Hot chocolate and a winter mystery

P D James was considered the natural heir to Christie — her work was a continuation of the great tradition of English crime fiction of the 20th century.

The mercury is dipping and there’s a chill in the air; so for book lovers, it’s time to bring out the cosy sweaters and woollen socks while reading a good mystery book. A hot beverage on the side is, of course, a given.

There are the trusted go-tos for winter mysteries — a Hercule Poirot story involving a Christmas pudding is a perennial favourite. But if you like your mysteries with a little more of the real world and bit more darkness than an Agatha Christie could offer, may I suggest going for P D James’ Cover Her Face?

P D James was considered the natural heir to Christie — though from a younger generation than the original Queen of Crime, her work was a continuation of the great tradition of English crime fiction of the 20th century. While Cover Her Face, her first book published in 1962, was very much in the vein of the stories that flourished in England during the golden age of detective fiction with its focus on an upper class family and their emotional entanglements, subsequent books were set in vastly different environments.

A country house murder

Her star detective was Adam Dalgliesh, a poetry loving Scotland Yard inspector (and as the series progresses, commander), introduced for the first time in Cover Her Face.

As a character, Dalgliesh is quiet, observant and dignified — a more cerebral detective than an action hero. The cerebral nature of her detective definitely shaped the prose that James produced — her work was considered more literary than other works published in the genre and Kingsley Amis famously described her as Iris Murdoch with murder. Even with those literary credentials and skill, James was very much aware that what a good detective novel needs is the element of surprise so she used tropes of the genre with twists and red herrings liberally peppered through her work.

Cover Her Face is set in a country house in Essex where a servant girl is found murdered in a locked room. Dalgliesh and his colleague come to investigate and soon the family secrets are tumbling out — and since this is England, inter-class prejudice is very much part of the narrative.

Blackmail, manipulation, secret marriages and more revelations lead to more suspects coming out of the woodwork. James’ skill at building mystery and suspense were considerable enough in this first book — so much so that the unveiling of the murderer by Dalgliesh does elicit surprise even in the most ardent reader of detective fiction.

James would go on to have a long career as a mystery writer — even as she rose through the ranks of government bureaucracy, eventually retiring in 1979. She used her experience in the civil service to give an added authenticity to the stories she was writing. She was appointed an OBE in 1983 and also bestowed the title of Lady James of Holland Park, joining the House of Lords where she sat among the Conservative party peers. By the time she died in 2014 at the age of 94, she had been firmly (and deservedly) established as one of the pantheon of great English women crime writers.

The author is a Bengaluru-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.