The Private Patient
by P.D. James
Knopf, 368 pp., $25.95
An editorial in the Times (London), written to mark the publication of P.D. James’s latest novel, The Private Patient, praised Lady James as “a perceptive chronicler of the changing landscape of London.” It is true that she brings her traditional values to bear on some of the problems that blight modern society. But I’m not sure James’s chronicling of modern Britain should be the first thing about her novels to celebrate.
Rather, they tend to have the elegant settings of quaint English villages or, as in this one, a luxurious Elizabethan manor house in Dorset. Even when the plot takes the characters to London, it tends to be done, fleetingly, in the quiet of a Sunday morning; either that or they are having lunch at The Ivy, the famous and fashionable restaurant. These settings all add to the sense of comfort which is a hallmark of P.D. James.
Perhaps the most loved aspect of James’s books, however, is not the fact that they are good, old-fashioned, classic crime novels, but that she writes with an eloquence that transcends the genre and lifts it to a level where the word “literature” can legitimately be used. Like many genre writers, James is determined to escape from the confines of crime fiction, and to bring more depth to her characters and literary flourishes to her prose. For it is the quality of the prose that keeps you coming back for more, even when the plot, artificially concocted as most detective fiction is, does not quite reach the same height.
This is true of The Private Patient. Commander Adam Dalgliesh–that much loved poet-detective of Scotland Yard–investigates a murder in the exclusive surroundings of Cheverell Manor. Having been partly converted into a plastic surgery clinic, the manor is renowned for its seclusion and, of course, attracts a high calibre of patients. The murder is of a distinguished investigative journalist, Rhoda Gradwyn, who is a very private person. (Even her own mother seems indifferent to her death: “You don’t expect it to happen to someone you know,” she says, expressing a lack of closeness.)
Gradwyn becomes a patient at the clinic in order to have a horrible facial scar removed. The scar was caused by her drunken father, and while she has lived with it for 34 years, she now “no longer has need of it”–a point the reader is repeatedly reminded about. From the opening sentence, we know it is a decision “which would lead inexorably to her death.”
This was obviously meant to create an ominous sense of foreboding. But it doesn’t; it just tells us who is going to die, which we already knew from the blurb. And so we wait patiently for the patient to die–or at least we try to wait patiently (if I’m being honest, I was thinking: “get on with it”). We know the death is coming, and when it finally comes, after almost 90 pages and much, maybe too much, characterization of Gradwyn as a withdrawn enigma, it comes as a relief. We eventually begin to lose ourselves.
After Dalgliesh has gathered the closed pool of possible suspects for questioning in the Clue-like library, it soon becomes clear that several of them have strong motives to want Gradwyn dead. All the classic techniques are in place, and James does not disappoint. Indeed, in a nod towards the classic crime writing of the 1950s, James pays homage to Cyril Hare’s Untimely Death throughout. Also intertwined with the investigation is a myth behind the Cheverell Stones in the grounds of the manor. In 1654, so the myth goes, a woman was tied to the tallest stone and burnt as a witch, thus adding to the mystery.
But most interesting is Dalgliesh himself, a character that James’s fans will by now know quite well, but that nevertheless manages to intrigue. He has been around for some time (this is his 14th outing since James’s first novel in 1962, Cover Her Face) and normally a detective of his rank would not be doing the sort of work he does here. But Lady James daintily maneuvers around this problem by placing him in a special, elite squad. In this book the squad is called in by No. 10 Downing Street to investigate the murder. Dalgliesh only tackles the most sensitive and important crimes, naturally–though quite what is so sensitive and important about this particular murder is not especially clear.
James has given Dalgliesh all the qualities she admires: intelligence, compassion, but not sentimentality. So when his fiancée, Emma Lavenham, intrudes on his investigation to ask him to help a friend who was the victim of a rape, he does not hesitate before saying no. For him the job always comes first. It would, however, be wrong to mistake this for coldness; Dalgliesh’s compassion is always evident.
“I am speaking to Adam Dalgliesh the poet,” somebody tells him, “not Adam Dalgliesh the detective.” In fact, the two sides are inseparable.
Pirouetting through her prose, James often indulges in thoughtful meditations on the nature of things. Sometimes she pulls these digressions off; other times not. “Perhaps it’s arrogant,” Dalgliesh ponders after uncovering the murderer, “this need to know the truth.” Later he decides that what is arrogant is thinking we can both know the truth and understand it, “particularly the truth about human motives, the mysterious working of another’s mind.”
It may not be a particularly profound observation, but it does lend weight to the claim often made about James’s books: That they are not only whodunits, but also whydunits.
Phyllis Dorothy James–otherwise known as the mistress of mystery or the queen of crime or, since 1991, Baroness James of Holland Park–wrote in her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest, that all autobiography is fiction, and that all fiction is autobiography. Of course, with crime fiction, this idea can only be taken so far. That said, during the writing of The Private Patient, James, who is in her 88th year, was herself hospitalized by a heart failure and yet continued–through what she describes as a “happy period”–to write a book which her fans will love.
Although, like Gradwyn, James ended up in a private room, it is with Dalgliesh that she is most closely akin, and it is his attention to detail, his intelligence, and his compassion that flow from every page.
James Grant is a writer in Glasgow.