On August 3, 1920, P. D. James was born. James was an English writer of crime novels, whose series of novels about London police detective Adam Dalgleish spanned nearly fifty years.
James’s formal education ended when she was sixteen. Even if her family had been able to afford college, her father didn’t believe in higher education for women.
She married an army doctor in 1941. When he returned from his service in World War II with emotional trauma, he spent time in a psychiatric institution, and James had to support herself and their two daughters. She studied hospital administration and worked for almost twenty years in a London hospital. After her husband’s death in 1964, James transitioned to work as a civil servant in British government. Those experiences gave her great familiarity with a variety of British bureaucracies, and many of her novels take place in such settings.
James began writing in the mid-1950s, and published her first novel, Cover Her Face, in 1962. It was the first of fourteen novels to feature Detective Chief Inspector (later Commander) Adam Dalgleish. Dalgleish is an unusual policeman, an intellectual who has published several volumes of poetry, which his fellow officers delight in teasing him about. James gave her character the name Dalgleish after a favorite high school teacher. It was years later when she learned that the father of her Miss Dalgleish had, coincidentally, been named Adam.
James introduced another important character in the 1972 novel An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Cordelia Gray was one of the earliest female private investigators. She was the central character of only two novels,The Skull Beneath the Skin is the other, but was strongly influential on a generation of female private eyes.
An Unsuitable Job was one of three James novels to be nominated for the Edgar Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America to the year’s best crime novel. The Dalgleish novels Shroud for a Nightingale and A Taste for Death were also nominated. In 1987, the Crime Writers Association, the English equivalent of the MWA, awarded James the Diamond Dagger award for lifetime achievement.
James’s stand-along novels include The Children of Men, a dystopian novel about humanity on the brink of extinction after an epidemic of mass infertility; and Death Comes to Pemberley, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth and Darcy must solve a murder. She also wrote a memoir, Time to Be in Earnest; and an essay collection, Talking About Detective Fiction.
More of James’s books are available at Overdrive.
Also This Week
August 5, 1735
John Peter Zenger was acquitted on charges of libel in the courts of colonial New York. Zenger was the publisher of The New York Weekly Journal, in which he frequently objected to the actions of colonial governor William Cosby. Zenger and his lawyer argued that his statements could not be libelous because they were true, and the jury agreed. It would be another seventy years before the principle that truth was a defense to charges of libel was firmly established in American law, but Zenger’s case was an important precedent. Richard Kluger tells the story of Zenger’s trial in Indelible Ink.
August 6, 1910
Charles Crichton was born. Crichton was an English film director who worked primarily at Ealing Studios, where he directed popular comedies in the 1940s and 1950s. Among the best of his Ealing films is 1951’s The Lavender Hill Mob, a crime caper starring Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway. Crichton left the movie business in the mid-1960s for television and corporate videos, making a triumphant return to theaters in 1988 as co-writer and director of A Fish Called Wanda.
August 7, 1974
High-wire artist Philippe Petit performed for 45 minutes, crossing eight times between the towers of the World Trade Center, 1,300 feet above the ground. The towers were still under construction when Petit made his unauthorized performance. New York prosecutors dropped all charges of trespassing in exchange for Petit agreeing to give a free performance for children in Central Park. Petit writes about aspects of his art in the books Creativity: The Perfect Crime and Why Knot (on knot-tying); the documentary Man on Wire includes footage of Petit’s performance.
August 4 is National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day
It is rare that we can date the birth of any food as precisely as we can the chocolate chip cookie. Ruth Graves Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts, chopped up a chocolate bar and added the bits to her cookie batter in 1938. Demand for the recipe spread nationwide during World War II when soldiers from Massachusetts received Toll House cookies in care packages from home and shared them with friends, who demanded that their families get the recipe and make similar cookies for them. Carolyn Wyman’s The Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book is equal parts history and cookbook, with recipes for several variations.