Private eye on human nature

Detective fiction is the literature of escape. It is surprisingly popular with very powerful men in positions of great authority and people whose lives are arduous intellectually. People who are confronted by serious puzzles in their daily lives."

Baroness James of Holland Park is musing on the sort of puzzles one would expect to preoccupy a Conservative peer. "Social puzzles that are beyond anyone's ability to solve, that we pour money into and social workers' time into, although it doesn't seem to make a lot of difference. So there is a comfort in reading something with a puzzle at its heart which is solved by the end of the book, with order being restored."

Who better to ask about the reasons for the ever-increasing popularity of crime fiction than one of the genre's most revered practitioners? P.D. James and I are sitting on the sofa in the living room of her large house in Holland Park. She is bright-eyed as she offers tea, shortbread and insights into the nature of evil. "One wonders," she says, "if people are getting the same satisfaction they did, because what we often get from crime fiction now is not escapism but violence."

Bracing for new shine

The 89-year-old Lady James is trying to recall what first drew the teenage Phyllis in the 1930s, to the so-called Golden Age detective stories. "Those books suggested we live in a moral, comprehensible universe, at a time when there was a great deal of disruption and violence at home and abroad and of course the ever-present risk of war. And we live in times of unrest now, so perhaps we may soon enter another Golden Age."

It is one thing to read detective fiction voraciously, another to write it for five decades in the spare moments of a busy life spent working first for the NHS and then the police and criminal law departments of the Home Office, while bringing up two daughters and coping with the stresses of being married to somebody who was mentally ill: Her late husband, Connor Bantry White, developed a form of schizophrenia after he returned from war service. She says writing was a compulsion — and it had to be detective fiction. "I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern."

But is there something that compels her to write about violent crime? James dismisses my suggestion that she is fascinated by violence. "One is fascinated by the problem of finding a method of murder that is quite right, both for the perpetrator and the victim. That is a technical problem I enjoy. So sometimes the murder is violent because I know the murderer would be violent."

She does, however, admit to a long-standing preoccupation with death. "Since childhood I've been thoroughly interested in it, the complete finality of it. People would say, ‘what are you doing for your summer holiday?' and I always thought, we might not be here for the summer holiday. Which is strange really. But," she adds brightly, "now that I'm nearly 90 it becomes a reasonable concern, frankly!"

Pioneer of sorts

She talks and writes a lot about childhood. "Those years are very important in determining what happens to the adult. Increasingly, I've come to believe that genes are far more important than we used to think they were."

So, I ask, does she think murderers deserve sympathy as the unlucky victims of their genes? "I still believe evil is a strong force in the world and people can deliberately choose it."

James's novels, although full of traditional elements such as red herrings, dodgy alibis and justice done, can shock with their insights into human nature. If, in 40 years' time, Ian Rankin or Val McDermid write their own histories of detective fiction, that is surely how they will celebrate her: as a pioneer among those mystery writers who make their readers see the world more clearly even as they try to pull the wool over their eyes.