DD29 – Cover Her Face
Neither the reader nor the author could have imagined that a book that begins with an account of a slightly trying dinner party was to herald a series of what would eventually comprise fourteen astonishingly good detective novels. The author was P D James, the series explored murders investigated by Adam Dalgleish. They remain examples of the very best in detective story writing, and a clue to their quality is that they can be re-read more than once yet still remain deeply satisfying.
Phyllis Dorothy James was born in 1920 in Oxford but finished her formal education at the Cambridge High School for Girls. Her mother became ill, and was eventually placed in a mental hospital, and so James had to leave school at the age of sixteen to work, and to take care of her sister Monica, and brother Edward. The family didn’t have much money and anyway her father didn’t believe in higher education for girls. Her first job was working in a tax office in Ely for three years and then was employed as an assistant stage manager at the Festival Theatre in Cambridge. She married Connor White in 1941 and they had two daughters, Clare and Jane.
Life continued to be challenging, and Connor White returned from the Second World War mentally shattered and was he institutionalised. He died in 1964. With her daughters mostly cared for by Connor’s parents, James studied hospital administration, and from 1949 to 1968 worked for a hospital board in London. She began writing in the mid-1950s, using her maiden name, and her first novel, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962. While thirteen more were to appear with Dalgleish as the key character, he also has a small role in a second series of just two books, adventures centred around Cordelia Gray, a private detective. One piece of background trivia. Dalgleish’s last name comes from a teacher of English at Cambridge High School and his first name is that of the woman teacher’s father.
In deciding to comment on Cover Her Face, I face an obvious problem, which is how much should I reveal? One feature of this novel, which will be true of all the others P D James was to write, is that the murder to be investigated is quickly limited to a focus on only a small number of people: the ‘country house murder ‘model as it is sometimes described. In this case there is a large ‘country’ house, Martingale, a manor house in Chadfleet, a (fictional) village in Essex. The house is the home of Eleanor Maxie and her terminally ill husband, who, at the time of the events that follow, is bed bound and under continuous medical supervision. There are a number of others staying at the house.
Once a year, the local church, St Cedds, holds a fete, at which members of the Maxie family have traditionally taken part, including Eleanor Maxie’s son and daughter, Stephen Maxie and Deborah Riscoe. This year there’s a dinner party before the fete, with some others staying at Martingale, including Catherine Bowers, a former romantic interest of Stephen, who still hopes to marry him; Alice Liddell, the warden of a refuge; and Dr Epps, the local GP. They are assisted by a cook, Martha Bultitaft, and a maid, Sally Jupp, who was recently taken on and is living in the house with her baby. Sally is an attractive young woman and was formerly one of the girls at Alice Liddell’s centre, the St Marty’s Refuge for Girls, up until taking up her position at Martingale. The only other key character, who is absent from the dinner, is Felix Hearne, who appears to be interested in some kind of relationship with Deborah Riscoe, whose husband, Eric, had died some years before.
No one is dead, but P D James wastes no time in getting us suspicious. Sally claims to have found some tablets hidden under the mattress of old Mr Maxie’s bed, and takes them to Stephen, who works as a doctor in London. Are they being salted away for a suicide attempt, rather than being used on a daily basis to alleviate his symptoms? Martha has an almost vicious hatred of Sally, especially since her growing baby is beginning to take up Sally’s time with the result of reducing her energies in assisting Martha in the kitchen. We learn that Felix is somewhat cavalier in his attitude towards Deborah but he obviously enjoys spending time at Martingale. Like the others he will be assisting at the fete.
At the dinner the night before the fete, Sally steps out from her serving role to announce that Stephen has asked her to marry him, leaving the room in shock, but only after making some very nasty comments to Martha. When asked, Stephen admits that the offer of marriage was true. In case you haven’t got the general idea, everybody goes off to bed feeling confused, angry, or merely anxious about their role in the activities they’re expected to support or manage in the fete the next day. Just like any large family, I guess.
The next morning Martha is annoyed to find Sally is late coming down to the kitchen to help in preparing for the day. Unable to rouse her by knocking on her bedroom door, while hearing Sally’s baby crying, Stephen and Felix eventually break into her room from the outside, using a ladder to climb up to her windows. It is clear Sally has been strangled (so now we have a classic locked room mystery), and the police are called in. On the basis of high-level connections and with another case already preoccupying the county detectives, it turns out that the local police will be replaced by officers from Scotland Yard, and so we meet Adam Dalgleish accompanied by D S Martin. They arrive at Martingale in a police car, which will prove to be the last time we find Dalgleish in such a mundane vehicle. At the beginning of the series he drives a Cooper Bristol, but later he has graduated to a Jaguar. We are told he is tall, and in some of the later novels he is described as being ‘tall, dark and handsome’ (by women, I should add). However, it is his mind that enthrals us.
Rereading Cover Her Face once again, I am struck by two things. First, it is such an assured novel: how could PD James write so well from the beginning? Well, it’s not really the beginning. She had been writing for at least ten years before the novel appeared, but this was her first serious book. I am unable to find out anything more about that earlier work. To read a first novel that shows all the signs of being written by an outstanding author is all the more impressive through the lack of any published work preceding it. She was 42 years old when it appeared, and it’s an astonishingly assured and professional work. It sets a standard that was James more than met in every one of her subsequent Dalgleish stories.
Second, the choice of her key character, Adam Dalgleish, is fascinating. By the time he appears, he is already a Detective Chief Inspector. We know little else about his previous life, except when we hear about his thoughts as he is asking one of the family about their children. Almost out of the blue, and in just over two lines on page 94 we learn “I have no son. My own child and his mother died three hours after he was born. I have no son to marry anyone – suitable or unsuitable”. We later learn this was thirteen years previously. Adam’s private life remains private. We do get great insight into his thinking, however, and he comes across as very cerebral in his approach. Eventually P D James will relent a little, and in later novels we are slowly allowed into a little more of Adam Dalgleish’s world.
Well, cerebral may be a little unfair. We know he is a poet, although we aren’t able to see what that means in terms of the poetry itself. We also get glimpses of the man beneath the mask of cold analysis. Indeed, in the very last paragraph, the place where P D James likes to leave a small but fascinating ‘extra’, we read that Dalgleish’s inability to say anything of consequence to Deborah Riscoe beyond police stuff might eventually be surpassed and “when that happened the right words would be found”. James was never going to succumb to pages of insight about how Dalgleish saw the world, but, as the series grew, we begin to learn a little about the man and his hidden passions.
If that sounds like a criticism, it isn’t meant to be. P D James had a clear view of the way in which she wanted to write her novels. I’m confident she had learnt from previous leading murder mystery writers and understood the conventions. Create a situation in which there is an unusual and apparently inexplicable death – not the means of dying, of course, but rather offering no clear evidence as to who and why. Set the story in a location where the number of suspects is small enough for the reader to know and able to learn about them all, and yet do so by offering sufficient red herrings to keep you alert and uncertain to the end.
She also realised the importance of having a key character whose fancies and foibles would help garner a committed readership. For Dorothy Sayers it was Peter Wimsey; for Agatha Christie it was Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. We have to assume that James didn’t want to have the extravagance of either Wimsey or Poirot: Lord Peter Wimsey was a wonderful upper-class character, close to appearing a buffoon, with a brilliant mind behind that monocle, while Poirot was also larger than life, a fussy Belgian fop, with a mania for neatness and order, but similarly brilliant.
Unlike these two, and very far from the quiet village dwelling Miss Marple, Adam Dalgleish tends to hide his intelligence, nor is he more than mildly unusual (just those few mentions of his poetry and penchant for fast cars). However, like Wimsey and Poirot, he keeps his own counsel, often working away at discovery without offering evidence of too much drama.
What P D James offers is far more insight into how he thinks than does Sayers or Christie. We are privileged to discover how his ideas unfold, to understand the questions he asks and the tasks he assigns to various subordinates. In a sense , it is the mystery he is trying to solve that holds us, too. Once a murderer has been uncovered, Dalgleish is allowed to slip back to Scotland Yard, and the rest of his life remains largely untold. However, as I’ve already mentioned, James eventually relents, and we’ll eventually learn a little more about this patient and rather taciturn man in later murder cases.
Going back to Cover Her Face reveals one other aspect of James’ novels. This book is relatively short, just 250 pages in my paperback edition. By the time A Taste for Death was published, surely one of the more exceptional books in an outstanding series, the page count has increased. It is 469 pages long (also in the paperback edition), and it is in a smaller type. I would guess it is at least twice the length of the first book. More complex? Possibly. Certainly richer in terms of the depth in which all the characters are examined. I feel there is a greater exploration of the psychology of the key characters in this later story: if all her writing was assured , right from the start, it seems she was more willing to offer greater detail to the reader as the series progressed. Of course, such an approach also ensured we could more easily be tangled up in the possibilities of who did what to whom without too many tangential distractions!
Incidentally, A Taste for Death was the 7th book in the series of 14 novels. Some see it as her best book. It was to receive the 1986 Mystery Writers of America Best Novel Award ( as runner-up) together with the1987 CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction.
P D James died just over nine years ago, on 27 November 2014, aged 94, survived by her two daughters, five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. There were many obituaries at the time. However, one, Murder Most Intricate, stands above all the rest:
As he neared the house, down the quiet autumnal streets of Holland Park in west London, Commander Adam Dalgliesh felt a shiver of apprehension. It was the same slightly nervous curiosity he experienced when entering a country church, pushing at the heavy door to find darkness, sweet with incense, that filled nave and chancel but also held, at its heart, a mystery. That was, he knew, an analogy his creator P.D. James would relish.
Greetings exchanged, she led him to the drawing room for tea and shortbread. … He looked for the first editions of Jane Austen, her favourite author, whose work she had happily imitated in 2011 in “Death Comes to Pemberley”. But then he turned his detective’s attention to the woman herself.
She sat upright, small and spry, with no need for the stick that rested by her side. Her hands, folded in her lap, were strongly veined, almost tough. An Indian silk scarf was carefully draped around a scrawny neck. She wore a heavy pendant and a large ring, each of which appeared to be a Victorian memento mori. From beneath her silver hair she gazed at him with an expression that combined intelligence, good humour and, vitally, detachment. These were eyes that could look unflinchingly on the corrugated pipes in a slit throat, on the gooseflesh of rigor mortis and on the strangely colourful coils and pouches pulled from the human abdomen during a post mortem. She had worked, after all, for some years in the forensics department at the Home Office. Long before that, too, she had been fascinated by death, looking for drowned corpses on the way to school and wondering whether Humpty Dumpty really fell, or was pushed. She had often noticed, as Dalgliesh had, an expression of faint surprise on the faces of the dead. …
She and Dalgliesh did not disturb each other’s privacy. Since 1962, when he had first swung out of a police car in “Cover her Face”, she had never described his sex life nor quoted his poetry, an odd sideline for a detective. She had let slip, however, that he was the man she would like to have been. The poetry was part of it, for she felt crime fiction was undervalued as literature. She wrote it differently, using the confined English settings she knew but introducing, as well as bloody disruption, exact science, note-perfect backgrounds and exquisitely worked motivation. …
Their conversation passed so quickly, in a gale of shared experience and enjoyment, that Dalgliesh did not notice the darkness falling. He saw it only when his hostess, drawing on the phrases of the 1662 Prayer Book deeply stored in her head, mentioned the “perils and dangers of this night”, and briskly drew the damask curtains. The pages of his notebook were empty, save for a dusting of sugar from the shortbread. He had had no need to write anything, since they inhabited each other’s minds; and as much as she had created him he had also, perhaps, created her.
This was the Obituary published in The Economist on 29 November. Such a word perfect, intelligent way to mark the passing of a person I regard as an outstanding author.
