| Name: |
P. D. James |
| Variant Name: |
|
| Birth Date: |
|
| Place of Birth: |
|
| Nationality: |
|
| Gender: |
|
| Occupations: |
|
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 plotting, evocative settings, and quirky series detective Hercule Poirot, sometimes faintly echoing her predecessor's models but updating them and making them uniquely her own. A James plot, like Christie's best, is a well-oiled machine, efficient and balanced in a style many modern detective-fiction writers hardly aspire to attain. Her settings, like Christie's, reflect an impressive variety of interests, often esoteric and sometimes obscure. Like her predecessor, she speaks for a certain social class and way of life, one quintessentially English, without excluding readers who are different from the persona suggested by the narrative voice, as her success in the United States attests. By James's time, however, the detective genre had matured into a vehicle that could take many directions, playing against the stock protagonists of Christie's time to suggest both the diversity of realism and the rich well-roundedness of serious fiction.
This is a free page. This page contains 151 words. This
biography contains 5,045 words (approx. 17 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Phyllis Dorothy James White Access Pass.
