NONFICTION REVIEW: P.D. James' Talking About Detective Fiction

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NONFICTION REVIEW: P.D. James' Talking About Detective Fiction

POSTED: Thursday, December 3, 2009, 5:15 PM

Filed Under: Arts Books

Knopf, 208 pp., $22, Dec. 1

William Godwin used one to promote anarchism by showing the treachery of social institutions. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett used theirs to chronicle the political and social convulsions shaking American society in the 1920s. Dorothy Sayers used hers to escape her meager circumstances for the elegant opulence of Sir Peter Wimsey. E.C. Bentley used one to satirize an entire genre.

The weapon? The detective novel. The motives? As various as the culprits. The victims? Anyone who's ever lain sleepless into the remote hours of the night, gripping and feverishly flipping the pages of a battered paperback, consumed with the desire to know who, in fact, dunit.

Anatomizing and contextualizing these addictive stories is the project of popular British author P.D. James in her new book, Talking About Detective Fiction. Each chapter explores some topic within the genre, such as the interwar 'Golden Age' of detective fiction or the origins of the solitary, brilliant detective character. James is a flexible writer, adept at holding her readers' interest, and intersperses careful research with more philosophical conjectures about detective fiction.

After discussing ' and rejecting ' the criticism that detective novels are popular because they uphold class distinctions, for instance, James investigates why the novels do hold such appeal. She cites W.H. Auden's observation that the genre is most popular in predominantly Protestant societies, whose citizens do not routinely seek divine absolution for their sins. Perhaps, she concludes, such readers enjoy detective fiction because it confirms their hunch that 'we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means.'

Of course, traditional British detective novels rely on this premise from the outset. The crimes in those novels, James explains, are not merely breaches of law; they upset the very order of things in the communities where they occur. For this reason, 'the single body on the drawing-room floor can be more horrific than a dozen bullet-ridden bodies down Raymond Chandler's mean [American] streets' ' the latter deaths are part of the scenery, while the former is 'shockingly out of place.'

Elements of real-world turmoil and trauma may rarely take center stage, but they do feature in the works of most authors of detective fiction. Dorothy Sayers, for example, alluded in her novel Unnatural Death to the vast numbers of British women fired from their work after World War II ended and the men came home. Real suffering is also present, albeit more obliquely, in the works of detective fiction writers who came from disturbed backgrounds: 'Such pain in childhood is never forgotten and seldom forgiven.' James herself, she hints, is one such writer.

But just how meaningfully can a humble detective novel record the human experience? This is the question that has vexed James's literary kin more, perhaps, than any other. Sayers flatly disavowed the genre's ability to achieve literary greatness in this regard, writing that 'it rarely touches the heights and depths of human passion.' Sayers' French contemporary, R'gis Messac, disagreed: 'A good detective story possesses certain qualities of harmony, internal organization and balance, which respond to certain needs of the spirit, needs which some modern literature, priding itself on being superior, very often neglects.'

James does not opine on the ultimate literary worth of detective fiction. Wisely, she confines her speculation to the demand for the genre, rather than the quality of the supply, and predicts that the market for detective fiction can only increase. Readers have long fled less structured, more frightening criminal realities for these seductive fictions, James points out. And the realities don't seem to be getting any more comfortable.

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