P D James: With benefit of hindsight

Beyond the age of 80, P D James observes, "one can't pretend one's young any more". The veteran crime writer will be 83 when her latest book The Murder Room (Faber, 3rd July, £17.99, 0571218210) is published, yet there is no sign of her work losing any of its vigour. Death in Holy Orders, published in 2001, was acclaimed by the critics and has sold a million copies across all editions, according to her publisher; and there is a feeling within the trade that The Murder Room--set in a private museum on the edge of Hampstead Heath--can repeat that success.

At her home in Holland Park, west London, P D James--Baroness James, since she was created a life peer in 1991--reflects on her longevity as a writer: "I think really it is a question of experience versus energy. Obviously there isn't the same creative energy at 82 as there is at 28, there can't be. But against that are all these years of experience in structuring and writing a book, and I suppose there is the length and experience of life and of living, more people met and encountered. And still the ideas seem to come."

James never starts a book until she is "really possessed by an idea which excites me". For The Murder Room, it was the thought of a London setting, and of a private museum dedicated to the interwar years. The Dupayne Museum contains one room dedicated specifically to murders committed during this period--"the idea being that murder is in a sense a symbol of its age".

Of course the museum becomes itself a site for a new murder in the novel, in a plot involving three warring siblings who are the museum's trustees. James' poet detective Commander Adam Dalgliesh is brought in to investigate; his personal life is also at an interesting stage in this book, as he is on the point of proposing to Emma Lavenham, the Cambridge lecturer he met in Death in Holy Orders.

James says that this idea of murder as a symbol of its age is "debatable", although a case can be made--she points to the example of Victorian women who soaked flypapers to obtain arsenic to rid themselves of unpleasant husbands they were unable to divorce. But fictional murder is, of course, a world of its own.

"Real life murder is often not very interesting and it may be forensically quite simple to solve. Most murders are not particularly ingenious, they are a stabbing or a bashing. One is interested really in the motives which impel a very often law-abiding, educated, quite privileged person to step over that line--in other words, somebody for whom there can be no excuse. Why? It is in the psychology that the interest comes."

Nevertheless, James stands in the tradition of the classic detective story writers such as Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh in using the genre to present a portrait of the society of her time. The Murder Room has a definite contemporary edge, without being modish; there is a broad social spread of characters, with the well-heeled Dupayne family on the one hand, and the young drifter Ryan or the financially insecure housekeeper Tally Clutton on the other. Dalgliesh may be a patrician type, but his police colleague, Kate Miskin, has carved out her successful career as a way to escape a background growing up without an education on a deprived council estate.

"I do like gutsy women who have managed to do that," remarks James. "I don't want to write about one little privileged group of people, I want my books to be in the real world, and in the working world. I'm interested in how the characters live, where they get their money from."

A particular richness of her novels comes from the depth of back story which she affords even her minor characters. "I like to give the subordinate characters a life of their own beyond the pages. For example, in A Taste for Death, a car was found outside the church door at a time relevant to the murder. It would have been perfectly possible in the novel to have a young couple walking along the towpath and noticing this rather smart car outside the church, and just to have one person say to another 'I've had a telephone call from someone who says they saw the car.'

"But instead of that, you really enter the couple's minds: they were on the towpath, they were lovers, the girl was from a very morally rigid family, she was supposed to be at evening classes and she was with her boyfriend. If they go to the police this would come out, and the boy realises he would be under pressure to marry her, which she is desperate for and he isn't. I think he says, 'When they find the murderer he'll be in prison for 10 years, but if I go to the police and am forced to marry her, I'll get a life sentence.' You suddenly realise they've got a life quite apart from the main plot, it's almost a novel in its own."

Entering the characters' consciousness in this way also means entering the mind of the murderer. "I want to enter the murderer's mind, I absolutely do," James cries. "It isn't different emotionally from creating any of the characters. When I speak in the voice of the character, I am that character, so when I speak as the murderer I feel like the murderer, I feel his compulsions.

"I don't know that I feel sympathy with him--I don't feel sympathy for the deed, because I believe murder is an appalling crime for which one can never make reparation--but certainly I feel some empathy. You want the reader to think, 'Yes, given that character, given that temptation, given that background, given that childhood maybe, I can see why he did it.'"

And what of Dalgliesh, who has finally in this new novel been brought to the brink of personal happiness after long years of solitude? "Well obviously in the last book he fell in love, or was just beginning to fall in love, and I had to bring that either to fruition, or deal with it," James says.

"Here we have a man who for years has been extremely private and who has had rather a splinter of ice in his heart, dedicating himself to his poetry and his job, now accepting commitment to another human being with all the problems that may raise in his life.

"If you have a job which keeps your own life inviolate but enables you at the same time to interfere in the lives of others, if you are a watcher and a spectator but don't get involved closely with other human beings, you are in danger--as one of my characters said in the last book--in danger of losing your soul."

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