Elegant detections

Press, 9 October 1982, Page 16

Elegant detections

p D. Janies Omnibus. Containing Unnatural Causes (1967) Shroud for a Nightingale (1971) and Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972). Faber 1982. 743 pp. $22.75. (Reviewed by Ken Strongman) Now and again one receives for review a book which is outstandingly good value The P D. James "Omnibus is one and could ’ scarcely provide a better introduction to the works of this talented author. She is currently the best exponent of the traditional English detective story, many clues ahead of her nearest competitors. It is not that she has assumed the mantle of Miss Christie. Miss Marsh and Miss Savers, she is better than any of them and writes with enviable ease and fluency There are no jarring notes, in plot, in characterisation, or in style. One can just read and enjoy her books, the onlv problem being to make them last, rather than to swallow them like oysters. , Ms James has a most engaging hero. Superintendent Adam Dalgleish. With flair (or is it cunning?) she has also made him Adam Dalgleish, successful poet. Thus he becomes credible ds a Metropolitan policeman who makes intuitive leaps rather than flatfooted procedural plods. As well as being a good ‘tec he is complex and human, with believable frailties and dark moments. Naturally, he is a man of integrity, but other than his poetry and the fact that he is literate, he

has np lollipop-sucking quirks. He stands as his own man and does it well.

Adam Dalgleish features, prominently in two of the three books included in this “Omnibus." In “Unnatural Causes." while on holiday with his aunt, he is presented with a handless corpse drifting in a boat. The corpse was formerly part of the small, intense, precious back-biting literarv community on the fringes of which ’ lives his aunt. He is thrust reluctantly into an intricate world of posture. ’ pretence and deep-seated jealousies. He is a match for it of course, in spite of a prickly relationship with the local police. He becomes so involved that his personal life suffers, but like everything else in P. D. James, this is only in the best tradition.

In “Shroud for a Nightingale." Adam Dalgleish is in the world of hospitals, about which Ms James clearly knows a great deal. Student nurses are poisoned which, although it might seem unlikely in the cold light of daily facts, is perfectly credible in the very real world which the author creates. The plot is complicated and the characters subtle. One looks up at the end with the thought of a book well read and a feeling of loss that a bit of one’s world is inexplicably gone. Which is a longwinded way of saying that the book is absorbing. “An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" has a heroine, although Adam Dalgleish is lurking in the background through the advice he once gave to her now dead colleague. Cordelia Gray is a 22-year-old inquiry agent who has an impressive amount of square-shouldered worldly wisdom. This resulted from being brought up as a bright non-Catholic in a posh Catholic boarding school and then being carted round Europe with her revolutionary . father. Following the suicide of her partner this is her first case alone.

She is asked to investigate the reason why a Cambridge undergraduate hanged himself. The request comes from the student's scientifically eminent father. There is mystery, danger, and pretence, but she copes with it all, and brings the case to a unusual conclusion. Finally, she has what, to the reader, is a very satisfying meeting with Adam Dalgleish. In these three books. P. D. James, has created three quite distinct and interesting worlds. The omnibus volume leaves one with a mass of rich designs, as though one has just walked through a room hung with Persian carpets. Apart from bringing one tradition of detective fiction into the 1970 s and ’Bos, P. D. James is living proof that crime fiction can be written with as much elegance as any other fiction.