Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > James, P. D. - Joyce Carol Oates (review date 5 February 1998)

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Joyce Carol Oates (review date 5 February 1998)

SOURCE: "Inside the Locked Room," in New York Review of Books, February 5, 1998, pp. 19-21.

[In the following review, Oates traces several of James's novels and praises her A Certain Justice.]

So it is here at last, the distinguished thing!

—Henry James, on his deathbed

Henry James's famous final words might be the epigraph for the literary genre we call mystery/detective. In these usually tightly plotted, formulaic novels a corpse is often discovered as soon as the reader opens the book:

The corpse without hands lay in the bottom of a small sailing dinghy drifting just within sight of the Suffolk coast. It was the body of a middle-aged man, a dapper little cadaver, its shroud a dark pin-striped suit which fitted the narrow body as elegantly in death as it had in life…. He had dressed with careful orthodoxy for the town, this...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. P. D. James with Jane S. Bakerman (interview date January 1977)
   2. Erlene Hubly (essay date Fall-Winter 1982)
   3. P. D. James with Rosemary Herbert (interview date Fall 1986)
   4. Julian Symons (essay date 5 October 1986)
   5. James F. Maxfield (essay date Summer 1987)
   6. Betty Richardson (essay date Fall-Winter 1988)
   7. Christine Wick Sizemore (essay date 1989)
   8. Michael Wood (review date 7 December 1989)
   9. Judith Crist (review date 28 January 1990)
   10. Hilary Mantel (review date 26 April 1990)
   11. Kathryn Hughes (review date 25 September 1992)
   12. Walter Wangerin, Jr. (review date 28 March 1993)
   13. James Sallis (review date 4 April 1993)
   14. P. D. James with Kate Kellaway (interview date 16 October 1994)
   15. Nicci Gerrard (essay date 23 October 1994)
   16. Harriet Waugh (review date 29 October 1994)
   17. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (review date 2 February 1995)
   18. Michael Malone (review date 2 April 1995)
   19. Robert Ward (review date 9 April 1995)
   20. Geoffrey Robertson (review date 5 October 1997)
   21. Harriet Waugh (review date 18 October 1997)
   22. Ben Macintyre (review date 7 December 1997)
   23. Joyce Carol Oates (review date 5 February 1998)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Joyce Carol Oates