When P.D. James meets Elizabeth Darcy

But,hang on,why not crime fiction? Isn’t this a genre that has freed itself of the narrow limits of sleepy (and murderous) English parishes,and expanded the fictional map of the world? From the dank pubs of of Edinburgh and Glasgow to snow-bitten Ystad and the contradictions of China. Like the best of realist fiction of the 19th century,this is a genre that is revelatory of people’s lives,engages with the tumult of social and political change,and explores issues of what is moral and not.

And with P.D. James,dear reader,you are in safe hands.

One of the most distinctive writers of the genre,James’s fictional universe shares little with the simple-minded English village of Agatha Christie,who she dismissed as “a literary conjuror who places her pasteboard characters face downwards and shuffles them with practiced cunning”. Commander Adam Dalgliesh,the detective she created,is a poet and a policeman,with the unsentimental intelligence about human character that the best Austen heroes have. James is an aesthete’s crime writer,her language slow-burns with elegance,and her novels have a remarkable sense of place,set in ancient abbeys or theological colleges,in the backdrop of hauntingly beautiful,and often threatened,English landscapes. Murder,when it happens in a P.D. James novel,is a desecration not just of beauty,but of order and reason.

Order and reason are also at the heart of Jane Austen’s fiction. As a product of the Enlightenment,she was impatient with flights of fancy in men and women,and of sensibility untempered by sense. And is there a genre more indebted to the Enlightenment than crime fiction? If murder ruptures all that is good,only human reason can lead the narrative to a restitution by seeing clearly through the fog of deception.

For James,this new novel marks the “fusion of my two enthusiasms — for the novels of Jane Austen and for writing detective stories”. It’s a connection she has thought over for a while now. In a talk in 1998,she discussed Austen’s Emma as a detective story in which no crime happens. Emma,one of the most superbly plotted pieces of English fiction,takes place in the closed rural setting of Highbury,where a small community is led astray by an outsider,Frank Churchill,about his secret engagement with Jane Fairfax,an orphan who has come to live in the village with her voluble aunt. (In Austen’s world,Churchill’s dishonesty marks him out as immoral,and a disruptive social influence.) Can Emma (and the reader) spot the clues Austen has audaciously scattered through the narrative and find the truth?

The test of Austen’s women characters is often this: to achieve a clear-eyed idea of reality,to come to a better realisation of the complicated balance of social relations. For Emma,that means to be able to tell the Knightleys from the Churchills. For Lizzy,to look through Darcy’s pride for the man that he is. It’s a moment that Dalgliesh/Wallander/John Rebus has reached at the end of many novels — when a crime is solved not simply by cracking the puzzle of disparate clues,but also through the understanding of character and society.

Pemberley,then,that classic Derbyshire setting,“a large,handsome stone building,… neither formal nor falsely adorned”,should be happy hunting ground for P.D. James.