PD James, death in holy order - should i give up?

[Lucyellensmumma]

Ok, so i picked this up in a charity shop - but i'm not loving it, its so convoluted - too much descriptive text and not enough actually getting on with it. Sort of interested now, but its slow going? Does it, or do any of her other books, get any better - or do i just give up and read something else.

I have Tess of the durbevilles waiting for me, and another couple that i cant even remember the titles of.........

It is very talky. They all are I think, but this and the subsequent ones particularly, as there is a development in the personal life of Dalgliesh that becomes a theme as well as the whodunnit plot. I liked it, but I have read them all, pretty much in order, so I 'get' the personal stuff IYKWIM.

TFM's quite right, PDJ does love to bang on and on and on. I read 'em out of curiosity (because I have a thing for crime fiction) but do find her a bit irritating. You have to remember IRL she's a bureaucrat. What I do think is striking about her work is the complete lack of any sense of humour at all - no-one EVER even smiles, much less cracks a joke. There's no affection for humanity, no tolerance of human foibles - just a clinical description of them.

Yes give up. Pass it to the charity shop for the next person to fail to read.

I bear a grudge with PDJ partly because she is somehow marketed as 'not a genre writer' when she blatantly is (and nothing wrong with that). Also because of Children of Men when she had her lead character born in 1969, same year as me, and said character appeared to have lived life on a different planet from me (a planet that looked very much as though he were born the same year as PDJ), and I think if you are going to be so specific about dates and places you should try a damn sight harder.

There.

oh, its not looking good is it

I perseverd with the later PD James, but I feel she hasn't moved on since the early Dalgliesh novels (shouldn't he be about 80 if he was aging in real time?)

In one of the more recent ones she had her female detective changing into a tweed skirt and suit which was suitable to wear while interviewing a suspect in the country.

Also, her characters all seem to live very rarified lives where they only wear cotton and turn their noses up at instant coffee and tea bags.

They do all grind their own coffee beans. And everyone who provides them with coffee provides beans and facilities for heating the milk

But the aging thing is common in series though. Dalziel and Pascoe similarly inhabit a Never-Never Land of detective fiction.

Yeah, Agatha Christie admitted if she'd only known how big a fixture he'd become, she'd have made H Poirot a LOT younger in the first book. Think he would have been 120 or something by the end if it hadn't been for fiction allowing you to fudge these things.