This is a report of a talk at Cambridge University Library on P D James – which included fascinating recordings of interviews with the late P D James for BBC Radio Cambridgeshire – which curiously had not been heard before.
“I’m a crime writer, I write about death,” P D James told her interviewer Mandy Morton for a broadcast on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire.
“Even as a child, I was aware of death.” As a little girl when she was told her family were going on holiday in six months’ time, she would think to herself: “If we’re still here.”
Phyllis Dorothy James, born in 1920, was a pupil at Cambridge High School for Girls and at one point worked in the tax office in Ely.
She left school at 16. After three years in the tax office, she found a job as an assistant stage manager at the Festival Theatre in Cambridge.
Her life and work were celebrated in Cambridge this summer in an exhibition called Murder by the Book and a lecture A Mind to Murder at Cambridge University Library.
Her publisher, Faber is launching a new paperback edition of her books, and a new television series is being prepared.
For most of her long career as a top-selling author, P D James had day jobs, especially after she became a widowed mother of two young girls in the 1960s.
Working for the NHS, the police, and the Forensic Science Service –she drew on all these experiences for her plots. Employed in London, she devised her plots on the Central Line and did her writing in the mornings before work.
Having learned as a Red Cross nurse how to administer tube feeding, she knew how someone might have deadly poison administered straight into their stomach.
Her work as an administrator in the Forensic Science Service was vital for Death of an Expert Witness and the Children’s Act 1976 was the inspiration for Innocent Blood about an adopted young woman who seeking her birth parents finds they are responsible for the rape and murder of a child – and visits her mother in prison. James’s description of their first meeting is chilling.
One of Phyllis’s talents, Nicola said, was the ability to create characters that “haunted your conscience long after the book is closed.”
Cover Her Face, the first of over 20 novels, was published in 1962. The last of her famous Alan Dalgliesh novels (he was her famous detective) was The Private Patient in 2011.
She died in 2014 aged 94. As her new books came out, P D James gave interviews to Mandy Morton parts of which were broadcast on BBC Radio 2. Only fragments reached the listening public.
“I’m a crime writer, I write about death,” P D James told her interviewer Mandy Morton for a broadcast on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire.However, only tiny fractions of the interviews were ever broadcast. It is astonishing when you hear their richness, to hear Mandy say: “The BBC only wanted four minutes.”
Only fragments went out to the listening public.
That is until now. The audience at Nicola Upson’s talk on the life of P D James this month (August 8) at Cambridge University Library heard fuller versions– and the entire talk, including the excerpts with P D James speaking, are now on Mixcloud.
Among P D James’s engaging descriptions of her life and times from her twenties is a lasting memory of The Second World War. She issued ration books in a Food Office based at Christ’s College in Cambridge.
One day, she was surprised to see that: “All over the lawns were lying exhausted soldiers, still in their battledress. Some of them were asleep, others were just lying there. They were part of the Expeditionary Force back from Dunkirk.”
Asked how she felt about her books being televised, James said cheerfully that this did bring readers to the books, but she said with a chuckle in her voice that sometimes.
“You think this is a familiar story, I must have read this somewhere – it’s so different from what you wrote.”
She didn’t understand she said when dialogue had been provided, why couldn’t be used instead of the screenwriter composing something else.
She said people often asked her why people killed and what was in the mind of killers. She said she was no more an expert on that than anyone else.
But it took “an extraordinary mind to plan the destruction of another human being.” Murder, she said, was: “The taking away of something that no human being has the power to give, the crime for which no one could make reparation.”
To hear A Mind to Murder click on the link: www.mixcloud.com/mandymorton/els-a-mind-to-murder/
Nicola Upson read English at Downing College, Cambridge. Her debut novel, An Expert in Murder, was the first in a series featuring the crime writer Josephine Tey and was serialised on BBC Radio 4. The series was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger in 2018 for Nine Lessons and longlisted for the Gold Dagger in 2021 for The Dead of Winter. She is also the author of Stanley and Elsie, a novel about the painter Stanley Spencer.
Mandy Morton is an arts journalist who has produced and presented programmes for local and national BBC radio. She produced the P.D. James biography for BBC Radio 2, and her extensive audio archive chronicles the life and work of some of our leading writers, actors, and musicians. Mandy has collaborated with Nicola Upson on In Good Company, a book featuring the history of Cambridge Arts Theatre, and more recently writes a popular crime series of her own.
PD James(1920-2014) was a bestselling and internationally acclaimed crime writer best known for her books starring poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh. She wrote nineteen novels as well as several short story collections and works of non-fiction.
Her work has been translated into thirty-six languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
Among many international prizes, awards, and honours, she received the highest honours in both British and American crime writing: the CWA Diamond Dagger for a lifetime contribution to the genre, and the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award.
She was inducted into the Crime Writing Hall of Fame in 2008.
