PD James
The Art of Fiction
No. 141
The Paris Review 135
Summer 1995
P. D. James is one of Britain’s most admired and best loved writers. Long considered the queen of crime and the doyenne of detective novelists, she has a large and varied readership beyond the confines of the genre and is praised by critics in such literary journals as theTimes Literary Supplement and the Literary Review.
James was born in 1920 in Oxford and educated at The High School for Girls in Cambridge, where her family settled when she was eleven. Upon leaving school at sixteen, she started work, and in 1941 married Dr. Connor Bantry White with whom she had two daughters, Clare and Jane. Her husband returned from World War II mentally damaged and unable to work, and James was forced to earn a living for her family. She started working in the National Health Service and later moved to the Home Office, where she ended up as a principal in the Police Department. She published her first novel, Cover Her Face, in 1962, at the age of forty-two.
In the three decades that followed, James wrote eleven more novels, achieving critical acclaim and increasing popularity. She “hit the jackpot” with her eighth novel, Innocent Blood, which shot to number one on the American best-seller list and brought her worldwide fame and fortune. To date she has sold over ten million copies of her books in the U.S. and tours regularly to publicize her novels and give lectures.
P. D. James’s first mainstream novel, Children of Men, a futuristic moral parable set in England in 2007, also gained considerable success. Her thirteenth and most recent novel,Original Sin, is set in the London publishing world and features detective Commander Adam Dalgliesh, the most famous detective since Sherlock Holmes and a protagonist of many previous novels.
James was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 1987 for lifetime achievement, and the Silver Dagger of the Crime Writers’ Association for her fourth novel, Shroud for a Nightingale. In the United States she has won the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll for the same novel, as well as for An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Eight of her novels have been serialized on television. She is an associate fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, has won honorary degrees from four universities, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of The Royal Society of Literature. In addition, James has served as the chairman of the literature panel of the Arts Council and as a governor of the BBC. In 1991 she was ennobled by the Queen and sits in the House of Lords as Baroness James of Holland Park.
P. D. James lives in an elegant Regency house in Holland Park, London where this interview took place in April of 1994. Her drawing room is furnished with comfortable armchairs and sofas, gilt mirrors, Staffordshire figures, and a fine bookcase containing the complete bound volume of Notable British Trials, “fascinating to read.”
INTERVIEWER
You did not start writing until you were in your forties, yet you say that you always wanted to be a writer. How did you know and how did you think you would go about it?
P. D. JAMES
I think I was born knowing it. From an early age I used to tell imaginative stories to my younger brother and sister. I lived in the world of the imagination and I did something that other writers have told me they did as children—I described myself inwardly in the third person: She brushed her hair and washed her face, then she put on her nightdress . . . as if I were standing outside myself and observing myself. I don’t know whether this is significant, but I think writing was what I wanted to do—almost as soon as I knew what a book was.