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[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 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 penalty; the reaction of writers of fiction against experimentation; the shift of emphasis in psychology from science to a study of the human enigma; the persistence of inexplicable evil; the demise of the pure puzzle mystery; and the necessity that British detective fiction confront the presence of violent action that had become so much a characteristic of the American thriller. In her writings P. D. James expresses aspects of all of these factors, and since the first appearance of her fiction in 1962 she has established a major reputation in Britain and only to a slightly lesser extent in America, rivaled only by that of Ruth Rendell.
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