P.D. James on Detective Fiction!
By Peter on Dec 9, 2009 in Excellent book, bestseller, book review
P.D. James has been extremely successful as a writer. Her series about the famed Adam Dalgliesh, who now along with his creator P.D. James 
And her little slim book, Talking About Detective Fiction, with eight delightful, elegant and at times pretty frank analyses of the genre, the detectives and not least the writers of detective stories is indeed like amphetamine for a crime fiction addict. She does away with the whole so called Golden Age of crime fiction with a series of first serves so hard and so well placed that they sure would have given her a 90% serve ace score on any tennis court.
Agatha Christie gets a rough treatment in the book. Elegant, backhanded and smart, to be sure, but devastating all the same! P.D. James says Agatha Christie “hasn’t in my view had a profound influence on the later development of the detective story. She “wasn’t an innovative writer and had no interest in exploring the possibilities of the genre,” and lacks “the disturbing presence of evil.” And then she goes on to finish poor Agatha Christie off with a delicately placed, backhanded compliment that turns out to be a forceful topspin lob: “Perhaps her greatest strength was that she never overstepped the limits of her talent.”
I am not going to enter into a discussion with P.D. James’s views or analyses, neither will I give away too much of the content in this must-have of a book about detectives and crime fiction. Sufficient to say is that it is an engaging, intelligent, well written and well argued book that has multiple layers and is pleasure to be stimulated by.
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.See also the interview with P.D. James on The Globe and Mail about this book.
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