P.D. James: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction

At the age of thirty-eight, Phyllis Dorothy James White, National Health Service employee, reinvented herself as P.D. James, crime novelist. By the time she died in 2014 at the age of ninety-four, James had long since been informally christened Englands Queen of Crime. Sixteen of Jamess twenty novels feature one of her beloved series detectives, Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard and private eye Cordelia Gray, while her stand-alone works include dystopian The Children of Men (1992) and Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), a sequel to Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice. Jamess careful mystery plotting has earned comparison with Golden Age British detective writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. At the same time, Jamess work is thoroughly modern, with realistic descriptions of police procedures and the echoing aftereffects of crime. This definitive companion to P. D. James includes over 800 encyclopedia-style entries on all her published writing, characters, settings, and themes, as well as a career chronology, a chronological and alphabetical listing of her works, and an exhaustive index, making it an invaluable resource for devoted fans and new readers alike. See more