John Horder on

PD James

The Adam Dalgliesh novels

Adam Adamant

You may have heard the formidable PD James on Radio 4’s Today programme, passionately confronting BBC director general Mark Thompson over the corporations highest staff salaries. And she was handing out awards at the final South Bank Show on Sunday night.

She is as much a classic author who writes exquisitely in a direct line from Jane Austen as she is an impeccable researcher who leaves no stones unturned. She should enjoy her 90th birthday this year.

Remarkably, PDJ does enjoy life’s extremely messy mixture of beauty and squalor in the way the 14th-century saint Julian of Norwich once did. She is as passionate about Christianity as she is about literature.

If you are looking for a thriller to escape from all your winter worries, look no further. In the first chapter of The Murder Room, Conrad Ackroyd, the Roman Catholic editor of The Paternoster Review, with its unsigned reviews, whisks Commander Adam Dalgliesh off his home patch at New Scotland Yard to the Dupayne Museum in the middle

of Hampstead Heath.

The Dupayne has built its reputation celebrating the most notorious crimes in the years between the two world wars. At the very time of Adam and Conrad’s visit, its very survival is being called into question, much to the consternation of its employees.

An emergency meeting of its trustees is called. One of them, Dr Neville Dupayne, a psychiatrist with a secret, is known to strongly demand its closure. One hundred or so pages later, his body is found burnt to a cinder in his car after it has been doused in paraffin outside the museum.

Cue for Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team of Detective Inspector Kate Miskin and Detective Sergeant Benton-Smith to begin their investigation at the request of 10 Downing Street.

I feel in a saner world, far from being pigeon-holed as simply a thriller writer, PD James should be treated no differently to any other fiction writer.

The Adam Dalgliesh novels by PD James are in paperback from Penguin, including the latest, The Private Patient

John Horder © 2010

first appeared in the Camden New Journal © 2010