P.D. James Believed Mysteries Were Made Of Clues, Not Coincidences

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. We're going to remember mystery writer P.D. James and listen back to excerpts of two of her FRESH AIR interviews. She died Thursday at the age of 94. She wrote 18 crime novels, but even if you've never read her bestsellers, you may know her work. Seven of her books were adapted for the public TV series "Mystery." And her novel "The Children Of Men" was adapted into a 2006 film. P.D. James didn't publish her first novel until she was 42. When she started writing mysteries in the early 1960s, she was holding down a full-time job, raising two daughters and supporting her ill husband who died in 1964. The enormous popularity of her novels and of her detective hero Adam Dalgliesh eventually allowed her to devote herself full-time to writing. In 1991, Queen Elizabeth made P.D. James a Baroness.

Our book critic Maureen Corrigan, who has taught courses in detective fiction, spoke with James in 1998 after the publication of the novel "A Certain Justice." It's a characteristically brooding tale that opens on a murder trial. A young man named Garry Ashe is accused of having brutally murdered his aunt. Ashe is successfully defended by the brilliant criminal lawyer Venetia Aldridge. Then shortly after the trial ends, Venetia's bloody body is discovered in chambers, her office in the criminal court. With P.D. James, however, there's always much more going on underneath the murder and mayhem, as Maureen learned when they spoke.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: P.D. James, it's really an honor for me to talk with you. I'm a great fan of yours. And I do think that with every novel, your writing gets richer and more contemplative and even more philosophical. And yet you manage to wed those philosophical musings to an often terrifying thriller plot. I think we could loosely categorize "A Certain Justice" as a legal thriller. And that's a new area for you.

P.D. JAMES: Yes.

CORRIGAN: Why did you decide to enter into the legal world in this novel?

JAMES: Yes. I think you're absolutely right. A legal thriller is a good description of it. Well, I think what most attracted me was the contrast, the contrast between the order, the dignity, the history and traditions, hierarchy and indeed a very great pomp and courtesy with which a criminal trial is conducted in England and the appalling events with which it's concerned. The idea of this crime - the worst crime, the most contaminating crime coming in to that ordered world, and as it were shattering it. And I'm interested anyway in the criminal law. I always have been, so I think those ideas came together.

CORRIGAN: I'd like to ask you to read the passage in which a clerk who's working in the Inns of Court discovers Venetia's body.

JAMES: Yes. I think the moment in the book when the body is discovered is one of huge importance for the reader. And I always describe it through the eyes of the character who just makes the discovery. And it seems to me that the horror that character feels must be conveyed to the reader. Murder is an appalling crime - to find a murdered body, so this is what I tried to do. And here, as you know, the body is discovered by Harry Norton who is the clerk to chambers - the administrator of chambers, really. Elderly man just about to retire, coming to work to open the office, rather burdened with his own problems about retirement and his family and meets this appalling site. This is the actual moment when he unlocks Venetia's room and finds her dead.

(Reading) He moved slowly forward, as if drawn by the inexorable pull of a thread. She was sitting well back in the swivel chair behind her desk. The desk was to the left of the door, facing the two, tall windows. Her head was slumped forward on her chest. Her arms hung loosely over the curved arms of the chair. He couldn't see her face, but he knew that she was dead. On her head was a full-bottomed wig, its stiff curls of horsehair a mass of red and brown blood. Moving towards her, he put the back of his right hand against her cheek. It was ice cold. Surely even dead flesh couldn't be as cold as this. The touch, gentle as it had been, dislodged a globule of blood from the wig. He watched horrified as it rolled in slow spurts over the dead cheek to tremble on the edge of her chin. In terror, he thought, oh, God, she's cold. She's dead cold, but the blood is still tacky. Instinctively, he clutched the chair for support. And to his horror, it swung slowly around until she was facing the door, her feet dragging on the carpet. He gasped and drew back, looking appalled at his hand as if expecting it to be sticky with blood. Then he leaned forward and, stooping, tried to look into her face. The forehead, the cheeks and one eye were covered with the congealed blood; only the right eye was unsullied. The dead, unseeing stare, fixed on some far enormity, seemed, as he gazed at it, to hold a terrible malice.

CORRIGAN: Thank you, P.D. James. I think I can breathe again now.

(LAUGHTER)

CORRIGAN: It's really wonderful. In the case that Venetia is trying before she's murdered, which is also a very sinister case, a man is accused of murdering his aunt...

JAMES: Yes.

CORRIGAN: ...And of almost certainly having sexual relations with her before he kills her.

JAMES: Yes.

CORRIGAN: You write that Venetia had one great advantage in this case, and that was that there was no instinctive sympathy for the victim. I don't think that there's any instinctive sympathy for Venetia herself as a victim either. And I think that's a risk that you take as a writer, that oftentimes your victims fit this mold of being ambitious, careerists, sometimes even snobbish. And if they're not the victims, they're the murderers, that it's almost as though you deal with these people in your books by putting them in the negative roles. And I wonder how you deal with people like that when you meet them in life.

JAMES: You mean very successful people?

CORRIGAN: Yes, yeah.

JAMES: I think I deal with them exactly as I find them. Many of them, of course because I'm a member of the House of Lords, are my personal friends.

CORRIGAN: Yes.

JAMES: I'm not over-impressed by great success or great ambition. And certainly I'm not over impressed by great wealth, so that if they are pleasant, good, entertaining, compassionate, clever people, I'm very fond of them. And if they're not, I'm not. And, you know, the amount of success they've got is totally to me irrelevant.

I think in a detective story, it's almost inevitable that the victim, and to an extent probably the murderer, would have some of these qualities, really. You're very unlikely to have a murderer, you know, who is a very humble, hard-working, good, pleasant, compassionate, father of four children and goes regularly to the office and does his rather humble job well - the salt of the earth, in other words - a truly good person. A truly good person isn't going to attempt to murder. So inevitably you're in a world in which all these strong emotions really are thrashing around. And you do have victims who are unpleasant and difficult and unlikable and make enemies and both among the suspects and of course the murderer himself or herself someone who is capable of that deed. And it often does go with hubris I think. It very seldom goes with humility.

CORRIGAN: Another character who appears in this novel is one with whom we're familiar, those of us who know and love your books, and that's Commander Adam Dalgliesh. Dalgliesh, I mean, he's a fascinating character. And I know many women including myself who probably are a little attracted to him romantically. He's a poet. He's a loner. He's that irresistible breed of man who looks like he needs a little cheering up.

(LAUGHTER)

JAMES: We all feel like we can give him that.

CORRIGAN: We can do it. Yes, yes. I know you've admitted in other interviews that he's perhaps a bit of an alter ego for you. He likes to tour churches and walk by the sea, which are lots of...

JAMES: Yes. He's got lots of things I like of me in him. That's perfectly, too. I suppose he's a rather - oh, damn, what should I say? - he has the qualities which I very much admire either in men or women. And he has many of my own likes and dislikes. He lives his life very much as I would live it, you know, if I were Dalgliesh I think.

CORRIGAN: Do you feel at all that you may have fallen into the trap that Dorothy Sayers fell into where she created...

JAMES: (Laughter).

CORRIGAN: ...A detective hero who she herself felt attracted to?

JAMES: I don't think so.

CORRIGAN: (Laughter).

JAMES: I don't think I'm in love with my hero. I think she was certainly in love with Peter Wimsey and indeed changed him in order to make of him a love object more suitable for her affections, which is always a risk, I think, with a detective that he changes from the fundamental character which you begin with. No, I think I admire Dalgliesh and respect him, and I'm extremely fond of him. I don't think I'm in love with him. No, I don't feel that about him.

CORRIGAN: I was hoping to trap you into a confession here, but...

(LAUGHTER)

JAMES: But I am very fond of him. I'm not sure I'd like to work for him, though. I think he would be a very demanding boss.

CORRIGAN: Yes. How do you feel he has evolved if not changed from his first outing?

JAMES: Well, I think I understand him more and more as the years go by. I think he's matured. He's been promoted. I think he realizes increasingly how much harm a murder investigation can do to the innocent. He's more compassionate, and I think he's more aware of the imperfections of the law. He's more aware that the job he does is a very necessary job, and he's never wanted to do any other job and he's not ashamed of it. But he can see that it is a job that causes immense distress to other people.

GROSS: P. D. James spoke with our book critic Maureen Corrigan in 1998. James died Thursday at the age of 94. Coming up, we continue our remembrance with an excerpt of my 1987 interview with James. This is FRESH AIR.This is FRESH AIR. We're remembering mystery writer P.D. James. She died Thursday at the age of 94. Seven of her novels were adapted for the public television series "Mystery." Her novel "The Children Of Men" was adapted into a 2006 film. We just heard an interview with James conducted by our book critic Maureen Corrigan in 1988. Let's get deeper into our archive, all the way back to my 1987 interview with James. It was after the publication of her novel "A Taste For Death," which became a number-one bestseller.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

GROSS: In detective novels, the crime, the murder usually introduces fear and disorder into the world. And then it's the detective's job to set things right again and to recreate a balance, to recreate order. I think that you violate that in a way 'cause at the end of the book, things aren't back to their state of order and balance again. People have been irrevocably changed.

JAMES: This is true. I think, and this is one other way, really, in which the modern mystery can differ. You still have a solution. I think unless you had a solution at the end, it really wouldn't be a mystery. It wouldn't be written within the genre, to use a word I don't like, but it's the only word I think we can use. It might be a crime novel, but it wouldn't be a detective story. So you have to have the solution.

But you, nowadays, seldom have a complete restoration of order as you used to in the days of Agatha Christie and Mayhem Parva. There was this wonderful, little village, you know, in which everybody, whether they were the parson or the doctor or the chemist or the district nurse or the squire, moved like figures on a chessboard. And this disruptive crime happened and, then, as you say, order was restored. And certainly, in my novels, order isn't restored, or not necessarily so because the innocent can suffer more than the guilty.

GROSS: All writers who write about crime have to figure out how detailed, how explicit they want to make the death or the murder. And I'd like you to read a passage from your novel "A Taste Of Death" in which the first person comes in who discovers the bodies that set the story in motion.

JAMES: Yes. This is where our poor Miss Wharton, this elderly church worker, has gone to the church to clean it and replace the flowers and finds the bodies in the vestry. And I suppose it is really rather horrific because murder is horrific. And I want my reader to feel Miss Wharton's terrible shock at what she finds.

(Reading) Brightly lit, as on a stage, she saw the body still, more garish, more brightly lit than when they had first met her horrified eyes. One corpse had slipped from the low, single bed to the right of the door and lay staring up at her, the mouth open, the head almost cleft from the body. She saw, again, the severed vessels, sticking like corrugated pipes through the clotted blood. The second was propped ungainly as a ragdoll against the far wall. His head had dropped forward, and over his chest, a great mat of blood had spread like a bib. A brown and blue woolen cap was still on his head, but askew. His right eye was hidden, but the left leered at her with a dreadful knowingness. Thus mutilated, it seemed to her everything human had drained away from them with their blood - life, identity, dignity. They no longer looked like men, and the blood was everywhere. It seemed to her that she herself was drowning in blood. Blood drummed in her ears. Blood gurgled like vomit in her throat. Blood splashed in bright globules against the retinas of her closed eyes. The images of death she was powerless to shut out, swam before her in a swirl of blood, dissolved, reformed and then dissolved again. But always in blood.

GROSS: I think what I especially like about that is the impact that the discovery of the bodies has on the woman who finds them - how overwhelming the contact with death is for her. And a little later on, you write how she's afraid that she's going to vomit or that she's going to lose control of her bowels before she can even get to a bathroom. And I don't think of rotting bodies and of this contact with the stench of death as being a standard part of the British crime novel.

JAMES: No. I think Ruth Rendell writes really stickly about death. But it certainly isn't typical, really, of some of the best-known writers. In Agatha Christie, there's hardly any description of a corpse at all. In fact, I think one - in one book - I can't remember which one it was - we're told, you know, that he was killed by a blow to the head and then later, I think in some other method of death, almost as if she really couldn't face the actual description of the body. She wasn't - she didn't want to write about it. She didn't want to think about it. And certainly Dorothy L. Sayers, who I admire very much, is not very explicit about the actual corpses, is she? I think I'm trying to write a realistic novel, and murder is uniquely horrible. And I think that this shock of finding the bodies is important, really. The reader should feel it.

GROSS: Well, I think that the passage that you just read not only sets the story in motion, but it sets another theme of your novel in motion, which is how awful it is to confront death.

JAMES: Yes, to confront violent death, absolutely. And I think the novel deals with the effect of violent death - of murder - on everyone who comes in contact with it or who is involved with it. They, at least, think of it as a contaminating crime. And indeed, it proves to be so that we see, by the end of the book, that nearly every life has been changed including, Miss Wharton's, of course.

GROSS: The clues have to be fair in a detective novel...

JAMES: Yes.

GROSS: ...Fair to both the detective and fair to the reader. What's out of bounds?

JAMES: Oh, I think too great a coincidence. You see, what's interesting to me is that coincidence frequently happens in real life. We know, in our own experience, extraordinary coincidences happen and they do, I think, very often in real life investigation of murder. But somehow it doesn't write in the mystery. We shouldn't rely on an extraordinary coincidence. And I think that the clues have got to arise naturally from the circumstances of the book and the people, the characters and not sort of be inserted rather artificially, as if they're 6 million pieces in a plum pudding, you know, ready for the reader to pull out triumphantly and hold aloft and say, here's another clue. They must arise naturally because they can be material clues, the obvious ones like handkerchiefs, a button, cigarette ends. They can be the absence of something - gardener working in the garden, yet there aren't any footprints in the beds, the dog that didn't bark in the night. They can be largely scientific - body fluids, blood, of course. And they can rise some character. Those are probably the most interesting - the way in which people behave at one particular time, behaving out of character, apparently.

GROSS: You can't do anything like introduce a secret passageway at the end of the novel or have a twin brother come in who actually committed the crime, throwing everything off?

JAMES: Oh, absolutely not, no. You could have a twin brother, of course, if the reader knew from the beginning that there was a twin brother. You can have a secret passageway if the reader knows from the beginning that this is a very old house and it's got a secret passageway. But both, I think, have been overdone, really, in the mystery - the twin brother and the passageway.

GROSS: Do you have a rule of thumb? Does nearly everybody, or does everybody in the novel have to be a suspect?

JAMES: No, not necessarily. But I think one of the problems of writing the mystery is the number of characters you have to introduce because you obviously have a detective, and he's extremely important in one way; he's the main character. You have your victim. Then, if you're going to have a puzzle that's intriguing, you probably need about three or four suspects. So, already, you've got four, five, six major characters. So in a way, from a technical point of view, you can't afford to have too many characters who are not playing a fairly important part in the book, you know, unless they're just extraneous, walking-on parts, as it were.

GROSS: Should the reader be able to solve the crime before the detective does?

JAMES: Oh, I think so, yes. One hopes that the reader won't. But, very often in my books, the reader knows more than the detective does because I will have a scene when two suspects, perhaps, are talking together and admitting things to each other, which they certainly aren't going to admit to Dalgliesh when he interviews them. So in a sense, the reader can be a little ahead of Dalgliesh.

GROSS: We're listening back to my 1987 interview with mystery writer P.D. James. She died Thursday at the age of 94. We'll hear more of the interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. We're remembering mystery writer P.D. James. She died Thursday at the age of 94. Let's get back to the interview I recorded with her in 1987.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

GROSS: You thank the forensics unit of the police in the beginning of your book for all the help that they gave you. What kind of help did you ask them for?

JAMES: Particularly on bloodstains. This is the difference between real life and detective fiction because very often in the old books, you know, the body would be - the autopsy would be done by the village doctor on his table after dinner. And he'd immediately next morning or straightaway say, well, this is so-and-so's blood, 'cause in real life, it takes about three days to get this result. I wanted to find out, too, how exactly the examination of the scene is done. So I went to see the forensic biologists at the lab, and interestingly enough, the senior biologists are women - and very brilliant they are.

GROSS: Have you sat in on autopsies?

JAMES: No. No. I've never felt I needed to. I use a book by a forensic pathologist, Professor Keith Simpson, who is a very famous pathologist and vastly experienced in murder of course. And this is a textbook really for medical students, and I can get all the information from it I need. I've never felt I needed to watch an autopsy.

GROSS: Would you have the stomach for it if you did?

JAMES: If I needed - if I really needed to watch an autopsy in order to write the book properly, I would watch it. But I would never watch it out of curiosity. I don't think that's right.

GROSS: Do you think you'd make a good detective?

JAMES: Yes, I think it would. I don't know how good I'd be at the dollar part of the investigation. I mean, so much of it is plotting from door-to-door, and this is so vitally important. But I think women on the whole are underused in the detective force because I think we are much cuter about people. I mean, I think women can tell when another person is lying much more easily than men. And in some real life crimes that one has read, I found myself thinking, well, how on earth could they have been taken in by that story? And that if a woman had been there, she would've known that that was a lie - that it had to be a lie.

GROSS: Would it make you really angry if I told all of our listeners who did it in your book? I mean, how important would that be - I'm not going to do it - but how important would that be to you?

JAMES: Well, Terry, who knows? They might hear over the phone a terrible gurgling scream as I've fastened my hands around your throat.

(LAUGHTER)

JAMES: I hope not.

(LAUGHTER)

JAMES: I hope not. Well, how important is it? Well, this is interesting, isn't it? I mean, obviously I think people don't want to be told. Obviously, they're reading it partly for the puzzle. But what is interesting about the mystery is that the ones I really enjoy, I reread. I mean, the actual solution to the crime can't really be so dominant -can it? - because if it were, we would never reread. And we do reread our favorites. We know perfectly well who did it. But I don't think we want to know in advance in the first reading. That's for certain.

GROSS: I'd better be careful then (laughter).

JAMES: Oh, you had better be very careful.

GROSS: I know a lot of people have commented that it seems almost ironic that here you are writing these novels - these mystery novels with rotting corpses and people whose lives are irrevocably changed by violence. And you are a very, you know, controlled, probably pretty orderly woman - you know, an older woman who seems to have a great control over your life, and you're not probably the adventurous sort.

JAMES: No. No I don't think I am, Terry. Quite right.

GROSS: So does this seem like a great contradiction to you?

JAMES: It may be, you know, in some way in which I exercise what I think is quite a deep rooted fear of violence on my part. I'm frightened of violence. I dislike violence. I do love good order, good social order, good psychological order. I don't like messy lives. I think this is perfectly true. Of course, none of us can be totally in control of our own life, and if we think we are, then all sorts of horrible little things jump out at us behind the next corner, don't they? But I do like a fairly ordered life, a fairly structured life, yes. This is true.

GROSS: I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

JAMES: Thank you very much for having me. It's been very interesting, Terry. Thank you.

GROSS: P.D. James recorded in 1987. She died Thursday at the age of 94. If you want to catch up with interviews that you missed or listen to our show on your own schedule - when you're walking the dog or just walking - try podcasting us. It's free and easy to get on your podcast app or on iTunes. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.