Baroness James is normally a model of courtesy—at one point in the interview she expressed regret age would prevent her usual “enjoyable” visit to Canada—but mention of Wallander brings out her more waspish side. She deplores “the modern tendency to stereotype senior detectives as solitary, divorced, hard-drinking, psychologically flawed and disillusioned. And they all have trouble with their children! If someone created a happily married detective who enjoys his work and spends his free hours playing the cello, I doubt readers would find him credible, but he would certainly be an original.” (Bursts of sentimentality from Dorothy Sayers’s hero Lord Peter Wimsey invoke the same reaction, much as James admires Sayers: when Wimsey is reduced to tears on the execution day of a murderer he was instrumental in convicting, James writes that “some readers”—i.e., P.D. James—“may feel he should have confined himself to collecting first editions” if he found the results of his work so troubling.)
James is also a huge fan of Ian Rankin, creator of Edinburgh Detective Inspector John Rebus, for much the same quality she admires in Sansom. “You get a much better idea of what it means to be a police officer in Edinburgh, and of Edinburgh itself, from a Rebus story than from any official report,” says James, who has read (and written) more than a few bureaucratic memoranda in her life.
Admirable too is Rankin’s “temerity” in allowing Rebus to retire, a boldness not shared by most detective serial writers. Most tend to leave their creations fixed near the age first assigned to them. That includes James: Dalgliesh, a senior detective in 1962, must be almost as old as his creator herself, but he remains as subtle, ingenious and energetic as she does. Far from taking it easy in the nursing home, Dalgliesh actually got married in 2008 after his last case, The Private Patient. Still, James notes shrewdly, Rankin did not follow in the irrevocable footsteps of Nicolas Freeling, who killed off his creation, Dutch detective Piet van der Valk. “Rebus could come back, he’s only retired.”
One reason James admires masters of setting is that, for all her skill in characterization and plot, an acute sense of place may be her finest gift too. It’s certainly the trigger that launches all her novels. “I have a very strong response to what I feel is the spirit of a place,” she says. “When I come upon the right setting I feel immediately, ‘This is where it all happened.’ ” In Talking About Detective Fiction she describes how she stood on a deserted shingle beach in East Anglia, listening to the wind and sea, and thinking it would have looked and felt much the same centuries ago. Then, “turning my eyes to the south, I saw the great outline of Sizewell nuclear power station and immediately I knew that I had found the setting for my next novel,” 1988’s Devices and Desires. That kind of setting, a place of claustrophobic isolation where jealousy and rivalry among characters eventually boils over—is standard in James’s work, and includes a theological college (Death in Holy Orders), an exclusive plastic surgery clinic (The Private Patient), and a forensics lab (Death of an Expert Witness).
James, among the most novelistic practitioners ever of her craft, feels no particular need to defend its value. The claim that detective fiction’s formulaic requirements—for a mystery, a circle of suspects, a solution—prevent it from real literary achievement makes her laugh. It equates, in her opinion, to saying a sonnet’s technical demands mean Shakespeare’s poetry, by definition, cannot be art. “And how many writers continue to find those restrictions actually liberating?” she asks in reference to the great flood of worldwide crime writing she sees today. The detective story classically restores order from chaos, setting things right again, or as right as they can be in the wake of murder, a “unique” crime that damages everyone it touches.
That’s why detective fiction is popular, James argues, and why its popularity and production are increasing in an era when most Britons “feel more threatened by crime and disorder than at any other time I remember in my long life.” If, as seems likely to James, “detective fiction flourishes best in the most difficult of times,” as it did in the grim years between the wars, when people want to feel that, however intractable our problems, human ingenuity and courage can solve them, “we may well be at the beginning of a new golden age.”
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