An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P.D. James

James, who earned the sobriquet “Queen of Crime,” penned 14 Dalgliesh novels, with the last, The Private Patient, appearing in 2008. The public resonance created by James’s singular characterization and deployment of classic mystery devices led to most of the novels featuring Dalgliesh being filmed for television. The novels in which he appears are peopled by fully rounded characters, who are civilized, genteel, and motivated. Her first mystery novel, Cover Her Face (1962), introduced Dalgliesh and was followed by six more mysteries before she retired from government service in 1979 to devote full time to writing.ĭalgliesh, James’s master detective who rises from chief inspector in the first novel to chief superintendent and then to commander, is a serious, introspective person, moralistic yet realistic. To support her family (which included two children), she took work in hospital administration and, after her husband’s death in 1964, became a civil servant in the criminal section of the Department of Home Affairs. White, a medical student and future physician, who returned home from wartime service mentally deranged and spent much of the rest of his life in psychiatric hospitals. Her formal education, however, ended at age 16 because of lack of funds, and she was thereafter self-educated. The daughter of a middle-grade civil servant, James grew up in the university town of Cambridge.

James, byname of Phyllis Dorothy James White, Baroness James of Holland Park, (born August 3, 1920, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England-died November 27, 2014, Oxford), British mystery novelist best known for her fictional detective Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P.D. James