As the novel’s title indicates, an important theme in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman examines whether in fact a woman is suitable as a detective. Throughout the novel, many characters tell Cordelia that she is unsuitable, but the three exceptions are important. In an imaginary conversation, Cordelia’s mother (who died at her birth) assures her that the job is perfectly suitable. Mark’s history teacher suggests that women’s patience, curiosity, and desire to manage others should make them fine detectives. Most important, Dalgliesh is finally confounded by the very precepts about lying that Cordelia learned from Pryde, and he seems to acknowledge as well that Cordelia is right in condemning him for his insensitivity.

Sensitivity and emotional involvement are primary issues in this novel, and they seem to account for Cordelia’s success. Almost from her first moments in Mark’s cottage, Cordelia is doing what theory might say the detective should never do—she is becoming involved with the victim. Indeed, as she interviews Mark’s friends, she becomes involved with them as well. She feels comfortable in Mark’s cottage and admires his tidy gardening. She even wears his clothes, including the strap with which he was hanged (and which saves her life in the well). Mark was attending the university that she had hoped to attend, and in the end, she acts to protect Mark’s memory even though it means that she must violate some basic precepts of detection (such as preserving the evidence).

Throughout the novel, Cordelia responds to events emotionally as well as intellectually. Thus she spreads a blanket over Isabelle’s drunken and unconscious chaperone at a party, and she even wishes to offer help to the unpleasant wife of the senile doctor from whom she seeks information. Her effort to help Miss Leaming escape the consequences of her crime seem to rise partly from her sympathy for Miss Leaming as thwarted mother who loves the child she has been forced to give to another woman.

Most significant, the heart of the accusation that Cordelia makes against Sir Ronald is that, as a scientist, he is making a world in which love can have no place. The truth of that accusation sends him into a diatribe which ends in his death. Readers may be surprised that Cordelia, whose own life has been nearly loveless, should place a high value on emotion, but James gives credit to Cordelia’s formative years in a convent school, surrounded by peace and order and informed by the loving but still scholarly example of Sister Perpetua, who had hoped to send her to the University of Cambridge. Those years were enough to give her the human heart that, as the novel suggests, detection requires.

Although in many of his appearances in James’s fiction Inspector Adam Dalgliesh is indeed a man of sensitivity, in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman he falls a bit short, and the reader thinks that Cordelia is right to condemn him for paying too little heed to what happened to Bernie Pryde. In fact, Dalgliesh confesses that he had forgotten Pryde. Still, Dalgliesh has enough heart to suspect that Cordelia has made the right choices in helping Miss Leaming cover up her crime. Although he interrogates Cordelia minutely, in the end (aided in part by Pryde’s teachings) she is allowed the victory, having demonstrated that the job is perfectly suitable for her.

The novel also addresses other themes; notably, the great variety of fathers and children, real and spiritual. Thus Cordelia’s real father, the Marxist poet, is portrayed as never having been more than a destructive force in her life. It is...