P.D. James is one of the best stylists around of that genre which is usually referred to as "crime", but which doesn't do justice as a broad description of her work. For a start, there's death, but very little violence in her books: a gore fest they are not. James is far more subtle than that: a kind of Alfred Hitchcock of crime writing, focused almost exclusively on creating suspense, a complex plot, and a beguiling picture of the psychology of her characters.
Readers of crime or mystery like returning to a familiar anchor character: in P.D. James's books, it is Commander Adam Dalgliesh, the detective about whom we learn a little bit more in each book. Dalgliesh is a solitary soul whose business is solving suspicious deaths and who is also a respected poet; a character both mysterious and solidly reassuring, who shines through the pages like a light the reader keeps following.
Death In Holy Orders, like several of James's books, is set in East Anglia. She is superb at evoking the atmosphere of a landscape, which always becomes as potent as a character. The isolated, seawashed, wind-soughed territory of Ballard's Mere, with its flat land ending at cliffs, is the setting for St Anselm's Theological College. One of its students, Ronald Treeve, has been found dead on a nearby beach. Accidental death, suicide, or murder?
Dalgliesh, who spent time in the area as a boy, is called in to make unofficial investigations at the exclusive college. The future of the college itself is unsure: church authorities elsewhere feel there are too few students and too many privileges during training. But it's not just the future of students and priests which is in question: what will happen to the college's priceless painting, which was left to them on condition it always hangs over the altar in the college church?
Dalgliesh's arrival for a weekend visit disturbs the privacy of the priests and those who work on the estate. He is not the only weekend guest, but unlike one of his fellow guests, he will leave St Anselm's alive. James is so good at pacing her novels, and allowing readers to know a bit more than her protagonists, that the reader feels like an invisible spectator, irresistibly drawn into the unfolding of the action.
Death In Holy Orders is a page-turner, in that you have to keep on reading (I belted through it in a day) but it is also so well-written that you linger over James's beautifully-observed descriptions of characters or scenes. The denouement of the plot is not a means to an end; the means of arriving there are at least as interesting and compelling as the end result.
And for those readers who are familiar with Commander Adam Dalgliesh, the man who is so good at subverting his own emotions, and who almost always appears alone, well, there's a quiet surprise in store in this book. He may well have published a book of love poems by the time we next read about him. More, please, P.D. James.
Rosita Boland is an Irish Times journalist
