That very title prompted in me a little Proustian epiphany. I was abruptly transported back to the mid-Fifties when, a swotty little creep, I would stow away my completed homework, switch on what we called the wireless and tune in to the Third Programme. For readers too young to have known that august institution, a typical evening’s edification might consist of, precisely, an illustrated lecture on detective fiction (although not, of course, by P. D. James — Jacques Barzun, perhaps, or Ronald Knox), sandwiched between a performance of Christopher Fry’s The Dark is Light Enough and a concert of Schütz motets.
And nothing changed when I opened the book. There they all were, the usual suspects — or, rather, the usual detectives — Auguste Dupin, Holmes, Father Brown, Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, etc. There, too, were all the usual generic subsets: the pioneers (Poe, Conan Doyle, Chesterton); the so-called Golden Age (Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Bentley, although no John Dickson Carr); a brief, single-chapter detour paying lip-service to the American hard-boiled tradition of buddies, baddies and bodies (Hammett, Chandler and James’ own personal favourite, the now rather forgotten Ross Macdonald, although no Horace McCoy, no James M. Cain); before haring back with relief to the current team of soft-boiled English practitioners, not excluding the author herself.
Nor have style nor substance budged much in 50 years. In James’ best fireside manner we are told, for example, that ‘Some novelists like to begin either with a murder or with the discovery of the body, an exciting and shocking beginning that not only sets the mood of the novel but involves the reader immediately in drama and action.’ True, true. We learn, too, that ‘Money, particularly great wealth, is always a credible motive for murder, as is revenge and that deep-seated hatred which makes it almost impossible to tolerate the continued existence of an enemy.’
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