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Before I introduce the Book Club’s choice for September just a reminder that the Club is devoted to writing that has an East Anglian connection either through the author or by place or more often than not by both. I tend towards choosing books which are located in the region and by authors who have strong connections with it. I think the July choice Sally Beauman’s Landscape of Love didn’t work for me because I was looking forward to a book set mostly in a dilapidated abbey in Suffolk, being a bit of a romantic, but to be honest the abbey could have been anywhere. There was no ‘spirit of place’ in the book and for me that was a big disappointment.
‘Spirit of Place’ is not something that is lacking in the books of PD James the author of Death in Holy Orders the Club’s choice for September. James was born in Oxford in 1920 and moved to Cambridge at the age of 11 where she attended the High School for Girls. She lived and worked in London, latterly, after the death of her husband, with the Criminal Policy Department of the Home Office, retiring in 1979. Her first novel Cover Her Face was published in 1962 and was the first in a series of books featuring Adam Dagliesh, the poetry writing Scotland Yard Detective. It has been said that the strengths of these books is that they belong to the criteria of the main stream novel as much as they do to the detective genre. James, as well as having the great ability to produce stories rich in detail, has been praised for the strength of her characterization and an ability to construct atmosphere.
Atmosphere, spirit of place, whatever you like call it is what pervades Death in Holy Orders published in 2001. The story is set in St Anselms, a theological college, on a remote stretch of the Suffolk coast. A body of one of the students is found on the shore and his wealthy father demands that Scotland Yard re-examine the verdict of accidental death. Commander Adam Dalgleish knows the college from his childhood and as he is due on holiday in the area he agrees to pay a visit. A further murder finds Dalgleish involved in one of the most violent and puzzling cases of his career.
I recently bought a copy of Scene of Crime, A Guide to the Landscapes of British Detective Fiction by Julina Earwaker and Kathleen Becker the authors of Literary Norfolk the book which got me interested in East Anglian writing. In the foreword to the book PD James writes ‘I suspect I am not the only writer of detective fiction whose creative imagination is sparked off, not by a character or an interesting and original method of murder, but by the setting of the crime.’ I would recommend the book which has a comprehensive chapter on East Anglian detective fiction although unfortunately much of it appears to be out of print.
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