Roy Marsden - IMDb IMDb 8 January 2017 4:30 PM, UTC NEWS Roy Marsden was born on June 25, 1941 in Stepney, London, England. He is an actor, known for The Sandbaggers (1978), Unnatural Causes (1993) and King Solomon's Mines (2004). See full bio » Born: a list of 608 people created 15 Jul 2012 a list of 102 people created 12 Aug 2012 a list of 12 people created 12 May 2013 a list of 49 people created 03 Sep 2015 a list of 81 people created 4 weeks ago Do you have a demo reel? Add it to your IMDbPage How much of Roy Marsden's work have you seen?

User Polls Unnatural Causes Commander Adam Dalgliesh (1993) 2015 Partners in Crime (TV Series) Commander Haydock 2011 Holy Flying Circus (TV Movie) Mervyn Stockwood 2011 Silent Witness (TV Series) Prof Nigel Silverlake 2010 Moving On (TV Series) Eddie 2010 New Tricks (TV Series) George Mackie - Where There's Smoke (2010) ... George Mackie 2009 Margaret (TV Movie) 2008 Trial & Retribution (TV Series) Ray Harper 2007 Diamond Geezer (TV Series) Garovski 2006 Eleventh Hour (TV Series) Drake 2006 Foyle's War (TV Series) Ted Cartwright - Bad Blood (2006) ...

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Policeman 1965 The Flying Swan (TV Series) Tony Hassall 1965 Riviera Police (TV Series) Jack 1965 No Hiding Place (TV Series) Gerry Moore 1964 First Night (TV Series) Matthew 2008-2009 The Supersizers Eat... (TV Series) Himself - Narrator - The French Revolution (2009) ... Himself - Narrator (voice) - Medieval (2009) ... Himself - Narrator (voice) 2008 Profiling (TV Series documentary) Himself 1997 Light Lunch (TV Series) Himself 1994 Horizon (TV Series documentary) Himself - Narrator 1979-1984 Call My Bluff (TV Series) Himself 2009 Doctor Who Greatest Moments (TV Mini-Series documentary) Mr.Stroker / Mr.

.Stroker 1999 Anglia at Forty (TV Series) Himself Personal Details Other Works: He acted in John Vanbrugh's play, "The Relapse," at the Mermaid Theatre in London, England in a British Actors Theatre Company production with Kate O'Mara, Raymond Mason, Michael Thomas, Richard Heffer, Peter Adamson, and Laura Cox in the cast. See more » Publicity Listings: 1 Interview | 1 Magazine Cover Photo | See more » Alternate Names: Did You Know? Personal Quote: On his television series "Airline": It was one of the most enjoyable programmes I ever made. Learning to fly those old DC-3s was terrific. And I enjoyed playing Ruskin enormously because he had hope. Of course, he was a pain up the tushie most of the time, but then you'd see that youthful desire to actually get out and triumph against enormous odds. I identified with that character the most.

Trivia: 2 sons - Joe (born 1982) & Billy (born 1987) See more » Star Sign: PD James: the 5 novels you should read - Telegraph Celebrity news PD James: the 5 novels you should read From the first Adam Dalgleish novel to the acclaimed Pride and Prejudice sequel, here are 5 novels demonstrating the breadth of PD James's writing talent Clive Owen in Children of Men, a film adaptation of PD James's 1992 novel Photo: Rex By Anita Singh , Arts and Entertainment Editor 4:13PM GMT 27 Nov 2014 PD James was regarded as the queen of crime novels thanks to her Adam Dalgleish and Cordelia Gray mysteries, but she could also turn her hand to dystopian fiction and period drama. Cover Her Face (1962) James’s debut novel introduced readers to Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgleish, the poetry-writing policeman. His first investigation is the violent death of a young parlourmaid at an Essex manor house.

“Adam Dalgleish is not drawn from any person I know but does, I suppose, represent the qualities I most admire in a man, ie sensitivity, courage and intelligence,” James said. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) After four outings for Inspector Dalgliesh, James created a female lead in Cordelia Gray, a private eye who inherits a detective agency and sets out on her own. A decade later she appeared again in The Skull Beneath the Skin, but fans hoping for more Cordelia Gray novels were disappointed. James chose instead to focus on Dalgielsh’s “gutsy girl” sidekick, Kate Miskin. Related Articles 27 Nov 2014 The Children of Men (1992) James’s first and only foray into dystopian fiction is set in 2021, when mass infertility has led the human race to the brink of extinction. The last generation to be born are known as “Omegas”, and England has become a brutal dictatorship. The hero, Theo, is approached by a dissident group and introduced to a young woman who, miraculously, is pregnant.

The story was turned into a 2006 film directed by Alfonso Cuaron and starring Clive Owen. James described it as “a grim book”. The Private Patient (2008) Adam Dalgleish – by now elevated to Commander in the Metropolitan Police - comes full circle and investigates a death at a country house, just as he did in Cover Her Face. This one is run as a cosmetic surgery clinic and the murder victim is a patient, investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn, there to have a disfiguring facial scar removed. James said at the time that it might be her final Dalgliesh novel, saying the character “may have had enough” of solving crimes. Death Comes to Pemberley (2011) James’s last novel combined her two literary passions: detective fiction and the works of Jane Austen. This Pride and Prejudice sequel is set six years after the wedding of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy and opens with Elizabeth’s flighty younger sister, Lydia, gatecrashing a Pemberley ball with the news that her husband, Wickham, has been murdered. The novel was adapted by the BBC last Christmas.

Order of Adam Dalgliesh Books - OrderOfBooks.com Home | Characters | Authors Order of Adam Dalgliesh Books Adam Dalgleish is a fictional character appearing in a series of mystery novels by British author P.D. James . He works at New Scotland Yard in London, starting out as a Detective Chief Inspector and rising through the ranks as the series progresses. Dalgliesh is a gentleman detective, a staple of British detective fiction. Adam Dalgliesh made his first appearance all the way back in 1962 (in the first novel in the series, Cover Her Face) with over a dozen novels in the series ever since then. Below is a list of P.D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh books in order of when they were originally published (which is the same as their chronological order): Publication Order of Adam Dalgliesh Books Cover Her Face P.D. James - Book Series In Order Hardcover Paperback Kindle When it comes to professional writers born and raised in the UK, Phyllis Dorothy James, better known as P.D. James, is one of the names you can never oversight. Born back in 1920, Phyllis has written and published over 20 novels.

Some of her works are single stories while others are book series. She is a mother of two daughters and lives in London and Oxford. Phyllis was raised by her parents in Oxford and attended Cambridge high school for girls. She is known for many of her creations, although the most popular one involves Adam Dalgliesh (character). This book series saw its final episode published in 2011. Apart from writing, she is also involved in many other activities and has worked in various offices during her time. She has had experiences as a mother, book author, medic, civil servant among other positions. Phyllis also has several recognition awards because of her writing. Books and characters P.D. James began her writing career in the mid 50s and her first book Cover Her Face was published in 1962. It featured one of her most popular characters Adam Dalgliesh who is both a police investigator and a poet. As a writer from the ‘old’ era, her books are based on a milieu of the United Kingdom’s bureaucracies. Most of the novels feature closed societal systems such as Criminal Justice and National Health Service. Her husband passed away two years after the first book was published.

Phyllis writings revolve around detective and police investigation fiction stories. She also has non-fictional books and omnibus versions. After the first release, she went on to publish A Mind to Murder in 1962, Unnatural Causes (1967), Shroud for Nightmare (1971) and so on. The last novel Death Comes to Pemberley was released in 2011. She gained popularity from her first creation that features Adam Dalgliesh, who is also the protagonist character in fourteen of her novels. The reader is first introduced to Dalgliesh as a chief inspector and detective in Cover Her Face. He continues to rank up the command along the novels and eventually assumes the rank of commander in a metropolitan police service. He is considered quite cerebral and has a passion of writing poems. Most of his friends remind him of this fact which leads him to publishing his work. He owns a Cooper Bristol at the beginning of the story and later a Jaguar. Dalgliesh earns a decent salary and stays in a flat. He is portrayed as tall, dark and handsome. The 14 P.D James novels about this character depict incredible development.

Dalgliesh is transformed from a lower rank level inspector to an authoritative commander. Readers are also introduced to his personal lifestyle and relationships. He becomes a widow 13 years before the next book (A Mind to Murder) is released. His aunt, Jane Dalgliesh, who is the only family relation he held with great esteem also dies and leaves him in control of a decent inheritance. The debut novel begins with a plot describing how Dalgliesh investigates the murder of a young maid. The build begins with a party event for the fete celebrations. Sally Jupp is a young maid who works for Mrs. Maxie. Her employer has a son Stephen Maxie and daughter Dorothy Maxie. On the second day of fete, Sally shows up in the same dress and accessories that Dorothy has on and later announces that Stephen proposed to marry her. There is an exchange of insulting words between her and Mrs Maxie before the party breaks. She is found in the morning dead inside her bedroom and the detective game begins. It is later discovered that she died of strangulation. There are many other plots, thrillers, dramas and controversies built into the story. All Phyllis novels depict optimum creativity and character development.

A Mind to Murder basically involves the investigation of an intellectual predatory killer. Dalgliesh receives a night call that forces him to quickly abandon his writing to investigate killings in a psychiatric clinic. He finds the body of a dead clinic staff at the basement floor with a chisel driven right into her heart. This erupt a series of investigative procedures and detective activities. Along the lines in P.D James novels, it is easy to pick out exceptional creativity and imagination. She spent some time working in the criminal justice and health service offices which gives her a more personalized approach. It makes it easier for readers to follow what is going on. The last book about Adam Dalgliesh where he is a commander is The Private Patient (2008). An investigative journalist is savagely killed in a plastic surgery clinic where she went to remove her facial scar. The surgeon and entire clinic are subjected to the thorough investigative procedures typical of Dalgliesh. Production and awards Due to the level of creativity and use of descriptive elaborations, P.D James books are very clear, on purpose and easy to script. Many of her works (over a dozen) have been made into television and film adaptations.

Death of an Expert Witness was made into a movie in 1983. Other novels that have been adapted to TV and/or film include Cover Her Face, Mind to Murder, A Certain Justice, Devices and Desires and Original Sin among many more. She has also received various honours and awards for her contributions in detective writing. Some of the select honours include: Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1983, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and President of the Society of Authors in 1997. The awards section comprises CWA (crime writers’ association) Macallan Silver Dagger for fiction (1971, 1975 and 1986) and Diamond Dagger in1987. Others are Grandmasters Awards (Mystery writers of America 1999) and Best translated crime award (Japan 1992). She has many more awards and honours received in various countries around the world. Conclusion Crime writing is one of the most entertaining pieces of literature, especially if it is written by someone with a first hand knowledge of what detective work involves. P.D James is one of the excellent crime writers and her novels are there to prove it.

Although she is now in her retirement, many readers will still anticipate to see an inspired protégée who can match her level of professionalism and entertainment in crime writing. P.D. James Book List - FictionDB Cozy Mystery Oct-2016 Four previously uncollected stories from one of the great mystery writers of our time--swift, cunning murder mysteries (two of which feature the young Adam Dalgliesh) that together, to borrow the author's own word, add up to a delightful "entertainme... Historical Mystery Dec-2011 A rare meeting of literary genius: P. D. James, long among the most admired mystery writers of our time, draws the characters of Jane Austen's beloved novel Pride and Prejudice into a tale of murder and emotional mayhem. It is 1803, six years sin... Suspense Oct-2009 To judge by the worldwide success of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's Poirot, it is not only the Anglo-Saxons who have an appetite for mystery and mayhem. Talking about the craft of detective writing and sharing her personal...

The Guardian profile: PD James | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close Although she didn't publish her first novel until she was 42, PD James had been writing about the world since childhood. The girl Phyllis discovered there were ways of making trivia meaningful. "I commented on everything to myself," she says. "For example, 'She got up in the morning, put on her slippers and went downstairs.' I commented on life as it continued. It was one long story, of which I was at the heart." As she got older, her reflex narrating found more eventful territory. As a 22-year-old Red Cross nurse during the second world war, she attended a lecture in which a plucky volunteer was fed solution through a tube in her nose. "I thought, now if I were writing a detective story, that would be a very good way of killing someone." She had powers of dissociation, an inclination to study her own reaction to things. She knew from the start that she was a novelist. Phyllis Dorothy White (James is her maiden name) is 80 and about to publish her 17th book, Death In Holy Orders, the 12th to feature Commander Adam Dalgliesh.

She lives in Holland Park and welcomes visitors with a gusty wrench of the door and a jubilant "hello". Her demeanour - wide features, plain dress, a quickness to exclamation - has long been used to diminish her authority as one of Britain's most popular crime writers. "The sweet little lady who now wears Agatha Christie's crown", is how one tabloid introduced her to readers after eight successful novels, and James is often referred to in terms similar to those adopted for the title of her 1972 bestseller, An Unsuitable Job For A Woman - someone who, by virtue of her appearance, is judged too mimsy for the butch world of her chosen profession. Two years ago, in a joint interview with Ruth Rendell, the writers were asked by a Daily Telegraph reporter, "how two respectable, middle-class ladies" could be involved in the "sordid world of crime fiction?" In her autobiography, Time To Be In Earnest, James refers to herself as "an elderly grandmother who writes traditional English detective fiction", although not, one senses, without a little irony.

In fact, the "sweet little lady" of the cosseted middle classes had withstood two major encounters with mental illness, the first when her mother was hospitalised, the second when her husband, Connor, returned from the war irreversibly damaged. For 30 years, she had worked her way up the civil service. For 10 years, she was a senior administrator in the forensic science service at the Home Office and the police and criminal law departments, harvesting details for her books while consolidating a substantial career. Curiously, James identifies indolence as one of her chief short comings. She is very bad in the afternoons, she says and tasks that bore her, like letter-writing and paperwork, are only grudgingly and belatedly attended to. For the past 10 years she has been helped in these labours by her assistant, Joyce. But for 25 years she not only worked full-time, attended night school to qualify as a medical record-keeper and cared - albeit with the aid of her parents-in-law - for two daughters and an incapacitated husband, but also rose every morning at 6am and wrote for two hours before work, all of which she puts down to necessity.

"My most valuable trait is tenacity," she says, "but what got me where I am now is courage." It is for this reason that friends defend James as a novelist first, and as a writer of detective fiction second, an odd distinction necessitated by the general sniffiness towards crime writing, and the peculiar contempt reserved for its female practitioners. "She is like the Dickens or the Trollope of the genre," says Frances Fyfield, fellow crime writer. "She is the weight, the ballast, and she has dragged detective fiction kicking and screaming into the 21st century." "People can see detective fiction as an easy way into getting published," says Joan Smith, journalist and author. "There are certain rules to be followed, a template, and that means much of it can be not very good. The fact is that PD James is a very good writer. Some detective fiction is OK to read on the plane, but doesn't give you anything to think about afterwards.

She uses it to explore bigger themes." James's vehicle is Adam Dalgliesh, a chief inspector on his first outing in Cover Her Face (1962), now a commander at the Met aided by two detectives, Kate Miskin and Piers Tarrant, characters through whom James has tried to modernise her gentle depiction of the police force. Dalgliesh is a frustrated poet, a graduate capable of the sort of introspection that, for the last three books, has been offset by the more modish preoccupations of kate Miskin. For the purposes of balance, Miskin was brought up on a predominantly black council estate in south London after being abandoned by her mother. "If I was starting now, I would almost certainly have a woman professional police officer [as the main character]," says James, "and that would be perfectly logical. But when I began, in the late 50s, it was a very different world. Women in the police force mostly dealt with issues concerning women and children.

I don't think they were even in the detective force, so I had no choice about sex." In keeping with the tradition of English crime fiction, she could have made her protagonist an amateur sleuth rather than a professional officer. The books she most admired, those by Dorothy L Sayers, featured an amateur detective. But James was aiming for realism (one of her favourite compliments, she says, came from the head of a regional murder squad, who told her Dalgliesh was a "good cop") and she thought it would be better served by a professional officer. Borrowing the name Dalgliesh from her old English teacher, Miss Maisie Dalgliesh, she attached him to the Met, where she thought he would come across a wider range of investigations than a rural detective. "I gave him the qualities I admire because I hoped he might be an enduring character and that being so, I must actually like him. I can't help thinking that logically he would have been a musician. There's something about him that reminds me of my more musical friends.

But I don't know enough about music to make this credible, whereas I do understand the poetic imagination, so I thought, all right, I'll make him a poet." He wasn't to be distracted by a family, so she killed off his wife in childbirth and had Dalgliesh throw himself into work as a way of escaping the loneliness. "Dalgliesh is probably the most intelligent officer in modern detective fiction," says Ruth Rendell, author of the Inspector Wexford novels and James's closest rival. "He is the sort of person readers like to think the police might be like - sensitive and elegant, not elitist like Dorothy L Sayers's Peter Wimsey. He is the sort of person you wouldn't mind being interviewed by." None the less, accusations of elitism have occasionally arisen. During a radio interview five years ago, James attempted to explain how contrast is at the root of good crime writing by arguing that middle-class murderers make better characters, because the contrast between their ugly deeds and their urbane environment has a more dramatic effect. This was seized on, in some quarters of the crime-writing world, as covert advancement of the theory that the middle classes are more capable of making moral choices than the lower.

One of the critical voices was Mark Timlin, creator of the fictional detective Nick Sharman, who, as a drug using, university drop out, is as far from Dalgliesh as the dimensions of the genre will allow. "Phyllis is talking a lot of nonsense," he said in an interview at the time. He said that James's criminals were far removed from "the reality on the streets of south London" and rounded on the Crime Writers Association as "snobbish and stuffy" thanks largely to her and those like her. Rendell leaps immediately to James's defence. "She writes about all sections of the community - you don't have to be upper class to feature in her books." And this is true, although James's original premise ensures that her novels tend to be set in colleges and hospitals - environments in which most of the characters are highly educated. "But she writes intelligently about crime," says Fyfield. "She was one of the first detective writers to put pain into crime fiction - compassion, real suffering." There is no emotional squeamishness in James's fiction.

Death In Holy Orders is set in a theological college, and James doesn't flinch from dumping a body in the church or tackling, alongside the momentous occasion of Dalgliesh's first flirtation, mental illness, suicide and a gambit of ugly human emotions. Neither is she a prude. The novel includes sympathetic portrayals of an incestuous couple and, more controversially, a priest with a conviction for child abuse. "For a detective story," she insists, "the contrast between respectability and planned brutality is of the essence. I think contrast does intensify horror. If you have appalling and violent events happening in a civilised place, it's a great deal more horrific. I think it was WH Auden who said: 'The single body on the drawing-room floor is more horrific than the bullet-riddled body on Raymond Chandler's mean streets'. And Auden felt that very strongly - that you want a contrast between order and hierarchy and apparent goodness and the horror of the deed." There is a difference, says James, between the public's interest in real-life crimes and the popularity of the detective fiction genre. "With the detective story there is horror - I think one needs to make the murder realistic.

But I think the main attraction isn't the horror, it's the puzzle, the bringing of order out of disorder." She is intensely interested in and repelled by violence, and has confessed to a disproportionate fear of intruders. "I don't agree with Ruth Rendell that motivation is more interesting than the act of murder. The physical act of killing a human being has an awesome and horrible fascination. All that flesh to dispose of, all that blood to be washed away, so many lies to be told." Which, for PD James, is where the story begins. Phyllis James encountered no physical violence during her childhood, but there was enough emotional disturbance to leave her with the impression that the world was an unreliable place. She was born in Oxford in 1920, the eldest of three children each born 18 months apart. Her father Sidney was an Inland Revenue official and remote from his children. Her mother Dorothy suffered from a mental illness that might be treatable at home today, but in the 30s confined her to hospital. James says: "In one sense, I was very lucky - I've always felt at home in the world.

But yes, I did feel that in some ways it was a frightening place and those two things don't seem very easy to reconcile. I was a child of a not very happy marriage and therefore I think it was a childhood of some apprehension, living in a sense with fear, that things might erupt, that things might go wrong." Her mother's illness, she says quietly, ensured that she grew up prematurely. The insecurity is apparent still in James's lingering fear of violence, and more obscurely in her dislike of the distorting effects of great pressure. She will not accept money in advance of writing, since the burden of having to earn it back - even at this advanced stage in her reputation - will, she says, interfere with getting the job done. "Suppose I took a huge advance for the next two books?" she has said. "Will they be any good? Will the publishers like them? Will they wish they hadn't given me that huge amount?" For years after becoming a published author she continued to work full-time for the Home Office and to insist that she was not a "professional" writer. Writing was never something she did under duress, but because she chose to.

It was clear from the beginning, however, that writing was one of the few constants in her choppy existence. Her happiest childhood memories are of books. "I read from a very early age. My mother used to buy us comics every week: the Rainbow and one called Tiger Tim. She read them to us when we were three or four. And then, one day, I suddenly discovered I could read it. I was probably helped by the pictures. But I remember that moment of thinking, I don't have to wait for her! I can read it myself!" It was a moment paralleled 40 years later when she heard that her first novel had been accepted by Faber. "It was certainly one of the great moments of my life," she says. "I remember dancing for joy." Her education was short: she left school at 16, armed with a thorough knowledge of Shakespeare and the Bible, which for the purposes of becoming a writer she found quite adequate. She is scandalised that today's school curriculum pays such scant attention to the Bible. "This is so much part of our history and our literature that one would suppose that the King James Bible would be a set book. One was brought up listening to some of the most wonderful English prose.

The cadences stayed with me. It's amazing that we can so neglect it." In retrospect, James thinks that had the money had been available, she would have liked to go to university and become a barrister. As for the police force, she would have found the administration irksome, but reckons she has a talent for sniffing out the truth. "I imagine, without being conceited, that I would have been a good detective for two reasons: people do tend to tell me things, quite astonishing things sometimes, often on quite short acquaintance. And I do seem to have an idea when people are lying." In the end, however, the career she took up fed as much into her writing as she would have got from anywhere (the nursing demonstration with the tube was used to dispatch a character in her fourth book, Shroud For A Nightingale). In 1949, James moved to London and joined the NHS, where she was responsible for the administration of psychiatric outpatients (details were used in a Mind To Murder, 1963).

She stayed in the civil service for 30 years, accruing enough qualifications to enter the Home Office in 1968 and work first as an administrator for the forensic science service (Death Of An Expert Witness, 1977), and then in the criminal law department. "I couldn't bear not to be a success at the job. I am ambitious. Inevitably, I qualified myself for promotion. Whether it's a matter of personal pride, if I'm doing it, I want to succeed at it." Knowing of her desire to write, her mother suggested she turn the experiences of her first job into "a cheerful book about all these lovely people in hospital, where a nice nurse falls in love with a lovely doctor". James suspects that her mother always knew that "within the first chapter there'd be a dead body in the sluice room and the nice nurse would probably have done it". Through her 20s and early 30s, James waited for a convenient moment to begin her writing career, but none came. Her life at home in London was not easy. Connor Bantry White was an Anglo-Irish doctor whom she had married at 21, after meeting him at the Festival Theatre in Cambridge.

They had three happy years together before he went off to war with the Royal Army Medical Corps and returned with his mental health broken. Their two daughters, Clare and Jane, who went on to become a midwife and a teacher, were largely cared for by James's parents-in-law at their home in Ilford, Essex. Connor White was admitted to hospital for psychiatric treatment, where he adopted the name Ted and played eccentric games of football with the other patients. It was not unknown for the goalkeeper, distracted by voices in his head, to stand immobile while the ball shot past into the net. "One suffers with the patient and for oneself," writes James of her husband's illness, in her autobiography. "Another human being who was once a beloved companion can become not only a stranger, but occasionally a malevolent stranger." After years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, Connor died at home in 1964, aged 44. During this time, it occurred to James that a convenient moment to start her writing career would never present itself and that if she didn't hurry, she would wind up "unfulfilled as a human being". At 35, she began her early morning regime.

Detective fiction was an obvious choice, since it reflected her own interests and, she thought, had a good chance of being published. "It's a kind of instinct, really," she says. "I read a lot of classical detective stories when I was a girl, it was my light reading. So to an extent it seemed to come about naturally. The novel is a way in which the writer's own enthusiasms, interests, compulsions, maybe even neuroses, are rearranged in a form that he or she hopes will be compelling and attractive to the reader." There were two principles on which James was immoveable: that the intricacy of a plot could never make up for poor writing ("I find with my own reading, that it doesn't matter how exciting a book is: if it's badly written one just can't be bothered with it."); and that an author must always write with the reader in mind, and not the publisher or the book market. James talks about this with a sort of belligerent modesty. "At the end of a book, I want to feel, well that's as good as I can do - not as good, perhaps, as other people can do - but it's as good as I can do.

There are thousands of people who do like, for their recreational reading, a classical detective story, and I think they are entitled to have one which is also a good novel and well written. Those are the people I write for.. They don't want me to adapt to what I think is the popular market. They want a good novel, honestly written and I think they are jolly well entitled to it." "Some modern detective fiction can be very didactic, used as a vehicle for a lecture," says Joan Smith. "But James never does that to her readers. The story comes first." After experimenting with Phyllis James and Phyllis D James, PD James was chosen because she thought it would look enigmatic on a book spine. It didn't occur to her that she would be mistaken for a male author, and when someone pointed it out, she did not see it as a particular advantage. It is rare, she believes, for readers to reject a book because they dislike the sex of the author, especially in crime fiction. Before writing, she constructed a chart to keep track of who was doing what, where and with whom, planning and structure which took a whole year.

After five years of early mornings, she sent an agent Cover Her Face, a detective story in which Adam Dalgliesh investigates the murder of Sally Jupp, a parlourmaid found dead in mysterious circumstances on the day after the church fete. James finds the book dated now, confined to the cosy, domestic setting of an English village in the shadow of its Elizabethan manor, that puts it very much in the Agatha Christie mould. In the 40 years since, her novels have had to keep pace with great advancements in modern policing. DNA testing has caused her some trouble, since it leaves no room for doubt and could solve a crime in the first chapter. In Death In Holy Orders it is introduced to the storyline only at the last minute, after more traditional policing has been exhausted. The book also contains references to the Macpherson report into racism and the latest policing methods. It is important to her to remain contemporary. Cover her Face was a critical success, but it was the Black Tower (1975), in which Adam Dalgliesh, grown disillusioned with the force, investigates the death of a friend at a care home in Dorset, which Kingsley Amis called "almost Iris Murdoch with murder in it".

Financially, the breakthrough was Innocent Blood (1980), one of the few novels not to feature Dalgliesh, in which an adopted 18-year-old girl discovers the identity of her murderous true parents. The paperback rights went for £380,000, the film rights for £145,000, which was more than she had earned in 10 years at the Home Office. She retired happily. "I started out as more of a cult writer. The one that broke through here was Shroud For A Nightingale. Then the huge international bestseller was Innocent Blood. At the beginning of the week I was relatively poor and at the end of the week I wasn't." Did they make an enormous fuss of her at the Home Office? James laughs. "No dear, the Home Office doesn't make a fuss. Just occasionally people would come up at Christmas and say 'We want to give the Home Secretary one of your books, would you mind signing it?' Otherwise, no. I was Mrs White there, you see. They knew I was a writer, but there was a general feeling that you don't encourage people in hubris.

It was very funny really." It was while writing the opening scenes of Devices And Desires, her 12th book, that James had the most powerful sense of her own duality, of being someone who both experienced things and stood aside and watched them, a self-consciousness that she believes might only be lost during extreme agony or the death of a loved one. It is the closest she comes to delineating the process of her writing: "A girl is on a lonely road and begins to remember that there's a psychopathic serial murderer loose. And we know she's going to be killed, because the book opens with a reference to her as the fifth victim. It's a terrifying opening. Now when I was writing it, I was, of course, that girl. But with another part of my mind I was thinking, well, I wonder if I ought to have a moon, or whether that's going a bit far? What have we got on each side of the road? We must have lots of bushes so you can feel that people might be lurking. And I think I'll have a car coming past, because that will seem reassuring, but obviously it goes past at speed and there's no help there.

"You think, how do I increase the menace? You feel the emotion of the girl and at the same time wonder how best it can be conveyed." James does not know if there is another book in her. She always waits for an idea to possess her, usually inspired by a particular location. Her great regret is that she didn't start writing sooner, although if Death In Holy Orders turns out to be her last book, she won't complain. With the promise of a relationship between Dalgliesh and Emma Lavenham, a Cambridge academic, hanging in the air, however, she is pretty sure there is another one coming. "I want it to be quite subtle; I don't want to have buttocks heaving everywhere. They are both private people." If another book doesn't arrive, she has plenty to occupy her. Afternoon indolence not withstanding, there is a briskness to PD James that shows itself in her enthusiasm for public duty: she has served as a governor of the BBC, a board member of the British Council and is president of the Society of Authors. In 1991 she was created a Tory life peer, Baroness James of Holland Park.

The pick-your-ideas up, anti-dogma of old-style Conservatism has always appealed and she is a regular guest speaker at local party level. She has told her daughters that in the event of a debilitating illness, she doesn't want to linger but would prefer to be "put out of my misery". In April, she flies to Texas for a book tour. "It has been a very busy life," she says, with a touch of defiance. "But a busy life by compulsion." Life at a glance Phyllis Dorothy White, Baroness James of Holland Park Born: August 3 1920, Oxford. Education: Cambridge Girls High School. Married: 1941 Connor Bantry White, died 1964 (two daughters Jane, Clare). Career: Administrator, NHS 1949- 68; Principal, Home Office police dept 68-72; criminal policy dept 72-79.

Publications: Cover Her Face 62; A Mind To Murder 63; Unnatural Causes 67; Shroud For A Nightingale 71; The Maul And The Pear Tree (with TA Critchley) 71; An Unsuitable Job For A Woman 72; The Black Tower 75; Death Of An Expert Witness 77; Innocent Blood 80; The Skull Beneath The Skin 82; A Taste For Death 86; Devices And Desires 89; The Children Of Men 92; Original Sin 94; A Certain Justice 97; Time To Be In Earnest (autobiography) 99. Honours: Life peer 1991.

Question: What is the first name of Commander Dalgliesh, the character created by author PD James?
Answer: Adam