Crime's Le Carre a Taste for Death

By J.D. Reed

Just a few decades ago, the whodunit formula demanded by both publishers and readers was compact -- and cozy: 180 pages of pure deduction and cardboard characters propped up in a long-gone rural England. Along with a handful of other contemporary crime writers including Dick Francis and Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, 66, has gracefully shattered the rules. In her best and most ambitious tale to date, A Taste for Death -- her ninth mystery novel in 24 years -- James has become a kind of Le Carre of crime, blending the calmer depths of mainstream fiction with the white rapids of the genre, to produce something quite different indeed.

Instead of an old standby, the isolated country house, the setting is a complex, violent and very real London of the '80s. A junior Cabinet Minister is found with his throat slashed in the dingy vestry behind the altar of St. Matthew's Anglican Church in the Paddington section of the city. Across the room, a derelict lies dead, killed in the same grisly manner. In charge of the investigation: the sleuth-protagonist of six previous James novels, brooding Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgliesh, a widowed intellectual who loves baroque music. As he did in such previous cases as The Black Tower and Shroud for a Nightingale, Dalgliesh focuses on himself as much as on the murders; deduction is a voyage of self-discovery. He thinks of himself as the "poet who no longer writes poetry. The lover who substitutes technique for commitment. The policeman disillusioned with policing."

James, however, never lets character overwhelm crime. Dalgliesh and his Scotland Yard colleagues track the killer through the corridors of Whitehall, the hospital of a fashionable abortionist, a painfully trendy suburban restaurant. Among the suspects: the dead politician's vapid second wife, pregnant with his child even though she has had a lover for years; her con-man brother, who has moved into the politician's room; the victim's conniving mother, who mourns the loss of prewar manners more than the loss of her son. The politician himself is a mystery. Why, Dalgliesh wonders, did he suddenly resign his government post, experience a religious conversion during which, it is suggested, stigmata appeared on his body, and come to be killed in a shabby church room?

The tale goes as well with Reeboks and condominiums as Agatha Christie's puzzlers did with spats and country homes. In the '80s, not only the dead are ) victims: "Was this what murder did to the innocent?" wonders a bystander. "Took away the people they loved, loaded their minds with terror, left them bereft and unfriended under a smouldering sky." Dalgliesh's assistant, Inspector Kate Miskin, provides a counterpoint to the Tory values exemplified by most of the characters on both sides of the law. Miskin has risen from a council-flat childhood to an imitation of chic affluence. A visitor to her sterile, modern apartment notes it is in "dull, orthodox, ghastly, conventional good taste." Like a Renaissance painter, James mischievously slips in a small, sharp portrait of herself as a "buxom grandmother, noted for her detective stories, who gazed mournfully at the camera as if deploring either the bloodiness of her craft or the size of her advance."