Time to Be in Earnest (3 page)

For the whole of my schooldays, both in primary school and at the High School in Cambridge, I never knew a child whose parents were either separated or divorced. No doubt this fact hid many wretchedly unhappy marriages and some that for the wife were little more than institutionalized slavery. But for the stoically enduring there were compensations. Couples, knowing that they were yoked together for life, frequently made the best of what they had. Those who were able to survive the more turbulent years of youth and middle age often found in each other a reassuring and comforting companionship in old age. They had a far smaller expectation of happiness, admittedly, and a far lesser tendency to regard happiness as a right. All our brightly minted social reforms, the sexual liberation since the war, the guilt-free divorce, the ending of the stigma of illegitimacy, have had their shadow side. Today we have a generation of children more disturbed, more unhappy, more criminal, indeed more suicidal than in any previous era. The sexual liberation of adults has been bought at a high price and it is not the adults who have paid it.

The beginning of a new year, whether the calendar year or the day after a birthday, produces in me a desire to get rid of rubbish, rearrange my books and drag into the light of day old boxes of long-forgotten papers. This morning I discovered a book of press cuttings which I started keeping after the publication of my first novel,
Cover Her Face
, published in the autumn of 1962. It is a hardback analysis book which I imagine I picked up as a bargain, finding the ruled blue and red lines helpful to the careful placing of my cuttings. I can’t be the only writer who, in the flush of triumph and excitement after publication of her first novel, decided to keep reviews and articles. For me the enthusiasm lasted only until publication of the second novel. But I was glad to find this first press-cuttings book although it has survived more by chance than by careful hoarding.

Some of the reviews were laudatory, and most encouraging. All assumed that P. D. James was a man except Leo Harris in
Books and Bookmen
, who wrote: “This is a very fine first, and I can’t help feeling that the author is a woman.” E. D. O’Brien in
The Illustrated London
News
wrote: “It is always pleasant, though not always possible, to praise a first novel.
Cover Her Face
, by P. D. James, justifies just such an enthusiastic encomium.” It ended: “Insofar as this is a mystery, I failed to solve it. Mr. James will, I hope, give us many more such treats.” Francis Iles in
The Guardian
wrote:
“Cover Her Face
by P. D. James is one of those extraordinary first novels which seem to step straight into the sophisticated preserves of the experienced writer, yet retain the newcomer’s freshness of approach.” The reviewer in the
Oldham Evening Chronicle & Standard
wrote that the book was “the kind of novel which suggests that the author is planning a lengthy career in the business—particularly with the introduction of a colourful character in Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh.” But he or she much deplored the cost of the book—18 shillings. By present book-price standards a hardback at less than a pound was not exceptionally dear, but it was certainly not cheap for what the reviewer a little unkindly described as “this kind of material.” An established writer, he suggested, could perhaps get away with this overpricing, but not a newcomer.

There is even the cutting of an interview with photograph by a reporter from the
Surrey Comet
who came to talk to my younger daughter, Jane. We were then living at 127 Richmond Park Road, Kingston. I was working as a Principal Administrative Assistant at the North West Regional Hospital Board. Both Jane and her elder sister, Clare, were at home, and my husband Connor was with us, rarely, between bouts of hospitalization. Obviously he hadn’t been at home at the time of the interview but, due to Jane’s discretion, the article is blessedly free of details about his illness or suggestions of the brave little woman writing to support her family. Jane said that her mother had always been keen on writing, was highly delighted to have this first novel published, and that most of her evenings and weekends were spent working on her books. It is an apt comment on what life at the time was actually like. The article ends: “In Inspector Dalgliesh, she has a character who will benefit from greater attention and who no doubt will be called upon to solve future P. D. James mysteries.” There is a photograph in which I sit, arms folded, gazing at the camera, hair obviously newly set, and with an air of slightly quizzical self-satisfaction.

It is interesting how many reviewers assumed that I was a man. One of the questions I am often asked after signings is whether I deliberately chose to write under the name P. D. James in order to conceal my sex. Some questioners actually assume that I thought it an advantage to be
mistaken for a man. This certainly never entered my mind and I am grateful to have been born a woman, perhaps more from an innate positiveness rather than from any careful weighing-up of the relative advantages and disadvantages. But I would certainly never dream of pretending to be other than a woman. Not only would this be pointless, since the truth becomes known fairly quickly, but women are generally well regarded as crime writers and only a minority of readers would reject a book because they disliked the sex of the author, although I have to admit I have known cases. My memory is that when the manuscript was ready to be sent off to an agent or publisher, I wrote down Phyllis James, Phyllis D. James, P. D. James, and decided that the last and shortest was enigmatic and would look best on the book spine. It never occurred to me to write other than under my maiden name. I have never regretted my choice, particularly now, when I may have to sign as many as three hundred books at an American signing. That is seldom a problem here; the British are much less addicted to standing in long lines to meet an author.

I began writing
Cover Her Face
when I was in my mid-thirties. It was a late beginning for someone who knew from early childhood that she wanted to be a novelist and, looking back, I can’t help regretting what I now see as some wasted years. In the war there was always the uncertainty of survival and one needed more determination and dedication than I possessed to embark on an 80,000-word work when the bombs were falling and lack of paper made it difficult for anyone new to get published. There is also in my nature that streak of indolence which made it more agreeable to contemplate the first book than actually to begin writing it. It was easier, too, to see the war years as a preparation for future endeavour rather than an appropriate time to begin. I can remember the moment, but not the date, when I finally realized that there would never be a convenient time to write my first book and that, unless I did make a start, I would eventually be saying to my grandchildren that what I had wanted to be was a novelist. Even to think of speaking these words was a realization of potential failure.

I can’t now remember how long it took to write
Cover Her Face
, but I suspect it was years rather than months. When I began the book I was working at Paddington Hospital Management Committee, and the book was largely planned on the Central Line as I travelled from Redbridge to Liverpool Street, then on by the Metropolitan Line to Paddington. The writing, always by hand, was done in the early mornings
when I would get up in time to spend about an hour writing before I needed to leave for work, occasionally at weekends between visits to Connor in hospital, and sometimes on the journey. The work was hindered by family emergencies, by pressure of my job and by the need to spend some evenings at the City of London College in Moorgate, studying for the qualification in hospital administration which I hoped might eventually result in a job sufficiently well paid to support my family. I don’t think it occurred to me then that writing novels would be either lucrative enough or dependable enough to rely on.

It didn’t occur to me either to begin with anything other than a detective story. They had formed my own recreational reading in adolescence and I was influenced in particular by the women writers: Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Josephine Tey. I had no wish to write a strongly autobiographical novel about the war or Connor’s illness. I suppose, too, I have a streak of scepticism, even of morbidity, which attracted me to the exploration of character and motive under the trauma of a police investigation of a violent death. I could always imagine myself writing a novel which wasn’t a detective story—indeed, I have written two,
Innocent Blood
and
The Children of Men—
but I can’t imagine myself writing a book which doesn’t include death. Death has always fascinated me and even in childhood I was always aware of the fragility of life.

And there were other reasons for my choice. I love structure in a novel and the detective story is probably the most structured of popular fiction. Some would say that it is the most artificial, but then all fiction is artificial, a careful rearrangement by selection of the writer’s internal life in a form designed to make it accessible and attractive to a reader. The construction of a detective story might be formulaic; the writing need not be. And I was setting out, I remember, with high artistic ambitions. I didn’t expect to make a fortune, but I did hope one day to be regarded as a good and serious novelist. It seemed to me, as it has to others, that there can be no better apprenticeship for an aspiring novelist than a classical detective story with its technical problems of balancing a credible mystery with believable characters and a setting which both complements and integrates the action. And I may have needed to write detective fiction for the same reasons as aficionados enjoy the genre: the catharsis of carefully controlled terror, the bringing of order out of disorder, the reassurance that we live in a comprehensible and moral universe
and that, although we may not achieve justice, we can at least achieve an explanation and a solution.

Glancing now through
Cover Her Face
, I am struck by how conventional it is. This is very much a detective story in the mode of Agatha Christie even if it aspires to probe more deeply into the minds and motives of its characters. Here is the English village, the stock characters of priest and doctor, the anxious virgin who runs the home for unmarried mothers. The book is very much of its time. Today the victim, Sally Jupp, would not have found it necessary either to seek refuge in Miss Liddell’s home, or to take a job as a house parlour-maid with the Maxie family. The local authority would have provided her and her child with a flat and the local social workers would have helped her to furnish it, and welfare payments, although not generous, would have enabled her to survive. But I’m surprised how many readers say that they like
Cover Her Face
. It seems that the cosy, domestic, English village murder has never quite lost its appeal.

After the book was finally finished and typed I had a stroke of luck. I was selected for a three-month residential course at the King’s Fund College for Hospital Administrators, then situated in the Bayswater Road. The head of the college was an ex-headmaster of Brighton School. He was a good administrator and I suspect had been a good teacher, but not immune to that particular brand of social snobbery which I have encountered more than once in the headmasters of minor public schools. But he liked me and was helpful to me, and I was invited by his wife to spend a weekend at their oasthouse in Kent. A fellow guest was the actor Miles Malleson, for me always associated with his incomparable portrayal of Dr. Chasuble in the film of
The Importance of Being Earnest
. He had written books about the theatre and I confided to him that I had just finished my first novel. He suggested that I send it to his agent, Elaine Greene at MCA, and gave me an introduction. My memory is that I took the manuscript in person. I can recall an imposing building in Piccadilly, the large letters on the brass nameplate, and meeting this dark-haired, rather intimidating American woman who accepted the manuscript but was not, as I remember, either particularly effusive or encouraging.

Elaine was at that time married to Hugh Carleton Greene, Director General of the BBC, and after reading my manuscript she had gone with him to have lunch or dinner—I forget which—at All Souls College,
Oxford. There she had sat next to Charles Monteith, a Director of Faber and Faber. Elaine, an enthusiast for detective fiction, had said how sad she was at the death of the crime writer Cyril Hare, whose novels, mostly set in the world of law, are some of the most elegantly written in the genre. One,
Tragedy At Law
, is in my view among the most enjoyable classical detective stories. Charles Monteith said that Faber would now start looking for a replacement for Cyril Hare, and Elaine told him that she thought she had found one. She sent the manuscript to him next day and Charles accepted it. I think this success produced some unease among my daughters, who had read that any writer of real talent could paper his or her walls with rejection slips. They tactfully pointed this out, anxious to arm me against future disappointment. I retorted with some tartness that children with no faith in Mummy’s talent would not get new bicycles out of the proceeds. A couple of extremely good bicycles as well as other small treats constituted for me financial success.