PD James, the acclaimed crime queen has died, aged 94. Books Editor Linda Herrick shares 10 facts about the British writer.
1. Phyllis Dorothy James had a grand title: Baroness James of Holland Park, not bad for a woman who spent her early married life working as a poorly paid National Health clerk while caring for two daughters and a mentally ill husband.
2. Her English teacher was a Miss Dalgleish, a name she later gave to her troubled poet-writing detective, Adam Dalgliesh.
3. Her husband, a schizophrenic, spent a great deal of time in psychiatric hospitals until his death in 1964, possibly a suicide. James worked as a filing clerk while studying hospital administration in evening classes. She first started to write novels in 1959, publishing Cover Her Face in 1962.
4. She rose through the ranks of the British Civil Service as she continued to write, eventually working for the Home Office, appointing scientists and pathologists to forensic science laboratories and advising ministers on juvenile crime. Now writing during in the weekends, she set one of her best thrillers, Death of an Expert Witness, in a forensic lab in East Anglia.
