P.D. James, Talking About Detective Fiction (Knopf, 2009)
Here's a book with a perfect title. In Talking About Detective Fiction we have, well, um, ah, one of the foremost writers of detective fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, er, talking about detective fiction.
James starts with Trollope and Dickens and traces the history of detective fiction in English down to the present. As is understandable for an Englishwoman, she concentrates on British writers, but she also devotes most of a chapter to Americans Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Besides the history and future of detective fiction, James also talks about the structure of this type of writing and about literary criticism as it applies to it.
So does she say anything worth reading? How could she not? Like her or not (does anyone really not?), James has the breadth of literary (over 20 books) and professional (many years in the policing and justice departments of the British Home Office) experience to evaluate detective fiction from more than one angle. She's also old enough, having been born in 1920, to have watched detective fiction evolve.
P.D. James' writing is exactly what one would expect of a well-educated woman of her generation -- clear and full of words that I'm not sure people learn in high school any more, or run across in their general reading, like purveyor and allotted and disingenuous. Now to my mind this is an advantage, rather like meeting old friends who don't get out much any more, but I'm sure not everyone would see it that way.
Each chapter in Talking About Detective Fiction is introduced with an appropriate cartoon. James also includes a "Bibliography and Suggested Reading."
To get back to my question, Talking About Detective Fiction is exactly the sort of intelligent discussion of a literary genre, by an expert for a non-expert, that I enjoy. If you like detective fiction it is certainly worth reading.
