RatingRating: 6/10
- Plot: An unmarried mother employed as a maid at a country house is found strangled in her bolted bedroom the night after the church fête.
- Clues: Traditional and fair, including a locked door and a crowd of people with motives.
- Reveal: Reasonable, but it lacks the psychological charge of James’s later endings.
Sally Jupp, a young unmarried mother taken on as a maid at Martingale, the Maxie family’s manor, is resented by almost everyone. She is clever, sharp-tongued and ambitious. On the night of the annual fête she announces that the son of the house has proposed to her. By morning she is dead in her room.
Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh arrives from Scotland Yard, and the novel follows a classic shape: a closed community, interviews, alibis, and a final gathering.
What distinguishes the book is its social sharpness. P.D. James, then working in hospital administration, is alert to class, charity and resentment, and Sally’s position as a working-class woman who refuses to be grateful is the most interesting thing in it. The Maxies’ decaying gentility is drawn with cool precision.
Dalgliesh himself is still a sketch. The poet-detective of later books is present only in outline, and he spends much of the novel off stage.
The book’s weakness is that James had not yet found her full voice. The structure is borrowed from the Golden Age, the pace is slow, and several characters are types. The solution is logical but doesn’t change how you see the people involved, as her best ones do.
The 6 reflects a competent, well-written debut that is more interesting as a sign of what was coming than for its own sake. Readers who want James at her best should turn to Shroud for a Nightingale or A Taste for Death…
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