Innocent blood

Baulked of my usual diet of ITV3 and its murder mysteries, I turned this week to the P. D. James novel of this name as a substitute, the first time for a while that I have read a novel of hers, although I do not think it is a first. I am, in any event, more familiar with the television productions of her Adam Dalgliesh stories featuring Roy Marsden, not that we have seen any of them for a while either. No doubt they will be back.

Interested to find from the blurb that she was a civil servant for a good chunk of her life, working first for the National Health Service and then for the police & crime parts of the Home Office.

This novel came out shortly after she retired and I thought it smelt a bit of a first novel, a thought which is disabused by consulting Wikipedia which says she was writing for most of her day working life. First novel, because I thought that quite a lot of the writing was rather awkward and because it seemed to me that a lot of the material smelt a bit autobiographical, a bit personal, something which I also associate with debutante writers.

The tale of a girl born to criminally unhappy circumstances, subsequently adopted by a middle class family living in Pimlico (in the sort of house which would now cost a small number of millions) and subsequently caught up in criminally unhappy events. With both the girl and most of the people with whom she has much to do being damaged or incomplete people. Not quite right. But a girl who was also clever enough and lucky enough to get a scholarship to Cambridge, something of which one suspects that James feels denied, perhaps unfairly denied. A girl who turns out to be a writer.

There is quite a lot of tutorial material on social work, sociology, adoption, crime and punishment. Material which all too obviously, for my taste, draws on her day work. Material which clogs up the story which does, nevertheless, manage an unexpected and reasonably gripping ending.

Nevertheless, an interesting read, not least because the main characters are damaged, with the suggestion that happy & whole people are not as thick on the ground as one might like to think. Maybe they are even in the minority. The lead in this book is certainly not happy & whole, although we are left with the impression that she will probably improve with age.

I get on better with Agatha Christie and I don't suppose that I will go out of my way to read another James. Maybe this is because Agatha is more content just to tell a good detective story, perhaps is just better at telling a good story, and while tutorial material is not altogether absent, there is less of it and it is done with a lighter touch. There is also the fun to be had working out how the written word of the book relates to the spoken word of the television adaptation. And this despite the fact that the agnathan prose often seems very flat and lifeless when one starts a story - although one seems not to notice too much once one has got into the thing. A hurdle to be got over rather than a drag.