P.D. James (1920-2014) was one of the greats of detective writing. She was a novelist, a baroness, a sleuth, and the Grand Dame of Mystery.
P.D. James (1920-2014) was one of the greats of detective writing. She was a novelist, a baroness, a sleuth, and the Grand Dame of Mystery.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan. This is Womanica.
This month, we’re highlighting women who’ve led dynamic lives. Ones that have shifted, evolved and bloomed, often later in life.
Today’s Womanican was one of the greats of detective writing. She was a novelist, a baroness, and a white-haired sleuth. We could only be talking about the Grand Dame of Mystery: P.D. James.
Phyllis Dorothy James was born on August 3rd, 1920, in Oxford. She was the oldest child of Dorothy and Sidney James. The family settled in Cambridge when Phyllis was 11 years old.
Though Phyllis’ career writing wouldn’t begin until later in life, she realized her fascination with mystery early on. She would later tell interviewers: “When I first heard that Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall… I immediately wondered: Did he fall– or was he pushed?”
Phyllis pursued other chapters of her life before sitting down to write. She graduated from high school into a society consumed by World War II. Her father didn’t believe women needed further education, so she didn’t attend university. Instead, she moved to London and got a job handing out ration cards in Manchester. In 1941, she married a doctor named Earnest Connor Bantry White. Just after their marriage, he was called to military service. He returned forever changed from the war, prone to fits of violence, and often requiring extended stays at the hospital. Phyllis knew she’d have to be the main support for their two daughters. She served as a nurse during the war, and later worked with the National Health Service.
When Phyllis was in her 40s, she decided to start writing. She set her alarm for 5am every morning to get in writing time before she had to leave for her hospital job. . She began writing a ‘whodunnit’ as practice for a serious novel– little did she know, she’d soon be regarded as a master of the genre.
Three years after she started writing, Phyllis sent off her first novel, “Cover Her Face” to a London literary agent. It was then sent to an editor from the publishing firm Faber and Faber. With that, Phyllis’ career as a novelist took off. . She decided to write under the pen name P. D. James– catchy, and gender-neutral. In 1962, Phyllis published her first book: she was 42 years old.
“Cover Her Face” follows Adam Dalgliesh (DAWL-gleesh), an old-fashioned poet-policeman, solving a grisly murder in a sleepy English town. It was a callback to golden-age mystery novels of the 30s and 40s, a far cry from the hardboiled detective types that littered bookstore shelves in the 1960s. But the novel was a hit– and so were the many iterations of Officer Dalgliesh’s adventures that followed.
Phyllis’ stories mixed together the fantastic with the mundane. Her stories were set in cozy towns and well-worn streets, full of archetypal characters. But Phyllis knew a good detective story required a twist, and she was more than happy to deliver. In “Cover Her Face” for example, a lead suspect proves his innocence by revealing he had an artificial hand. Readers knew to expect twists and turns… and to expect the unexpected.
Even though her books pushed the limits of believability, they were thoroughly researched. Phyllis used her experience in hospitals and the civil service to inform her novels. In 1964, she became an administrator in the forensic science and criminal law divisions of the Department of Home Affairs. This gave her an inside look into the type of work many other writers were just approximating.
In 1972, she also introduced a new protagonist, Cordelia Gray to the series. Cordelia was a young and competent private investigator leading the charge as a female sleuth.
For most of Phyllis’ writing career, she was working full-time. She retired in 1979, when she was 59. She used the extra time to dedicate herself to even more stringent research, sometimes taking up to a year to read up on a subject before committing it to paper.
Phyllis only ever wrote outside of the mystery genre once. A 1992 novel called The Children of Men, a dark futuristic satire where the human race faced extinction by infertility. The novel was later adapted into a 2006 film directed by Alphonso Cuarón. That ‘dark future’ was set in 2021, by the way.
In her later career, Phyllis saw many of her other books made into film and TV productions and published an autobiography. She was also made a doctor of letters by more than half a dozen universities, and an honorary fellow by another handful of institutions.
She also had a political career. Though she claimed allegiance to no political party, she worked mainly with Conservatives. In 1991, she was also appointed an Officer of the British Empire, effectively becoming Baroness James of Holland Park.
In 2011, she published her last work, “Death Comes to Pemberley.” In it, Phyllis orchestrates a whodunnit among the characters of Pride and Prejudice set six years after the events of the classic Jane Austen work.
Phyllis died at her home in Oxford in 2014. She was 94 years old.
All month, we’re highlighting dynamos. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram @womanicapodcast.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
Talk to you tomorrow!