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MURDER ROOM, THE
by P. D. James
Faber and Faber, July 2003
352 pages
17.99 GBP
ISBN: 0571218210


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Briefly, the most recent of James's Adam Dagliesh novels is set in a fictional private museum dedicated to life between the two world wars, happily situated on Hampstead Heath. Among its other attractions, it includes a gallery called the Murder Room that documents some of the famous murders of the period. Now, murders are taking place at the museum that seem to be copy-cats of the historical crimes, disconcerting to at least one of the characters, who believes that murders are the particular product of their historical period and thus express some inner truth about the time in which they were committed. Are these the work of some mad historical re-enactor or are they linked in other, more personal ways?

The book is a classic murder mystery, and a very good one, but more than that, it is a meditation on time and the past. Readers who prefer fast-moving and plot-driven novels may be a bit impatient with the pace, but James is a careful observer and requires the reader also to look closely at character, at behaviour, at scene. As well, it is very elegantly written and impeccably constructed. Several recent reviews have seen James as a kind of magnificent monument largely out of touch with the present moment or as a exponent of High Toryism. Both judgements, I believe, over-simplify what is going on here. James is 82, a product of the very period her fictional museum celebrates, and passionately committed to the belief that the past matters.

Hers is not a romantic attachment to a better, nicer old England--it is no accident that the museum she invents records dreadful crimes and miscarriages of justice. But simply dismissing the past as irrelevant will not answer, either. The England she lives in, the England everyone lives in, was shaped for better or worse by the events that flowed from the Great War, which shadowed the youth of those born after it, by the compromises and dishonesty of the inter-war period, and finally by the Second War itself. This reminder provides a depth here, a resonance lacking in any number of "relevant" novels about crack cocaine and the mean streets.

The anachronistically-named Tally (Tallulah) Clutton, named after her maternal grandmother, turns out to be the moral centre of the book, a survivor of London's past, pulled from a house destroyed in an air raid when she was four years old, the only member of her immediate family not to be killed. When she was freed from the rubble, "she was lifted into the light, grey with dust but laughing, and spreading out both arms as if to embrace the whole street." It is a compelling image, and one James does not want us to forget. (I cannot help wondering if it is not one that James herself witnessed.) While there have been some complaints about James's upper-middle-class bias, it is hard to fault her uncondescending portrayal of Tally, whose fate we care about intensely.

Class is, however, a strong element of this book, especially since the upwardly-mobile Kate Miskin is the central investigator here, as Adam Dagliesh has become even more remote than in his most recent appearances. Kate is painfully divided between her desire for a middle-class regularity and her swift, fierce flashes of loyalty to her class origins. Though identified as "an Adam Dagliesh novel," this is only technically true, since Dagliesh is the chief investigator, but his heart does not seem to be in it, a fact that might disappoint some readers. I should not like to give the impression that all is philosophy here. The pace quickens in the last third and comes to a smashing climax, one that surprised me, though all the clues were there. And one of the nicest touches is the very end, in which James delicately evokes the grandma of all British women crime writers, Dorothy L. Sayers herself. I could go on about the richness and interest of this book, but I'll shut up now except to hope that the Baroness is spared to write more novels, if this is what they will be like.

This review refers to the British edition of the book, available in the UK and Canada. A US edition is planned for November of this year.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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