Goodbye dear P.D. James... we will remember you forever in your intriguing and mysterious books that challenged us to guess the murderer... Rt. Hon. Phyllis Dorothy, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL (3 August 1920 – 27 November 2014), known as P. D. James, was an iconic English crime writer. She rose to fame for her series of detective novels starring policeman and poet Adam Dalgliesh. James began writing in the mid-1950s. Her first novel, Cover Her Face, featuring the investigator and poet Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, named after a teacher at Cambridge High School, was published in 1962.[6] Many of Jamess mystery novels take place against the backdrop of the UKs bureaucracies, such as the criminal justice system and the National Health Service, in which she worked for decades starting in the 1940s. Two years after the publication of Cover Her Face, Jamess husband died and she took a position as a civil servant within the criminal section of the Home Office. She worked in government service until her retirement in 1979. In 1991, she was created a life peer as Baroness James of Holland Park and sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative. Her 2001 work, Death in Holy Orders, displays her familiarity with the inner workings of church hierarchy. Her later novels were often set in a community closed in some way, such as a publishing house or barristers chambers, a theological college, an island or a private clinic. She revealed in 2011 that The Private Patient was the final Dalgliesh novel. In 2008, she was inducted into the International Crime Writing Hall of Fame at the inaugural ITV 3 Crime Thriller Awards
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 11:05:26 +0000