Sunday Times 2
Queen of crime fiction
The acclaimed crime novelist PD James has died at the age of 94. James, who became Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991, is the author of 20 detective novels and creator of popular Adam Dalgliesh series.
She is survived by her two children, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Her most famous works are the Adam Dalgliesh series, immortalised by actor Roy Marsden in film and television.
The actor today said her death was a ‘great loss’.
‘It is with great sadness that the family of author P D James, Baroness James of Holland Park OBE, FRSL, FRSA, announce that she died peacefully at her home in Oxford on the morning of 27 November 2014, aged 94, a much-loved mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.
‘The family have requested privacy at this time,’ a spokesman for the novelist said this morning.
Baroness James is the author of 20 successful detective books and also spent 30 years working in departments of the British Civil Service (AFP)
Since publishing her first novel at the age of 42, Baroness James has become known as one of the country’s finest crime writers.
The author, born Phyllis Dorothy James in Oxford in 1920, always showed a keen interest in literature, inventing fictional characters for her younger siblings when they were children.
Besieged by austerity and put in charge of her two siblings at the age of 14, she was forced to abandon her dreams of writing for a job at the theatre.
A career in the NHS, and in various departments of the British Civil Service followed, providing the writer with a vast understanding of such environments which would become commonplace in her later crime series.
She did not publish her first novel until the age of 42 after months of secrecy, her only confidante being her husband who, at the time, was being treated in a psychiatric hospital.
A doctor in the war, he returned in poor mental health and died some years later.
Describing herself in interviews as a ‘late starter’, Baroness James was quickly rewarded for her literary talents.
The Adam Dalgliesh novels, starting with Cover Her Face, were adapted by ITV in 1983 in a 10-part series starring Roy Marsden.
In 2003 the BBC took over to adapt two more starring Martin Shaw.
Her 1992 novel Children of Men was made into a film by Alfonso Cuarón in 2006.
Five years later, the then 91-year-old reproduced Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to critical acclaim.
Her other fictional work, The Children of Men, also received praise.
Among her many accolades is the International Crime Writing Hall of Fame 2008 and the Grand Master Award from Mystery Writers of America, 1999.
In her role as Governor of the BBC, Ms James challenged the then-director general of the BBC while guest-editing the Today programme in 2009.
She urged that the salaries of BBC executives become public knowledge, which they now are.
While Baroness James spoke of her lack of sentimentality in fiction, she enjoyed a strong connection to the Church and its values in reality.
Speaking at St Paul’s Cathedral in May last year, she told the congregation: ‘Even our religious duties must come secondary to meeting the need of another human being.
‘When we see that need we should meet it and not have excuses.’
Roy Marsden, who gleaned his most prolific role as Baroness James’s Adam Dalgliesh, led tributes to the writer today.
‘She was a gentle, slightly coquettish, but gentle woman. She was great, it’s a great loss,’ Mr Marsden, 73, told MailOnline this afternoon. ‘
‘She used to write, better than anything else I’ve read in my life, a description of place. She’d have made the greatest travel writer if she turned her pen to it. She could evoke the most extraordinary places, when you read her books it was that that you were drawn to, and out of that were these extraordinary characters.’
Speaking of his time working with Baroness James, he added:
‘It was a wonderful period and a very good period of television, when it was in a powerful and strong place, we were making a lot of good dramas.
‘I always associate her (stories) with a very happy, creative period in my life.
‘It’s always been good, I’m very lucky.’
Her publishers Faber & Faber said: ‘This is a very sad day for us at Faber.
‘It is difficult to express our profound sadness at losing PD James, one of the world’s great writers and a Faber author since her first publication in 1962.
© Daily Mail, London
| ‘HE IS A MALE VERSION OF ME, BRAINIER THAN ME, BUT HIS EMOTIONS ARE MINE’:PD JAMES AND HER BELOVED PROTAGONIST ADAM DALGLIESH PD James became known as the queen of crime fiction for her portrayal of the life of the fictional New Scotland Yard detective, Adam Dalgliesh. The protagonist of 14 of her mystery detective novels, Dalgliesh first appeared in the 1962 work Cover Her Face. ‘He is a male version of me, brainier than me, but his emotions are mine. ‘The empathy is mental rather than physical. I never describe Dalgliesh getting up and getting dressed. ‘I’m very unsentimental. Very,’ she told the Daily Telegraph. Of the series which brought her critical acclaim, the novelist prescribed her sort of murderous fiction for ‘middle class’ readers. Today the actor, now 73, paid tribute to the woman who gave him his most prolific television role. ‘It was a wonderful period and a very good period of television, when it was in a powerful and strong place, we were making a lot of good dramas. ‘I always associate her (stories) with a very happy, creative period in my life.’
‘IT OUGHT TO BE A PRIVILEGE TO WORK FOR THIS ORGANISATION’: PD JAMES SLAMS BBC FOR ITS ‘EXTROARDINARY’ SALARIES In 2009, Baroness James sat down with the then Director-General of the BBC to discuss the corporation’s structure and what she viewed as the inflated salaries of ‘middle management’ roles. Transcribed below are sections of the interview which has been made available again today by the BBC following the news of her death. ‘And to me, sometimes, it does seem like a very large and unwieldy ship which has been floating there since 1920, taking on more and more and more cargo, building more decks to accommodate it, recruiting more officers, all very comfortably cabined usually on salaries far greater than their predecessors enjoyed, and with a crew somewhat discontented and somewhat mutinouus. ‘The customers feeling they paid too much for the journey and are not quite sure where they’re going or indeed who is the captain, and that may be a little unfair but its basically how a lot of people might see the BBC as being, basically, very unwieldy, and very bureaucratic and less clear about what it should be doing. ‘Nobody is asking you to promise not to make mistakes. But something that is of immense concern to many people is the salary structure, if indeed there is a structure and the extraordinarily large salaries that are paid. It seems to be a huge great waste of middle management of bureacracy which is very difficult to justify, it really is extraordinary. ‘We’re asking what exactly these people are doing? The private sector is in a desperate situation, people are losing their jobs. People are unable to get jobs who come out of university well qualified. Any sort of public body is really so protected against all these pressures. ‘I like to think they are doing a job which they see as a public service, which indeed it is, and I don’t think you can always have it two ways, |