The adult's ego … continues to defend itself against dangers which no longer exist in reality; indeed, it finds itself compelled to seek out those situations in reality which can serve as an approximate substitute for the original danger, so as to be able to justify, in relation to them, its maintaining its habitual modes of reaction. (Sigmund Freud)

My father was not disposed to educate girls. (P. D. James)

P. D. James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is probably the best known of her nine mystery novels because of its unusual conception of the detective protagonist. First published in 1972, An Unsuitable Job appeared to many of its early readers to be a feminist breakthrough. The heroine, Cordelia Gray, follows a profession hitherto reserved almost exclusively to males: lone-wolf, private detective. The prevailing critical interpretation of the novel seems to hold that Cordelia triumphantly demonstrates her ability to function successfully at a job not previously deemed suitable to women. Carolyn Heilbrun characterizes Cordelia as "independent, autonomous, self-supporting, and intelligent." But in truth, although Cordelia does in large measure possess the qualities Heilbrun attributes to her, she is by no means an exemplary feminist heroine.

The obviously ironic title of the novel and its first five chapters lead the reader to think the central theme of An Unsuitable Job is going to be that at least this woman, Cordelia Gray, is quite capable of being a private detective. The title is alluded to on three separate occasions in the first half of the book; interestingly, in all three cases the speaker is a woman. Immediately after the death by suicide of Bernie Pryde, Cordelia's older partner in the detective agency, the barmaid in the pub formerly frequented by Bernie addresses Cordelia: "You'll be looking for a new job, I suppose? After all, you can hardly keep the agency going on your own. It isn't a suitable job for a woman." The barmaid's job, the server of a predominantly male clientele, is of course deemed entirely suitable for a female. The same criticism of Cordelia's choice of a profession is later made by Isabelle de Lasterie, a young French woman whose only "job" in life appears to be to look beautiful and attract male admirers. Cordelia's commitment to her profession is merely confirmed by the criticisms of women whose chosen styles of life she regards with contempt. The third reference to the title phrase is offered by Cordelia herself to complete a sentence begun by a Cambridge history tutor: "I should have thought the job was—." The tutor, Edward Horsfall, then goes on to reject Cordelia's completion in terms not wholly complimentary to either her or her sex: "Entirely suitable I should have thought, requiring, I imagine, infinite curiosity, infinite pains and a penchant for interfering with other people." Whatever the qualities that aid her in the pursuit of the truth. Cordelia functions quite effectively as a detective for the first three-quarters of the novel. No reader well versed in detective fiction would have the slightest reason up to this point to believe that any male investigator could have done a better job.

Cordelia has been hired by Sir Ronald Callender, the eminent director of a science research laboratory, ostensibly to find out why his son Mark dropped out of Cambridge in the spring term of his final year, took a job as a gardener at a country house, then hanged himself less than three weeks later. Cordelia eventually concludes that Mark had discovered that he couldn't have been the biological son of both his supposed parents (his blood type being different from either of theirs) and that therefore the inheritance that came to his mother twenty-one years before (and the one that would come to him in four years at the age of twenty-five) had been obtained under false pretenses. She also learns that when Mark's body had originally been discovered, he had been clad only in female underwear, his face smeared with lipstick, several pornographic pictures of women on a table beside him. Being told of the circumstances of Mark's death, two of his college friends. Hugo Tilling and Davie Stevens, visited the death scene with the intention of cleaning up the body so that it would present a more respectable appearance. But when they got to Mark's cottage, they found someone else had already accomplished this task—removed the female undies, the lipstick (except for a trace later noted by the police), the pornographic pictures (except for one dropped outside the cottage and later picked up by Cordelia), and covered the lower half of the body with a pair of jeans. When Cordelia confronts Sir Ronald Callender in chapter six, she hypothesizes that he strangled his son, fearing the young man would expose the fraud surrounding his birth and thus raise a scandal that would prevent Sir Ronald's laboratories from getting a grant from the Wolvington Trust. He then set up appearances to make it "look like accidental death during sexual experiment." Cordelia further surmises that Sir Ronald hired her primarily to discover who had altered the appearance of the corpse. Sir Ronald's failure to deny her charges leads both Cordelia and the reader to conclude that she has correctly solved the mystery of Mark Callender's death.

Cordelia not only exhibits the ability to ferret out and interpret evidence that we associate with the master detective, she also displays some of the raw physical courage that is the stock-in-trade of the hard-boiled private eye. When the novel's secondary villain, Sir Ronald's lab assistant. Chris Lunn, hurls Cordelia down a well, she laboriously and painfully inches her way up to the top by moving her feet and upper back alternately against the opposite walls. When Lunn returns to make sure she is dead. Cordelia confronts him with the pistol she has inherited from her deceased partner; and after Lunn flees from her, she pursues him in a high speed automobile chase.

The end of the chase—the death of Lunn in the collision of his van with a gasoline transporter—marks a turning point in the novel for Cordelia. From this moment on, she is by no means as masterful as she was before. Just prior to confronting the murderer, she passively allows her pistol to be taken away from her by his mistress-secretary Miss Leaming; she has no reply when Sir Ronald tells her that she will never be able to prove her charges against him and that if she tries, he will "ruin" her by making her "unemployable"; she stands idly by as Miss Leaming shoots her lover-employer in the head with Cordelia's own pistol. After so conspicuously failing to act decisively, Cordelia now hurls herself into a flurry of largely inappropriate activity. She attempts to disguise Sir Ronald's murder as suicide, even though Miss Leaming seems entirely ready to accept the consequences of her act. This cover-up almost results in Cordelia's being arrested as an accessory after the fact, and it doesn't save Miss Leaming who dies in an automobile accident (which may actually have been a suicide—a self-punishment for her crime). Although Cordelia survives her confrontations with both Sir Ronald and Superintendent Dalgliesh, it is through fortuitous disasters befalling others (Sir Ronald, Miss Leaming), not through clearly thought out, purposeful action of her own. Instead, she is driven to both action and inaction by psychological compulsions she scarcely understands.

Cordelia does realize that she is covering up for Miss Leaming not out of concern for the woman herself, but simply because she is Mark's mother: "I was thinking of Mark, not of you." But even when she thinks of Mark, she is thinking less of the real young man who died shortly after his twenty-first birthday than she is of a sort of male projection of herself. At one point in the story, she becomes consciously aware that her whole interpretation of what happened to Mark Callender is influenced by (if not created lock, stock, and barrel out of) her identification with him:

She believed Mark Callender had been murdered because she wanted to believe it. She had identified with him, with his solitariness, his self-sufficiency, his alienation from his father, his lonely childhood. She had even—most dangerous presumption of all—come to see herself as his avenger.

To be the avenger of a person with whom one identifies is, needless to say, to be symbolically involved in avenging oneself. Much of Cordelia's ineffectual and even misguided behavior in the last two chapters of the novel derives from her subconscious tendency to identify Mark Callender with herself, Sir Ronald with her father, and Miss Leaming with the mother she never knew.

Early in the book, we are told that Cordelia's was "a childhood of deprivation." As she tells the barmaid, "I only had a mother for the first hour of my life." She likes to believe her mother loved her intensely during that hour, and even as an adult, she occasionally holds fantasized conversations with an idealized mother she imagines to be completely supportive of her goals and ambitions: "It was just as she expected: her mother thought being a detective an entirely suitable job a for a woman." But in her actual childhood, she was abandoned by her father to a series of largely unsatisfactory surrogate mothers whose central lesson for her was the necessity of concealing her true emotions:

All her foster parents, kindly and well-meaning in their different ways, had demanded one thing of her—that she should be happy. She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk loss of love. Compared with this early discipline of concealment, all subsequent deceits had been easy.

Since the "love" one gains by means of concealing true emotion is of doubtful authenticity, it seems certain that the deprivation of Cordelia's childhood was less material than emotional.

Her life, however, took an upswing when at the age of ten she was sent by mistake to a Catholic convent. There she was taken under the wing of Sister Perpetua who encouraged her to use her mind and apply herself to her studies. When Cordelia was fifteen, Sister Perpetua led her to believe she would have a strong chance to go to Cambridge in "two years' time." But then her father spoiled Cordelia's plans by summoning her to join him: "There were no 'A' levels and no scholarship and at sixteen Cordelia finished her formal education and began her life as cook, nurse, messenger, and general camp follower to Daddy and the comrades."

Cordelia describes her father to Miss Leaming as "an itinerant Marxist poet and amateur revolutionary." He was obviously a man to whom the cause was all important and personal relationships—including the one with his daughter—insignificant. The two references to his death in the novel suggest little grief on Cordelia's part. To Miss Leaming she merely says. "'He died in Rome last May after a heart attack and I came home.'" In doing so, she obviously left all involvement with the comrades, the Party—her father's values—behind her. When she touches the corpse of her partner Bernie, she thinks, "This was death; this was how Daddy felt. As with him the gesture of pity was meaningless and irrelevant. There was no more communication in death than there had been in life." Cordelia is named after a famous literary character who was banished by her father, but there are considerable differences between the situations of Lear's daughter and her namesake. P. D. James's Cordelia is banished at a very early age, apparently shortly after birth; she has no memory of having once been loved to console her in her banishment. And although she physically rejoins her father, it is clear that no true reconciliation ever takes place.

When Cordelia first interviews Sir Ronald Callender, the similarities between her life and Mark's must immediately strike her. He too lost his mother at an extremely early age: "she died when Mark was nine months old." (The fact that Evie Callender was not his true biological mother—something Mark didn't learn until he was twenty-one—is irrelevant to the sense of loss he would have felt when he was young.) He too was sent away by his father, "to a pre-prep school when he was five and to a prep school subsequently." Just as working for the Revolution was Cordelia's father's first interest, personal relationships being at best a very distant second, Sir Ronald Callender had dedicated his life to scientific research and will not maintain a relationship with anyone who might interfere with his cherished projects. That was why young Mark had to be sent off: "I couldn't have a child here running unsupervised in and out of the laboratory."

Cordelia thus begins her investigation of the supposed suicide of Mark Callender with a sense of the deceased young man being in several significant respects her male counterpart. Her identification with Mark makes her susceptible to do exactly the thing that Miss Markland (the elderly sister of the owner of the estate on which Mark worked as gardener) warns her against: "It's unwise to become too personally involved with another human being. When that human being is dead, it can be dangerous as well as unwise." It is likely, however, that Cordelia has succumbed to this danger even before the advice is given. A couple of pages later when she discovers a pornographic photo of a female nude crumpled in the weeds outside the cottage where Mark had been staying, her reaction to this possible bit of evidence is not detached and analytical but personal and emotional: "she felt contaminated and depressed."

When Isabelle de Lasterie eventually tells Cordelia how Mark's body looked when she found it—and Hugo sententiously explains how the death was merely the result of "bad luck," a matter of the belt buckle slipping during the performance "of one of the more innocuous of sexual deviations"—Cordelia flatly responds. "I don't believe it." Although she has by now discovered what Mark had—that he could not have been the child of both of his presumptive parents—she has not yet found any clear motive for why another person would wish to murder him. And although she has learned some admirable things about Mark—e.g., his willingness to care for the autistic child Gary Webber and the senile Dr. Gladwin—none of these things is absolutely incompatible with a preference for an "innocuous sexual deviation." (Indeed, given the fact that Mark has grown up without a mother, it might not be so unusual for him to seek to know the feminine through the experiment of dressing in female clothes and wearing lipstick—and to identify further with the deceased mother by feigning his own death by hanging.) Cordelia is unwilling to believe Hugo's interpretation of Mark's death simply because she identifies so strongly with the dead man that she can't conceive of him engaging in such a sexual deviation. (Or perhaps subconsciously, the image of Mark in female undies and lipstick uncomfortably suggests to her that she is involved in a parallel set of perverse actions in playing the role of private eye and carrying a .38 semiautomatic.) Cordelia's rejection of Hugo's theory turns out to be correct, but it is based much more on emotion than reason.

The following day Cordelia examines the will of Mark's grandfather and finds that no one—except several "highly respectable charities"—stood to benefit from the young man's death. This final piece of information leads Cordelia to the conclusion that Mark could only have been killed by someone wishing to conceal the fraud perpetrated twenty-one years earlier: the obtaining of a substantial inheritance by Evelyn Callender from her industrialist father by duping him into thinking she had produced a grandson for him. But before Cordelia can go to confront Sir Ronald with her inferences, she has to undergo a highly significant ordeal. Chris Lunn, Sir Ronald's "absolutely sinister" lab assistant flings her down a well, then clamps the cover back on leaving her to drown.

In realistic terms, Lunn's action is unaccountable. He has no way of knowing how threatening Cordelia's discoveries are to his employer. Sir Ronald later claims he has not instructed Lunn to do any more than "keep an eye on" Cordelia. Why then does the young man choose to "exceed his instructions" by trying to kill her? If Lunn knows enough to perceive Cordelia as a threat to Sir Ronald, he would surely also know why his employer hired her—to find out who altered the appearance of Mark's body. Why would Lunn attempt to kill Cordelia before she could provide Sir Ronald with the information he desired?

In the last analysis, one must conclude that Lunn acts not on the basis of realistic motivations but for essentially symbolic reasons. What does Lunn himself symbolize? For one thing, he is Ronald Callender's "true son," the son who functions as a mere extension of the father's personality. Like Sir Ronald, Chris Lunn is devoted to scientific research, whereas Mark, the biological son, although "he could very well have read one of the sciences," chose instead "to read history," to assert himself as a separate person with different interests from his father. Like Sir Ronald, Lunn is prepared to be totally ruthless to further the goals of the Callender Research Laboratory, willing even to resort to murder, while Mark's commitments were to the welfare of other people and to his conscience ("My son was a self-righteous prig," says Sir Ronald). Lunn is so completely an extension of Sir Ronald that he beds the older man's mistress Miss Leaming. Even if Lunn is technically exceeding his "instructions" when he tries to kill Cordelia, he is essentially acting as his employer's double. He is trying to kill Cordelia for exactly the same kind of reasons for which Sir Ronald killed his son.

If Lunn represents Sir Ronald in the murder attempt on Cordelia, she, because of her identification with Mark, represents the victimized and utterly rejected child. The setting chosen for the murderous attack reinforces these ideas. When Cordelia last sees the well as she is taking her final leave from Mark's cottage, she is shocked to see that Miss Markland has planted flowers about the rim: "Thus strangely celebrated, the well itself looked obscene, a wooden breast topped by a monstrous nipple." If the top of the well is thus associated with one part of the female anatomy, it is not so farfetched to associate the interior with another portion. When Cordelia is hurtling down toward the water at the bottom, the experience is strangely familiar to her: "The fall was a confusion of old nightmares, unbelievable seconds of childhood terrors recalled." The terrors of childhood are many, but surely one of the most fundamental is the terror of parental rejection—the fear that one or both parents wish the child had never been born. Such fears would come readily in early years to a child like Cordelia who would know that her birth caused her mother's death and that her father abandoned her to the care of others. For Cordelia, therefore, the psychological experience of being thrown into the well is that of being thrust back into the womb—a manifestation of her fear, or perhaps even sense, that her father would have preferred her never to have been conceived. But treading water at the bottom of the well, Cordelia does not succumb to despair; she affirms to herself her right to exist: "She had always been a survivor. She would survive." She braces herself against the opposing walls of the well and slowly, arduously inches her way upward, a process she at one point consciously identifies with a struggle to be born: "It seemed she had been climbing for hours, moving in a parody of a difficult labor towards some desperate birth."

It is significant, though, that Cordelia cannot be born again without the aid of two other people. One is the dead Mark Callender, whose belt—the one with which he was hanged—Cordelia wrapped twice around her waist earlier that morning. When she is exhausted from the climb, her strength nearly gone, she loops the belt over the ladder just out of reach above her and pulls herself up to the top of the well. The belt that caused Mark's death thus becomes a means to preserve her life. But Cordelia's climb, to the top of the well does not of itself save her; she is not physically able to remove the heavy wooden cover of the well, and she presently realizes that the murderer will be returning before sunrise to make sure she has drowned. Only the fortuitous arrival of Miss Markland, who removes the well cover before Lunn returns, saves Cordelia from being flung back down the well a second time.

The significance of Miss Markland's role in the novel will be examined below; for now, it is sufficient to note that instead of lavishing gratitude on her savior, Cordelia briskly dismisses the older woman and prepares to confront her attacker. She makes two significant preparations for this encounter: she puts on one of Mark's jumpers and gets and loads the pistol she inherited from Bernie. Wearing the jumper like wearing the belt affirms her solidarity with Mark as she anticipates facing the person who, at this moment, she must assume to be his killer. The pistol is a more complexly symbolic object. If being a private detective is not conventionally regarded as a suitable job for a woman, Cordelia's possession of the .38 is not merely unsuitable but illegal. Throughout the first three-quarters of the novel, this illegal weapon is Cordelia's prized possession, a source of security and confidence to her:

Bernie had meant her to have the gun and she wasn't going to give it up easily.

It was a heavy object to carry with her all the time but she felt unhappy about parting with it, even temporarily.

… she longed for the reassurance of the hard cold metal in her hand.

She … could see … the crooked, comforting outline of the pistol….

I'm perfectly safe. Besides I have a gun.

But when Cordelia confronts (and recognizes) Chris Lunn, she realizes "she wouldn't fire" even though "in that moment, she knew what it was that could make a man kill." And in the following chapter she passively yields the pistol to Miss Leaming, for Cordelia now believes "she could never defend herself with it, never kill a man." The pistol ultimately becomes to her (although she wouldn't put it in these terms) a symbol of phallic aggression, of a ruthless destructiveness she perceives as distinctly male in character. This does not mean that a woman cannot use a pistol in a violent aggressive manner (Miss Leaming does so only a few pages later), but that Cordelia has chosen to define herself as a woman for whom such an action would be … unsuitable.

After the death of Ronald Callender, Cordelia goes so far as to claim "she hadn't wanted him to die," but it seems highly probable that the real reason she covers up for Miss Leaming is simply because the older woman has done exactly the thing she herself wished to do. Sir Ronald is the heightened image of her own rejecting father. Miss Goddard (the former Nanny Pilbeam, nursemaid to Mark's presumed mother and briefly to the boy himself) speaks of how Mr. Bottley "never really cared for [his daughter] Miss Evie," perhaps because his wife died when the child was born. Miss Goddard, however, considers this "just an excuse for not taking to the child." Thinking of her own background, Cordelia replies, "Yes, I knew a father who made it an excuse too. But it isn't their fault. We can't make ourselves love someone just because we want to." Strangely, much the same argument is put forth by Ronald Callender when he is justifying to Cordelia his decision to kill his son: "… if [a parent] doesn't love, there's no power on earth which can stimulate or compel him. And when there's no love, there can be none of the obligations of love." Sir Ronald, of course, is a little more extreme in his denial of the "obligations of love": he literally murdered his son where Cordelia's father merely destroyed the life she wanted, the one she would have led if allowed to attend Cambridge. Nevertheless, Cordelia obviously perceives Mark's victimization as a mirror of her own.

Cordelia allows the pistol to be taken from her, because she knows she will not be able to use it against Ronald Callender. One reason is her shock at witnessing the violent death of Chris Lunn, but another surely is her identification of Sir Ronald with her father. No matter how evil the scientist is, how deserving of punishment, for Cordelia to shoot him would symbolically be an act of parricide. After he has been killed by Miss Leaming, Cordelia denies that she had "wanted him to die" because to admit this desire would be tantamount to acknowledging she wished for her own father's death—something it is highly probable that she did wish for since his death released her from a form of slavery and allowed her to seek an independent life. And Cordelia's behavior at the event indicates that the death of Sir Ronald was also desired by her. When she sees Miss Leaming approaching with "the gun held closely against her breast" (signifying that this killing will be an act of the heart, motivated by maternal love, in contrast to Sir Ronald's coldly rational of murder), Cordelia knows "exactly what [is] going to happen," because it is what she has subconsciously wished for. Although she feels as if there is time for her to intervene, "to leap forward and wrench the gun from that steady hand," she makes no move—not even when Sir Ronald "[turns] his head toward Cordelia as if in supplication." The use of the world "supplication" suggest Ronald Callender is begging Cordelia, not Miss Leaming, for mercy—as if the younger woman has passed sentence on him and the older is merely the executioner who carries it out. Cordelia may merely be imagining the supplication she sees on the man's face, but she clearly chooses not to respond to it—she allows the execution to proceed.

If Ronald Callender is associated in Cordelia's mind with her father, it stands to reason that Miss Leaming, the true mother of Cordelia's counterpart Mark, should symbolically be associated with her mother. Early in the novel, we are told that Cordelia likes to fantasize about her dead mother, imagine her as someone warmly supportive of her daughter's goals in life. The only surrogate mother Cordelia has ever had who did play such a role in her life was Sister Perpetua who encouraged her to "try for Cambridge." When Cordelia is struggling to climb out of the well, she partially loses consciousness and has a brief dream vision in which Sister Perpetua oddly turns into Miss Leaming:

Sister Perpetua was there. But why wasn't she looking at Cordelia? Why had she turned away? Cordelia called her and the figure turned slowly and smiled at her. But it wasn't Sister after all. It was Miss Leaming, the lean pale face sardonic under the white veil.

This dream may indicate Cordelia's subconscious realization that what she needs or desires at this particular point in her life is not the teacher, Sister Perpetua, but the avenger, Miss Leaming. Although Elizabeth Leaming has been subservient to Ronald Callender for much of her adult life (her role being only a slightly glorified version of the one Cordelia played for her father), she is nevertheless more on a level of equality with him than the youthful Cordelia—and as Mark's real mother she has a greater right to avenge his death. Mark's mother taking revenge on his cruel and heartless father symbolically represents Cordelia's mother exacting retribution on her daughter's heartless (if not quite so cruel) father. Although Cordelia and Miss Leaming "don't even like each other," they are nevertheless allies against the evil father.

The novel, however, contains another mother figure for Cordelia. This is Miss Markland, who by removing the cover of the well insures that Cordelia's "difficult labor" does culminate in (re)birth. Miss Markland's role might at first seem to be more that of the midwife than the mother, but a couple of pages after the rescue, she makes clear that she at least regards Cordelia as a surrogate child. Years before, "her son, the four-year-old child of herself and her lover" had drowned in the very same well. By saving Cordelia's life, she has partially redeemed herself for her neglect or carelessness that led to the death of the child. Listening with appalled fascination to the story, Cordelia realizes, "What to her [Cordelia] had been a horror, to Miss Markland had been a release. A life for a life."

Cordelia, though, is reluctant to accept the relationship that she feels Miss Markland has thrust upon her. She almost brutally drives the older woman out of the cottage: "You've saved my life and I'm grateful. But I can't bear to listen. I don't want you here. For God's sake go!" Jane S. Bakerman interprets this action as a sign of Cordelia's maturity: she chooses to behave "coldly—but professionally" instead of acceding to Miss Markland's "demand" for "attention, support, daughterliness, comfort." But it seems to me that Cordelia's rejection of Miss Markland is neither cold nor professional. Certainly there would have been nothing "unprofessional" about seeking Miss Markland's practical assistance—asking her to call the police, for example. In truth Cordelia drives Miss Markland away not for rational reasons but emotional ones. She wants to avenge herself directly and personally on her attacker. She is also terrified by the story of the drowned child: "… it was horrible and unthinkable and she could not bear to hear it." She cannot bear this story, because it is once again her story. An illegitimate and perhaps unwanted child is left to wander about on his own and tumbles to his death in cold suffocating, water. The same thing could easily have happened to Cordelia in her early years—and perhaps in an emotional-psychological sense it did happen. Cordelia's ability to respond openly to other people, to reveal her innermost feelings, perhaps even to herself, perished in the cold, suffocating water of the well of loneliness that was her childhood.

Because of Cordelia's deeply ingrained sense of the harm that has been done to her in her childhood, she cannot respond maturely to Miss Markland's display of her own grief. When she is told the story of the child's drowning, Cordelia tells herself Miss Markland "must be mad." Later she has a similar response after seeing how Miss Markland has planted flowers about the well: "She was suddenly terrified of meeting Miss Markland, of seeing the incipient madness in her eyes." But Miss Markland is not mad. Rather she has wisely given expression in her outburst to Cordelia to grief and guilt she has (unwisely) kept pent up for years. Similarly, her planting of the flowers around the well, converting it into a shrine for her dead son, seems a fundamentally healthy action. She is no longer going to repress the memory of her son and his death but instead pay tribute to his memory—just as Mrs. Goddard does in faithfully tending the grave of her husband. Identifying only with the suffering of the neglected child, Cordelia either cannot or refuses to empathize with the sufferings of the remorseful negligent parent. Were she to understand and forgive Miss Markland, Cordelia might also have to forgive her father and the "succession of foster mothers." The utterly evil Ronald Callender, on the other hand, in no way disturbs Cordelia's self-righteousness.

An Unsuitable Job does not contain an unlimited number of parent figures, but it does offer quite a few. Two additional father figures deserve some comment. Bernie Pryde has been Cordelia's mentor in the detective business; in a sense he has almost adopted her in that he has given her a bedsitting room in his house. But Bernie, although as senior partner in the firm he is in a position of nominal authority over her and is definitely old enough to be her father, is regarded by Cordelia as essentially another child. His childlike quality is evidenced in his "boyishly naive obsession" with the .38 semi-automatic and his psychological dependency on his father figure, Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh, who is the source of all of Bernie's wisdom concerning criminal investigative processes. In this sense, Bernie like Cordelia is an abandoned child, for Dalgliesh got him fired from the police force.

When Cordelia is interrogated by Dalgliesh, Bernie's father figure easily becomes her own. As with the other fathers in her life, Cordelia instinctively mistrusts him: "He sounded gentle and kind, which was cunning since she knew that he was dangerous and cruel…." Dalgliesh exerts pressure on Cordelia to confess her part in the cover-up of Ronald Callender's murder, and she resolutely sticks to her story even though she is increasingly tempted not to "confess" but to "confide" the truth to the Superintendent. To an extent, she is yearning for a reconciliation with the father, for the establishment of genuine communication with him. This communication occurs in a different way after Dalgliesh announces Miss Leaming's death and tells Cordelia she need not return for further questioning. At that moment, Cordelia's defenses suddenly crumble, and she expresses her emotions totally and openly. Her dramatic and uncontrollable crying is basically for herself (she is still, I think, not mature or empathetic enough to cry for Miss Leaming); but when she expresses "her pent-up misery and anger" in words to Dalgliesh, "strangely enough" her grievances are focused on Bernie. This displacement of her own self-pity onto Bernie is in actuality not so strange at all. Bernie is the "child" who has been cast off by Dalgliesh just as Cordelia was cast off by her father. Although he does not acknowledge any sense of wrong doing for firing Bernie, Dalgliesh does apologize for having forgotten the man's existence and in a sort of backhand compliment to Pryde's junior partner tells Cordelia, "I'm beginning to wonder if I didn't underestimate him." Dalgliesh's concessions may seem slight, but appear to be greater than any ever made to Cordelia by her own father. The interview with Dalgliesh, although it doesn't seem strictly necessary to the mystery plot of the novel—which is adequately resolved by the information Cordelia receives from Miss Leaming in their final conversation—is important to Cordelia's psychological development, because it suggests that some degree of true reconciliation with the father is possible.

When asked why she has chosen to write mystery novels, P. D. James once replied:

I think there may have been in my very early life some emotional trauma or insecurity, and this [writing murder mysteries] is some way of trying to construct a world in which there is an ultimate answer to problems that may otherwise seem unacceptable seem unacceptable or insolvable.

I would suspect that in Cordelia Gray, James, is portraying this "early trauma or insecurity" more directly than in her other novels (with the possible exception of Innocent Blood) and that the author's identification with her protagonist's plight creates a characterization of far greater depth and complexity than is the norm for mystery fiction. But the "trauma or insecurity" may also give rise to the most obvious flaw of the book. Chris Lunn and Sir Ronald Callender are so utterly villainous that they belong more to the realm of myth or fairy tale (the evil sorcerer and his faithful troll) than to that of realistic fiction. In essence these characters are merely projections of Cordelia's worst fears concerning parental authority. Killing them off, therefore, is, as James says, a way of providing in her fiction "an ultimate answer" (total destruction of representatives of the trauma's source) to a problem that in real life can never be completely solved or removed. But even though the novel disposes of its villains rather patly, the treatment of the heroine is completely realistic: we know at the end of the book that Cordelia Gray not only needs to but will continue to grow and that her battles with the past as she moves into the future will by no means all be lost.