The coming-of-age of a mature crime fiction in England, to which P. D. James has contributed prominently, can be attributed to a variety of disparate causes: the rapid changes in a society that had appeared for so long as monolithic; the end of the death...

[This entry was updated by Ann Sanders Cargill (Columbia, S.C.) from the entry by Bernard Benstock (University of Miami) in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 180-199.] The coming-of-age of a mature crime fiction in Engla...

P. D. James is the inheritor of some of the most distinguished literary mantles in popular fiction, those previously worn by detective-story writers who achieved near perfection in their craft. James's works hearken back to Agatha Christie's ingenious pl...

As scientific and forensic evidence advancements have become more and more sophisticated, the employment of expert witnesses to present scientific opinions interpreting this evidence has become an essential element in criminal justice legal proceedings. The use of expert witnesses by both prosecution and defense...

KEYWORDS Knowledge, Claimant, Defendant, Opinion evidence, Training This article defines the role of the expert witness. The author outlines what is needed to become an expert witness and gives an overview of what is involved, highlighting the positive as well as the negative...

[P. D.] James's Death of an Expert Witness is quite possibly her best book: certainly the characters are the most credible, the writing is the most controlled (after a slight lapse in The Black Tower), and the sense of rhythm is the most subtle. There is an unexplained red herring early on and the reader is told a little too clearly that the solution is buried in the past, in a scene in which a scientific officer examines a coerolith, the skeleton of a microorganism from ancient seas now found in the...