James’s apprenticeship in crime fiction became a lifelong commitment, as she came to believe “it is perfectly possible to remain within the constraints and conventions of the genre and be a serious writer, saying something true about men and women and their relationships and the society in which they live”. To suggest that the formal constraints of crime fiction prevent its practitioners from producing good novels “is as foolish as to say that no sonnet can be great poetry since a sonnet is restricted to 14 lines”, she argued.
Speaking in 2001 at the launch of Death in Holy Orders, her 11th Dalgliesh novel, James explained that her success was founded on the belief that plot could never make up for poor writing and that authors should always focus on the reader.
“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.”
Her good was pretty good, if you ask me.
Heck, from working on short stories… the constraints can often make things better. Or, more to the point, the constraints can often force the author to be better in order to actually tell the story they want to tell in the limited format. Novels can have lots of extra elbow room for side plots and distractions that you can’t afford in a short story.
I’ve seen some pretty good stories done in SF in two pages. It’s still possible to demonstrate an unreliable narrator and show a multi-level story even within those constraints.
Anyone who is both a James and a Jane Austen fan will enjoy Death Comes to Pemberly, James’ sequel to Pride and Prejudice. It’s not a Dalgliesh style murder mystery and Lizzie and Darcy do not become Nick and Nora Charles. It is a good mystery novel and James does proper homage to Austen.
I’d never heard of PD James before. I don’t normally read crime/detective fiction, so that might be the reason, or it could be that I just have blinders on. I’m definitely going to read her first novel, she sounds like she was an amazing person.
Also: Al Dente@2, thanks for the followup recommendation!
I wonder if you’re familiar with Henry Lawson, one of Australia’s best (the best, in my estimate) authors, and a great proponent of the sketch format. He stated:
“I thought the short story was a lazy man’s game, second to ‘free’ verse, compared with the sketch. The sketch, to be really good, must be good in every line.”
She was great at setting the scene. That’s what you need in a crime novel.
No, I’m not. May have to look him up.
As mentioned, I have read a number of ‘short shorts’, one or two page stories, which fall into similar constraints, though.
I presume ‘sketch’ here means along the scale of a comedy sketch, something that could be performed in a couple of minutes. I’d never heard that term used for straight writing before.