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Julian Symons (essay date 5 October 1986)

SOURCE: "The Queen of Crime: P. D. James," in New York Times Magazine, October 5, 1986, pp. 48-50, 54, 58, 60, 70.

[In the following essay, Symons discusses James's new book, A Taste for Death, and talks to the author about her life and writing in the detective genre.]

The bodies were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18 September by Miss Emily Wharton, a sixty-five-year-old spinster of the parish of St Matthew's in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged ten.

These are the opening lines of P. D. James's new book, A Taste for Death, and they are typical of her work in their factual exactness, their brisk presentation of what we need to know about two characters who are there not just to discover corpses. The bodies, of a tramp and a Minister of Parliament, are in the Little Vestry of the church. The scene is horrific, the...

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1. Introduction
2. 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)
3. Further Reading
4. Copyright