Thu 17 Feb 2011
P. D. JAMES – The Murder Room. Alfred A. Knopf, US, hardcover, November 2003. Vintage, US, paperback, November 2004. UK edition: Faber & Faber, hardcover, 2003.
Commander Adam Dalgliesh meets a friend who convinces him to accompany him on a visit to the Dupayne Museum. This is a small place, seldom visited except by scholars, dedicated to the History of England between the two World Wars, and one of its rooms is devoted to famous murders between 1919 and 1938.
A week later Dalgliesh will be back when Dr. Neville Dupayne is burned to death in his car in the museum’s garage — a murder similar to one committed by Alfred Rouse in 1936.
Dr. Dupayne, his brother Sir Marcus, and their sister Caroline were the three trustees for the museum founded by their father. All three must agree on a lease renewal if the museum is to remain open. Neville had refused to do so and unless he changed his mind, or died, the museum would close. His siblings and the people who work there are thus supplied with motives for murder.
Normally, Dalgliesh and his unit would not be called in on this case but James Calder-Hale, the museum’s unpaid curator, happens to be a consultant to MI5, who are eager to having the case cleared up without that fact becoming known. Then, some days later, the body of a young woman is found in a trunk in the murder room — representing the murder of Violet McKee in the 1930’s who was also found in a trunk.
Basically, for all its 415 pages, this is a mystery novel Agatha Christie might have written if you exclude the sexcapade factor introduced towards the end, though Christie would have managed it in 200 fewer pages — not that the extra 200 pages aren’t well written and greatly enhance the character development, but they are essentially extraneous when it comes to the mystery element, which I figured out almost from the time the first murder was committed.
February 17th, 2011 at 5:11 pm
I’ve not read anything by P. D. James in many years. She’s always seemed too dry and aloof for my tastes, but maybe that’s what I remember and not what’s actually true about her work.
But in comparing her to Agatha Christie, one thing I know is true is that I could never ever figure out one of Christie’s, especially only after the first murder was committed!
February 18th, 2011 at 2:34 am
I liked James very well through the middle period of Dalgliesh’s career, but along about DEVICES AND DESIRES I began to drift away, and haven’t really drifted back.
No one does the institutional murder story better than James, but that said I’m not a huge fan of the institutional murder setting.
Still, we have to celebrate that she is still around and writing — at what, 90 something? I don’t recall any complaints that her powers have fallen off — or not noticably anyway.
Perhaps one day I’ll drift back into Dalgliesh’s orbit.
February 18th, 2011 at 3:25 pm
James still has an amazingly keen brain at ninety (91 this year) and what she says is always interesting, but since she abandoned ingenuity in her plotting (in favor of what she calls credibility) and pretty much had her say as a “serious novelist” some time ago, I just feel like she’s been on auto pilot for years.
Her books are much longer than you would need to explore a puzzle problem, so what we get instead are these long character and setting descriptions. These are well-written, but they don’t live, at least for me.
The situations are always so similar. Murder Room is a good example. There’s the usual fight over an old building (the museum, set in a Georgian house, Georgian being James’ favorite period of architecture, its being so redolent of the “order” she loves–for other examples, see Original Sin, Death in Holy Orders, The Lighthouse). There’s the usual highly articulate (even pedantic), unhappy upper middle class professionals. There’s the token working class person (I think in this one it was a caretaker named Tallulah). There’s Dalgleish and there’s Kate, both still unattached, though Dalgleish is involved in his not very interesting romance with the brilliant Emma (the male assistants do change).
James now values “credibilty” over ingenuity, which means the mystery is not that memorable. The interesting idea of a murder replicating a historical slaying commemorated in a crime museum is not carried out well, probably because of the clash of the credibility and ingenuity drives.
I suspect a lot of readers enjoy James still (this book has 94 reviews on amazon, 72 of which are four or five stars) because she gives them some of the satisfactions of reading a well-written novel, with a formal mystery problem thrown into the mix. But she doesn’t really say anything new or interesting as a novelist and the problem doesn’t really engage. So one is left with a quite long, not very compelling book.