History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 8/10

• Plot: A young woman inherits a failing detective agency and takes on its first case: finding out why a Cambridge student hanged himself.
• Clues: Carefully placed and fair, from the way the body was found to the dead man’s books and belongings.
• Reveal: Morally complex, with a final encounter that tests the heroine as much as the solution.
• Science bonus: The client runs a scientific research laboratory, and Cordelia’s forensic reasoning about how the body was found, down to a knot and a lamp, cracks the apparent suicide.

Cordelia Gray is twenty-two and has had an unsettled life. Her business partner, Bernie Pryde, a former policeman, kills himself and leaves her the agency. Her first client, the distinguished scientist Sir Ronald Callender, hires her to discover why his son Mark, who had abandoned his studies at Cambridge, hanged himself in a cottage.

Cordelia moves into the cottage and begins to investigate. She finds signs that Mark’s death was not what it seemed, and she forms an intense identification with the dead young man.

P.D. James creates in Cordelia one of the most appealing detectives of the decade. She is independent, brave, sensitive and self-reliant, a woman determined to succeed in a job everyone assumes she can’t do. The novel was widely read as a response to the rise of feminism, though James resisted such labels.

The Cambridge setting is well drawn, and the Fens landscape around the cottage adds atmosphere. The mystery is clever, and the final section, in which Adam Dalgliesh appears and questions Cordelia, is superb.

The weaknesses are that Cordelia’s youthful intensity can feel sentimental, and some of the Cambridge characters are types. The central solution also relies on elements some readers find melodramatic.

The 8 reflects a fresh, well-crafted and moving novel. Cordelia returned only once, in The Skull Beneath the Skin, but she remains memorable.