Best-selling detective novelist a lot like her leading man

By MICHELE HEWITSON

At 9 am on a cold London morning Baroness James is sitting at her kitchen table, finishing her tea, beginning to open her mail. From here she can overlook her patio, where the hebes she planted are just beginning to bud.

"There is a table and chairs outside on the patio, so it's quite pleasant if the weather's warm. It is not warm today."

So instead she is holed up in her "cosy, comfortable kitchen," with its "rather pretty wallpaper." She keeps her collection of Staffordshire cups and saucers in a large, old wooden dresser. On the walls are her Victorian prints - one is of a young girl dressed up in her debutante finery - which she describes as "kitchen pictures rather than drawing room pictures."

The table - "I do quite a lot of writing here because, for a table, it's just about right for me and I can spread out all my books and the dictionary" - will no doubt, if her legions of fans have their way and she does not, end its days as the central exhibit in a P.D. James hall of fame.

Baroness James is, of course, the detective fiction writer and creator of the enigmatic, poetry-writing Inspector Dalgliesh. She is also, as her readers well know, a stickler for detail. The detail above has come not from being in James' kitchen with her this morning, but from the writer herself.

If we could peer in through her patio windows, we would see that she is on the phone - to me, who has asked her to describe her surroundings. For two reasons.

The first is to get some idea of how a best-selling Baroness lives. The second is James has written, in what will have to suffice for her autobiography, Fragment of Autobiography: Time to be in Earnest: "The description of a room can be as revealing of character as dialogue or action."

It is an observation Dalgliesh would recognise. In her latest book, Death in Holy Orders, James has her character mimic her own words: "Books, pictures, the arrangement of artefacts sometimes provided more revealing testimony than words."

James knows exactly why we're playing this game.

She is happy to oblige, not least because, as it turns out, she's holding the trump card. What does her detailed description of the room she's sitting in reveal about her character?

"Oh, well," she says, "I'm not sure that the kitchen is as revealing of me as the other rooms in the house." How handy then, I tell her, for her to be in the room which is going to give little away.

She will give a little: "I think it shows that I'm not aggressively modern in my taste, certainly. It's a period house and it's not a sort of steel kitchen. It's a very used kitchen. It's obviously the room of somebody who feels at home in her house and likes to be here. Who likes to be surrounded by comfort and who likes to be surrounded by very many objects which have memories for me."

"Not aggressively modern" is as much insight as James is going to allow.

She is, like her fictional detective, an intensely private person. Describing Dalgliesh she could be describing herself: "He's a reserved man, a rather secret man in some ways." When she wrote Time to be in Earnest, it was in response to growing requests to cooperate with the writing of a biography.

"And I don't really want a biography, so I say that I don't. I think I'm too private to want a biography and I don't want all my friends and family worried."

She realises that there will be one, "when I'm dead and, well, I can't do anything about that."

What she could do was to steal the march on would-be biographers by publishing a diary of one year, between her 77th and 78th birthdays (she will be 81 in August). It is a strange little offering, designed to conceal more than it reveals - and, paradoxically, reveals perhaps more than its author intended - and is littered with more obfuscations and red herrings than a P.D. James detective story.

It reads - I was tempted to wonder whether it was not some glorious, elaborate prank - like the diary of a Victorian lady (James is fascinated by things Victorian) thrust into the modern world with all of its attendant irritations: people using cellphones in train carriages, the Millennium Dome, "almost all loud noises and, in particular, pop music."

She is one who loves the Book of Common Prayer, church architecture, and the novels of Jane Austen.

James was born and bred, as she writes, "in the distinctive odour of Anglicanism." It has, you feel rather than are told, sustained her through what have been some difficult years.

The youngest of three children, James' father was a tax inspector, a distant man whose wife was diagnosed as mentally ill and was committed to a psychiatric institution when James was in her mid-teens.

James now believes that her mother suffered, not from madness, but from "a menopausal incident. I think nowadays she wouldn't have been hospitalised at all. She would have been given drugs and been perfectly all right in the community."

She feels, she says, "sadness for her [tellingly not for herself], but I mean, I can't feel extra sad because the knowledge wasn't there. It's no good regretting what was not possible."

James was married in 1941, when she was 21, to a young medical student, Connor White. They had two daughters.

White was sent to India with the Royal Army Medical Corps and returned a man crippled by mental illness.

He never worked again and spent the rest of his life in and out of institutions. He died in 1964, aged 44.

James developed a career as a bureaucrat in the National Health Service, later as principal in charge of the forensic science service in the police department to support the family.

She refers to Connor's illness, and his death, but obliquely, and through the experience of others. She writes about Ted Hughes, whose wife, Sylvia Plath, killed herself: " ... no one who has never had to live with a partner who is mentally ill can possibly understand what this means. Two people are in separate hells, but each intensifies each other."

She does not write of her marriage, "except to say that I have never found, or indeed looked for, anyone else with whom I have wanted to share the rest of my life. I think of Connor with love and grief for all he has missed."

There is something very moving about that simple tribute to a marriage which cannot have been easy.

In a confessional age, too, it seems admirable that she believes, "I owed it to my husband and children to be discreet about his illness. I had a loyalty to them."

It tells you quite a bit about James, that she has, for example, two of the attributes she most admires in others: fortitude and self-control. They are, she laments "qualities which are not much in fashion." She tries, certainly she says, to achieve such attributes. It's a shame that others do not also aspire.

"I think things have changed considerably. I find it very strange, very strange.

"I mean nowadays in England people go to be counselled whenever anything happens to them," she says, managing to sound baffled and disapproving all at once.

And then: "I tremble to think what would have happened in the last war if everybody who had been bombed had wanted counselling. You know we just had to get on and do the best we could."

It is an old-fashioned, out-of-favour notion, and adds to the perception of a woman caught, not quite comfortably, in a time she can't quite fathom - an aggressively modern time. (She calls cars "motors" and she does not motor herself.)

It makes sense, then, to discover that she was drawn to the detective novel - not for James the more crass-sounding modern term murder mystery - as a means of writing "order out of disorder."

Dalgliesh is a man whose job is to do just that. He is also, although she will only admit to "respect" not love of her character, a man whom his creator would much like to spend time with.

"I gave him the qualities which I personally admire: of intelligence, compassion without sentimentality, fortitude, love of literature and architecture. I made him a poet."

Her new Dalgliesh book, Death in Holy Orders, is set in an Anglican theological college on the East Anglian coast she loves to write about. In it she has also given Dalgliesh a chance to fall in love again after she killed off his wife in childbirth in the first of the Dalgliesh series.

"He is on the brink of it," she says. "So I don't quite know what's happened. He hasn't confided in me yet. I'll be interested to see what has happened."

And she is not - there are no surprises in this plot development - going to reveal anything more than that.