About a month ago I read PD James's most recent novel, Death Comes to Pemberley, and was a little bit lukewarm about it. And now here we have PD James's very first novel, which I picked up recently in a charity shop. Amazingly enough it was published in 1962, which is exactly 50 years ago. Equally amazing is the fact that, having been born in 1920, Baroness James was 42 years old before her remarkably successful career got off the ground. Inspiring or what?
Actually I have to admit I was a little bit lukewarm about this one too. It's quite a conventional story in the sense that it takes place in a medieval manor house and has a limited selection of suspects, most of them family members. The house belongs to the well-to-do Maxie family, parents and two adult children, Stephen and Deborah. This being the 1960s, there are also servants -- an elderly housekeeper and a young woman, Sally Jupp, who is an umarried mother with a baby son. Sally has come to the house from the nearby 'Refuge for Girls', whence she has been sent when her pregnancy became known. She is an attractive though not very likeable young woman, and the whole household is shocked when she announces to the assembled company at a dinner party that she has been proposed to by Stephen Maxie. Shortly afterwards she is found strangled in her bed. Who did it? Everyone seems to have some kind of motive, but it is up to the detective, none other than Adam Dalgleish, to weave his way through the thickets of deception and reveal the truth. Of course there are plenty of red herrings, but no massive surprises here, and in fact the final denouement seemed a little weak to me.
I've read quite a number of PD James's later novels and enjoyed them a good deal. This one seemed very much like an apprentice piece to me -- conventional in plot and also in structure, with Dalgleish calling the whole cast of characters together in the final chapter and going through them one at a time till he reached the real perpetrator -- all very Poirot-esque. I suppose you've got to begin somewhere and this is by no means a bad start, just not the most exciting one. At least it knocks 1962 off my Century of Books!
