels in which I could be absolutely sure compulsive plotting would more than make up for the occasional absence of appropriate millinery.
- D. James was born in Oxford in 1920. In 1945 her husband Conor Bantry White returned from war service with severe mental illness, requiring James to act as sole support for both him and their daughters. White spent much of the time between 1945 and his death in 1964 in a mental hospital and from 1949 until after his death James earned the family’s entire income as a hospital board administrator.
The Second World War casts a long shadow over the Dalgliesh novels, just as it did over James’s marriage. Her first novel,
Cover Her Face, was published in 1962, two years before White’s death.
Cover Her Face introduces Adam Dalgliesh as a young policeman rocked by the death in childbirth of his wife and newborn son. The novel is a period piece, set in the shabby world of the post-war English country house. The victim is a parlourmaid, an unmarried mother whose life choices prompt a great deal of gossip after her murder about the wages of sin. One of the novel’s dangerous but attractive young men has survived time in the company of the Gestapo and has no fingernails to prove it. The novel also features a war orphan, a sub-plot involving the defrauding of a wartime benevolent fund, and a bomb- site injury that usefully absolves an otherwise suspect character from suspicion. Dalgliesh solves the murder in
Cover Her Face and also acquires a temporary love-interest in the form of the overworked daughter of the country house where the action takes place. His next two outings centre on a small psychiatry clinic and a holiday on the Suffolk coast, by the end of which he is single once again. White’s death enabled James to take a risk and change jobs, and the Dalgliesh books she wrote after beginning work as a Home Office official move up a gear in range and ambition. In 1971’s
Shroud for a Nightingale the victim is a student nurse and the solution to the riddle of the murder once again lies in wartime stories and in the murky slipping off of identities and masks enabled by the upheavals of the post-war period. The novel is set in a community of working women, but its modernity is nevertheless limited. Its nurses always leave the profession on marriage, women are characterized as either marriageable or not, the murder victim is planning an illegal abortion, and Dalgliesh’s male sidekick thinks nothing of a quickie with one of the suspects in a layby. Two more 1970s novels mark changing times (via the introduction of a lesbian couple and some dabbling in European heroin markets) alongside narrative features that P. D. James makes uniquely her own. Although like many crime writers she is happiest when unravelling the threads of a closed community, she is also deeply interested in the relationship between faith and morality and she develops an evident fondness in these early books for stories involving men in cassocks. She is utterly brilliant at setting and some of the places she writes about best are isolated coastal communities, clinging to headlands or scraps of friable coastline. She is also a wonderful writer about the capital. In
A Taste for Death (1986) the setting is London and the pace and stylishness of her writing picks up yet again. This is one of the best Dalgliesh novels and one of my favourites. It introduces two big changes to Dalgliesh’s world. The first is the establishment of his Special Investigations Squad, commissioned to handle particularly tricky or sensitive murders; the second is the arrival of Kate Miskin. Kate, like Dalgliesh himself, is beautifully drawn. She is the illegitimate child of a long-dead mother, brought up by an angry and frightened grandmother on a grim North London council estate. She hasn’t been to university and has little time for brash ’80s men, whether they are her colleagues or her suspects. She is the first female character in the series who is neither tempting nor repulsive: instead, James lets her be a thoughtful, hard-working, passionately committed professional, through whose eyes we are allowed to see much of the subsequent drama. She provides a brilliant foil for Dalgliesh, who is so self-contained and reserved as sometimes to appear impenetrable. The duo’s work in
A Taste for Death is centred on a Victorian Gothic church on the Regent’s Canal. The church itself may be imaginary but its canal setting just under the roar of the West Way is immaculately conjured. The Thames plays a crucial role in many of James’s London novels, just as the canal does here. But in this novel she also establishes herself as a dazzling verbal architect of rooms and interiors and food. Although the novel deals in death and violence it is populated by people in comfortable houses making comfortable lives for themselves, with good food (her characters always seem to have freshly cooked soup in the fridge) and well-appointed domestic spaces. We are also allowed to follow Dalgliesh home to his solitary flat at the top of an old warehouse, where he can survey the river below and be utterly alone. And in
A Taste for Death we see Kate too in the home she has worked so hard to acquire: a sanctuary against both the contemporary world and the hideousness of her past. As the plot unfolds, that sanctuary is violently invaded in a scene of such visceral horror that it stands alone in James’s fiction as a moment that, once read, can never be forgotten. It is also a moment that flings Kate, glancingly, briefly, into Dalgliesh’s arms, and to which in the books that follow she will return in her memory again and again as she works to build an emotional life that is independent of him. The novels of the late ’80s and ’90s offer variations on these themes. There is another holiday book,
Devices and Desires (1989), featuring a terrifying serial killer and a monumental nuclear power station, although there is no Kate Miskin in this instalment which was a disappointment to me the first time I read it.
Original Sin (1994) is an odd mixture of the Thames at its most menacing and magnificent, another denouement rooted in the trauma of the Holocaust and, simultaneously, a plotline involving a character dying of aids.
A Certain Justice (1997) is set in the world of the London Inns of Court and showcases one of Dalgliesh’s rare professional fail ures. It also introduces Piers Tarrant as a third member of Dalgliesh’s squad who, in one role or another, will see the series out with Kate. Four more books followed between 2001 and 2008. Of those my favourite is
The Lighthouse (2005), set on an imaginary island off the North Cornish coast.
The Lighthouse’s victim is an eminent novelist called Nathan Oliver; the hero is ostensibly Dalgliesh but is really the island itself, which is depicted in such detail that you feel as if you could mount a bicycle and go crime-solving alongside Kate, Dalgliesh and the team’s newest member, Sergeant Benton-Smith, another of James’s quintessential thinking policemen. Whitewashed cottages and still rooms and salt in the air tumble across the senses in this novel; hatlessness rarely features (presumably since most of the time it is too windy to even contemplate wearing a hat). The lighthouse of the title looms gloweringly above both people and place. When I first read the novel in 2005 its subplot involving SARS and much panicked mask-wearing among the island community seemed far-fetched. In 2025, by contrast, it felt astonishingly prescient in its description of the impact of a disease that can be feared but not seen. The novel ends with two exhilarating set-pieces: a race-against-time climb up and down a cliff-face in search of a crucial piece of evidence and a final confrontation with the villain in the lighthouse itself, where Kate is allowed to step out from Dalgliesh’s shadow and save the day herself. There is also a wonderful coda, after the murder has been solved and the rest of the cast are happily marooned on the island for ten days of quarantine, in which restoration of all kinds takes place. In the final novel of the series,
The Private Patient (2008), both Dalgliesh and Kate are allowed romantic happiness, although not with each other. Unusually for a detective writer James ends her final published work with the thoughts of a female survivor of violent crime, a figure so often rendered voiceless by detective fiction. ‘The world is a beautiful and terrible place,’ thinks James’s survivor. ‘If the screams of all earth’s living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defence against the horrors of the world but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all that we have.’ These last words form an entirely appropriate valediction for a novelist who never shies away from the fact that her genre deals in the currency of human suffering, but who remains ultimately optimistic about the power of love and friendship and working together as a team to counter evil. In the end Kate does not need Dalgliesh’s love to be sustained by the work they do together because she is her own person, with her own strength and the capacity to find and build love on her own terms. Nor, as she stands in the sunshine at his wedding in the final pages of
The Private Patient, does she feel the need to wear a hat. Daisy Hay’s most recent book is
Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age. She is currently writing about women who fall over in the eighteenth century.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Daisy Hay 2025
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