Phyllis Dorothy James White, b. 1920, Oxford, England.
Phyllis James was the eldest of three children in a family she described as not well-off or very close. Her father was an Inland Revenue officer, and her affection for the East Anglian countryside dates from family holidays in Lowestoft. She was sent to the Cambridge High School for Girls, a prestigious academy, but left at 16 and never got any further education.
She was 19 when World War II began, and married Dr. Connor Bantry White less than two years later, just before his departure for the Royal Army Medical Corps. They had two daughters, born during the war, and Phyllis stayed at home with them, coping on an Army stipend, until Dr. White returned at war's end. However, he was a sadly changed man: he had developed schizophrenia and was to be in and out of mental hospitals until his death in 1964. Not only was he difficult to live with, but he had no war pension, and the family was very poor. Phyllis went to evening classes and got a job as a hospital clerk, but she still had to rely on her in-laws to help the family scrape by.
By sheer persistence and intelligence, she worked her way upward through the British Civil Service until in 1968, already a published author, she became a Principal in the criminal policy department of the British Home Office. As an administrator, she was responsible for the appointment of scientists to Britain's forensics laboratories and advising ministers on juvenile crime issues, experience which she used repeatedly in her writing. When her fame as a writer took off dramatically with the publication of Death of an Expert Witness in 1977, she was able to consider retiring early to devote more time to writing, which she did in 1979. She has a house in London and a cottage in Southwold, Essex, and in retirement her non-writing activities have included chairing the British Society of Authors, acting as a local magistrate, sitting on the governing board of the BBC, and entertaining her grandchildren. In 1983 she was awarded the Order of the British Empire, and in 1991 was created a Life Peer by Queen Elizabeth; her formal title is Baroness James of Holland Park.
Her first novel (Cover Her Face), written in 1962 when financial pressures had eased a little, was intended as a practice run for a 'serious' novel she intended to write the following year, but it sold immediately and after several more books she came to value the restrictions and challenges of mystery writing. (She has also written a science-fiction novel, The Children of Men [1992]--where she imagines a future in which all the men on earth have been rendered infertile--as well as a volume of memoir, Time to Be in Earnest [1999].) At first her books were rather formulaic, but beginning with Shroud for a Nightingale, she began to add more of the personalities and details that mark her later writing. By the 1980s, her books were as much modern novels as they were detective stories, and in fact Innocent Blood (1980) has no puzzle element at all. In James's later works, the tone also seems to darken, and her endings become more bittersweet as her characters are variously scarred by the events of the novels. She researches her settings in detail and has a love of architecture and buildings that frequently shows up in the stories.
Her usual detective, Chief-Inspector (later Commander) Adam Dalgliesh, is a remarkably fleshed-out and complex character. He is a dedicated and efficient policeman, clever and professional, very sensitive but reticent and cold about emotional matters in his own life (his wife having died in childbirth years ago). He is also a respected poet. James said that she originally meant his character to contrast with the classic 'gentlemanly amateur' detective, and took his name from a former English mistress of hers. One suspects that Ms. James herself has more in common with the courageous young Cordelia Gray, who takes Dalgliesh's place in two of the 14 books-- and who is distantly connected to him; her mentor and one-time boss Bernie once worked with Dalgliesh in the C.I.D. In later books, two of Dalgliesh's sergeants become recurring characters as well: Piers Tarrant and Kate Miskin provide yet another point of view on events, and Kate in particular is a complex and interesting narrator.
P. D. James's detective stories have come to be respected as novels and have become widely known through TV dramatizations. She has said that she is a novelist first and a mystery writer second, but her mission has always been to combine the two.