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September 27, 2007
Unnatural Causes - P.D. James
Published in 1967, and hampered by some strangely inappropriate political incorrectness, this novel has dated really badly. Agatha Christies 1960's novels were also out of kilter with the times. Dining at one's club, employing servants and having a country retreat may be things that people still did (and still do), but they weren't treated as normal, in the way they would have been before the war. Society moved on, and English crime fiction took a while to catch up.
Casually mentioning that someone is a cripple, and actively disliking them for this same reason, isn't something a writer would contemplate allowing their hero to do nowadays, yet Inspector Dalgliesh does just that here. He come across as a moody unpleasant person in fact, which I wasn't prepared for. I've never encountered him before, I seem to have somehow missed all the TV series and novels. I'm not sure I want to again.
If these were my only complaints, we'd probably still be OK, but the plot itself is contrived and stupid as well. Dalgliesh is on holiday by the coast when a local writer is found dead in a boat with his hands cut off. This remote part of England is populated by a small community of fairly tedious people who dislike each other, but seem nevertheless to spend a lot of time in each others company. Though it's not his case, Dalgliesh gets involved anyway, antagonising the implausably named Inspector Reckless who gets the case.
The action heads up to London briefly, where we meet a reserved butler and a streetwise prostitute. Along with the egotistical writer and the underappreciated secretary, James has really made no effort here to give any of the novel's characters and individuality. Cardboard cutouts going through the motions.
And when we finally get to the end of the chase, the murderer has very kindly provided a taped confession of why and how they actually did it (yes, that really happens a lot in real life doesn't it?), but by then, you don't really care that much anyway.
This is a terrible book, one I started, gave up for a couple of months, and then finally finished just because I don't like leaving books half read; and because it's very short. I wish I'd never started it though.
Posted by se71 at September 27, 2007 01:03 PM
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