“Who wants to become a detective novelist and why?” wonders P. D. James (1920–2014) in her memoir Time To Be in Earnest (1999). Her responses range from the practical – “to make money” – to the moral and metaphysical. Is it, she wonders, “to impose order on terrifying chaos? To bring justice out of injustice? To give the illusion that we live in a moral and comprehensible universe?” Re-reading James’s lauded Adam Dalgliesh mysteries during this extraordinary summer of pandemic, protest and calls to “defund the police” – a reminder that bringing justice out of injustice is not necessarily what law enforcement does best – I found myself frequently wondering the same: what specific “illusion” do these novels offer?
A historian of the genre as well as a practitioner (she surveyed the field in Talking About Detective Fiction, 2009), James was well aware that its defining elements – a crime and its investigation – do not determine the answer to these questions. Rather than constraining her imagination, she said, “the detective story’s restrictions (the necessity of a plot, a puzzle, a solution) were really a useful discipline”. “The construction of a detective story might be formulaic”, she insisted; “the writing need not be.”
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