Talking About Detective Fiction (2009)

An interesting discourse on detective fiction by P.D. James. I was most interested in her acute evaluations of classic mystery writers, and surprised by her praise for Ian Rankin. ( )

In a perfect marriage of author and subject, P. D. James—one of the most widely admired writers of detective fiction at work today—gives us a personal, lively, illuminating exploration of the human appetite for mystery and mayhem, and of those writers who have satisfied it.

P. D. James examines the genre from top to bottom, beginning with the mysteries at the hearts of such novels as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and bringing us into the present with such writers as Colin Dexter and Henning Mankell. Along the way she writes about Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie (“arch-breaker of rules”), Josephine Tey, Dashiell Hammett, and Peter Lovesey, among many others. She traces their lives into and out of their fiction, clarifies their individual styles, and gives us indelible portraits of the characters they’ve created, from Sherlock Holmes to Sara Paretsky’s sexually liberated female investigator, V. I. Warshawski. She compares British and American Golden Age mystery writing. She discusses detective fiction as social history, the stylistic components of the genre, her own process of writing, how critics have reacted over the years, and what she sees as a renewal of detective fiction—and of the detective hero—in recent years.

There is perhaps no one who could write about this enduring genre of storytelling with equal authority and flair: it is essential reading for every lover of detective fiction. ( )

I've been eager to read this book, but I found it to be quite a bit slighter than I had anticipated. James talks a bit about her own writing, but primarily this is a shallow overview of the detective novel, with all emphasis put on the "golden age" of British mystery novels; from the end of WWI to the mid sixties. She does make the interesting observation that while mystery novels published in Britain during that time are best describes as "cozies", and featured gentle English village life, undisturbed by the homicide, which provides an interesting puzzle for the sleuth to unravel, American detective novels were going all hard-boiled. ( )

This is a brief, fascinating book that describes the origin and evolution of the mystery in Brittan (with a short side-trip into the history of American detective stories). I particularly enjoyed this book because she shared new insights into why readers feel satisfied by mysteries and what the different character types contribute to the story. She also provided interesting biographical information about some of my favorite authors. ( )

P. D. James gives a brief history of detective fiction in England and the U.S.A. since the time of E. A. Poe, up to the present day. It is not an in-depth study, being only just under 200 pages, and not large type-crammed pages at that, but she still covers a lot of ground very succinctly. It is a treat to listen at the feet of a master creator who has also read probably the entire oeuvre, or close to it, of all of the authors of whom she speaks. I have only read 2 of her detective novels, but this book whets my appetite to read more of them.