(2003)Another very good mystery as a killer is copying murders that are displayed in a unique museum. Neither the mystery nor the detective present James's followers with anything truly new in her latest Adam Dalgliesh novel (after 2001's Death in Holy Orders), which opens, like other recent books in the series, with an extended portrayal of an aging institution whose survival is threatened by one person, who rapidly becomes the focus of resentment and hostility. Neville Dupayne, a trustee of the Dupayne Museum, a small, private institution devoted to England between the world wars, plans to veto its continuing operation. After many pages of background on the museum's employees, volunteers and others who would be affected by the trustee's unpopular decision, Neville meets his end in a manner paralleling a notorious historical murder exhibited in the museum's "Murder Room." MI5's interest in one of the people connected with the crime leads to Commander Dalgleish and his team taking on the case. While a romance develops between the commander, who's even more understated than usual, and Emma Lavenham, introduced in Death in Holy Orders, this subplot has minimal impact. A second murder raises the ante, but the whodunit aspect falls short of James's best work. Hopefully, this is an isolated lapse for an author who excels at characterization and basic human psychology.

This book took a long time to get to the first murder and didn’t really pick up steam until the second murder. Elements of the resolution felt a bit sensationalized or gratuitous, and there were a couple of coincidences that I didn’t quite buy (especially because one of them seemed to come completely out of left field). ( )

This is another book that I suspect I bought and ready very soon after its publication, which I see was twenty years ago. I was, after all, a great fan of P D James, and viewed her then as representing the more literary end of the crime fiction spectrum.

Her prose is certainly very well crafted, but revisiting this book two decades later I found it heavier going than I had recalled. While James’s prose remains as lucid as ever, I was also far more sensitive to the air of petulance that underpinned so much of what she wrote. There is also a hardness, almost veering towards intolerance, about a lot of the attitudes underpinning the book.

As always, her characters are slightly removed from reality, and in fact reminded me of some of the casts encountered in Iris Murdoch’s novels. As it happens. My mother know both of them, although my recollection is that she never, or at least seldom, met the two of them together: that would certainly have been an interesting gathering, and I would have liked to see how the two novelists interacted.

Commander Adam Dalgleish was one of those giants of fiction who never seemed to age. He was still going strong in this novel, written in 2003, more than forty years after his debut in Cover Her Face in which he had already ascended to Detective Chief Inspector so must have been significantly more than ten years into his police career. Does that matter? Well obviously almost certainly not. Although it does mark James out as belonging to an older school of crime fiction that expected its readers to suspend disbelief. One of the appealing aspects of some of Adam Dalgleish’s more recent counterparts, such as Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch in Michael Connelly’s novels, or Sir Ian Rankin’s thrawn John Rebus, has been the way in which they have aged in real time, having to combat the challenges that ageing throws at them.

Yet enough cavilling. The characters might be slightly odd, and the setting (a museum on Hampstead Heath focusing on the years between the two World Wars) rather bizarre, but the plot itself is sound. Although he may have been preserved in literary aspic, Dalgleish remains an empathetic character, and he seems more readily believable than many of the other characters. Inspector Kate Miskin is also a finely drawn and highly plausible character.

I enjoyed returning to this novel, and may well revisit some more of P D James’s work soon. ( )

I do like P.D James's Dalgliesh novels, I truly do, but over 600 pages is a lot of re-reading. In the interest of having some room in the house not entirely stuffed with books, this one must go. Definitely a worthwhile read, I love Dalgliesh and his team, Kate especially is a joy. The writing evokes a sense of place which makes me wish I had more than a superficial acquaintance with London and its less tourist-frequented neighbourhoods. ( )

The Murder Room is a room in a museum in London. The museum is devoted to the inter-war years 1919 - 1939 and the murders are some infamous murders that happened during that time. We meet the characters invovled in the museum and Commander Dalgliesh for sometime before a murder happens. The novel is absorbing enough and moves on at a reasonable pace to its conclusion. ( )