In a perfect marriage of author and subject, P. D. James—
one of the most widely admired writers of detective fiction
at work today—gives us a personal, lively, illuminating
exploration of the human appetite for mystery and mayhem,
and of those writers who have satisfied it.
P. D. James examines the genre from top to bottom,
beginning with the mysteries at the hearts of such novels
as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Wilkie Collins’s The
Woman in White, and bringing us into the present with such
writers as Colin Dexter and Henning Mankell. Along the way
she writes about Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers,
Agatha Christie (“arch-breaker of rules”), Josephine Tey,
Dashiell Hammett, and Peter Lovesey, among many others. She
traces their lives into and out of their fiction, clarifies
their individual styles, and gives us indelible portraits
of the characters they’ve created, from Sherlock Holmes to
Sara Paretsky’s sexually liberated female investigator, V.
I. Warshawski. She compares British and American Golden Age
mystery writing. She discusses detective fiction as social
history, the stylistic components of the genre, her own
process of writing, how critics have reacted over the
years, and what she sees as a renewal of detective fiction—
and of the detective hero—in recent years.
There is perhaps no one who could write about this enduring
genre of storytelling with equal authority and flair: it is
essential reading for every lover of detective fiction.
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