According to dustjacket blurbs, James and Rendell are the queens of contemporary detective fiction, just as were Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie of the previous generation. Furthermore, journal reviews praise James as a masterful writer and storyteller, even though her work is considered popular rather than serious. James has been instrumental, along with other writers of the last three decades, in narrowing the gap between crime fiction and serious fiction, between what Sayers had separated as "literature of escape" and "literature of expression."
The James canon of eleven novels is by no means homogenous: a progression of changes in style, mood, and scope can be discerned along the way, as well as variations in the investigative focus of her novels. Adam Dalgliesh (spelled Dalgleish in the first book, but not thereafter), whom she created as her New Scotland Yard inspector, remained her primary detective for the first four books, but her fifth introduced a young woman as private investigator. The more romantic book reviewers quickly predicted a love affair in the future for the twenty-two-year-old Cordelia Gray and Dalgliesh (twice her age), reading between the lines of their closing confrontation in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972).
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