Exit the Baroness James

The Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL, better known as P.D. James, has indeed departed this world, having reached the mid-nineties mark, as did P.G. Wodehouse, and like Plum Wodehouse, writing to the end.

She had a gift for titles--"Cover Her Face" ( her first novel, in 1962), "An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" (1972, introducing her female sleuth, Cordelia Gray), and, among many others, "Shroud for a Nightingale" (1971, drawing on her long experience within the British hospital system).

"Shroud," to this reader, remains the most intense and memorable of her novels, and one of the two P.D. James books that seem essential. The other is "Talking About Detective Fiction," a collection of essays produced in support of the Bodleian Library, in which she discusses mystery writing from Dickens and Collins to Hammett and Chandler, but shows her greatest affection for other writers of her gender--Marjorie Allingham, Ngaio Marsh.

Her most familiar creation is the poet-police officer Adam Dalgliesh, later seen in several television adaptations. We still prefer the novels, in which Dalgliesh looks the way we imagine him to look.

Ever moving forward, very late in her career P.D. James wrote "Death Comes to Pemberley," a mystery which is also a follow-up to "Pride and Prejudice." Would Jane Austen have been amused? No one can say--but certainly Miss Austen and the Baroness will have a lot to talk about at their Heavenly tea time.