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PD James

1920 - 2014

Celebrated as one of the great writers of crime fiction, the novelist PD James on 27 November 2014.

Famous for her detective Adam Dalgliesh, James penned more than 20 books which sold millions around the world, with many adapted for film and TV. Her best known novels include The Children of Men, The Murder Room and her Pride and Prejudice continuation Death Comes to Pemberley. ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Arts presents a selection of PD James highlights from the archive.

From the archive

  • PD James joined Sue Lawley in 2002 to share a pick of music she couldn't do without. Her choices included the Agnus Dei from Faure’s Requiem, Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Gilbert & Sullivan, Is Life a Boon? from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeoman of the Guard and A String of Pearls by Gerry Gray.

  • In 2003 she met James Naughtie and an audience of readers at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre to discuss her novel Original Sin. Set in Wapping in London, the novel centres around the city's oldest publishing house, Peverell Press, headquartered in a mock-Venetian palace on the River Thames.

  • PD James was a guest editor on the Radio 4 Today programme in December 2009. She lambasted Mark Thompson, the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Director General, over the high salaries received by senior executives, which the Sunday Times observed, "left him filleted like a fish."

  • PD James appeared on Start the Week in 2009 to discuss her non-fiction title Talking About Detective Fiction, exploring the historical conventions of the crime novel. β€œHowever ambitious you are for your book as a novel… you still have to make it fair and give the reader a puzzle they can solve” she said.

  • To mark the reissue of The Maul and the Pear Tree, James joins Mark Lawson in 2010 to discuss her only book about a true crime. It was originally published in 1971. She explained here, in her 90th year, why she was sadly too nervous to write another Adam Dalgliesh novel.

  • A great Jane Austen fan, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice in 2013, PD James took part in a special edition of World Book Club. The author penned a murder mystery continuation of Austen's novel, with Death Comes to Pemberly in 2011.

PD James (Getty)

About the author

PD James always rejected the notion that detective novels were not proper literature. She proved her point with a string of well-researched and beautifully constructed crime stories.

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Born in Oxford on 3 August, 1920, from her early days at Cambridge High School for Girls, Phyllis Dorothy James nurtured an ambition to write.

The daughter of a civil servant, she was forced by her family's financial circumstances to leave school at 16 and find a job as a filing clerk.

Baroness James of Holland Park, as she was latterly known, began writing seriously in the mid-1950s, composing parts of her first novel during her commute to work.

The resulting book Cover My Face, published in 1962, introduced readers to Adam Dalgliesh, the intellectual, poetry-writing senior officer of the Metropolitan Police who would feature in most of her crime novels.

Dalgliesh was the latest incarnation of that bastion of English crime writing, the gentleman detective, epitomised by Lord Peter Wimsey and Albert Campion. However, unlike them, Dalgleish was a serving police officer - as was Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse, who would follow a decade later.

But it was not until 1980, with the publication of her eighth book Innocent Blood, that her small but loyal following exploded into mass international popularity.

Her books were not cosy in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Her victims died in brutal and often shocking ways and the perpetrator was not always brought to justice.

Speaking to the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ in November 2013, the author said she was hard at work on a new detective novel.

Simon Richardson, ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Readings Unit

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