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Books by this Author:
In Detail:
The Lighthouse (2005)
The Murder Room (2003)
Death In Holy Orders (2001)
A Certain Justice (1997)

Others:
The Private Patient (2008)

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   Author Biography

Browse a biography of P.D. James.
Plus: Book summary, excerpts and reviews at BookBrowse.com.

P.D. James
P.D. James
Photo © Ulla Montan
Books by this author at BookBrowse:
The Private Patient
The Lighthouse
The Murder Room
Death In Holy Orders
A Certain Justice
Biography

Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park OBE, better known as P. D. James, was born on August 3 1920 in Oxford, the eldest daughter of an Inland Revenue Official.  The family moved first to Wales and then, when she was 11, to Cambridge where she attended the Cambridge High School for Girls.  Due to financial pressures at home she left school when she was 16, first following her father into the tax office, then working in a theatre where she met her husband, Ernest Connor Bantry White, who was training to be a doctor.

They married in 1941 and had two daughters during the war years - she named her second daughter after her favorite author, Jane Austen.  Connor was sent to India during World War II with the Royal Army Medical Corps and returned mentally disabled. He was repeatedly hospitalized and finally institutionalized, before he passed away in 1964.

Taking on the financial responsibility for the family, James (who had been a nurse during the war) found work as a hospital clerk and through sheer persistence and intelligence worked her way up to principal hospital administrator at the North West Regional Hospital Board, London, in charge of five psychiatric hospitals.  She wrote her first novel, Cover Her Face (the first in the Adam Dalgliesh series) on the train to and from work; it was published in 1962. In 1968, she became a principal in the criminal policy department of the British Home Office, where she worked until she was able to retire in 1979 to write full-time. 

She was a Governor for the BBC (1988-93), and Chairman of the Literature Advisory Panel at both the Arts Council of England (1988-92) and the British Council (1988-93). She was awarded the OBE in 1983 and created a Life Peer (Baroness James of Holland Park) in 1991. 

She sits in the House of Lords (the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, comparable to the US Senate) as a Conservative.  She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.  She chaired the Booker Prize Panel of Judges in 1987 and has been President of the Society of Authors since 1997.  She has also received honorary degrees from many universities including Downing College, Cambridge; St Hilda's College, Oxford and Girton College, Cambridge. 

She has been awarded major prizes for her crime writing in Great Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia. In 1999 she received the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award for long term achievement. She is published widely overseas including the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Argentina.

She says that her influences include Dorothy L. Sayers, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but that her favorite novelist is Jane Austen ("an absolute mistress of construction").

She is the author of more than 20 books, most of which have been adapted for TV.  Her autobiography, Time To Be In Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, was published in 2000.

Partial Bibliography

Inspector Adam Dalgliesh Mysteries
Cover Her Face (1962)
A Mind to Murder (1963)
Unnatural Causes (1967)
Shroud for a Nightingale (1971)
The Black Tower (1975)
Death of an Expert Witness (1977)
A Taste for Death (1986)
Devices And Desires (1989)
Original Sin (1994)
A Certain Justice (1997)
Death in Holy Orders (2001)
The Murder Room (2003)
The Lighthouse (2005)


Cordelia Gray Mysteries
Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972)
The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982)


Novels
Innocent Blood (1980)
The Children of Men (1992).

Copyright BookBrowse.com 2006.

This biography was last updated on 11/06/2006.
A note about the biographies
We try to keep BookBrowse's biographies both up to date and accurate. However, with over 1,500 lives to keep track of it's inevitable that some won't be as current or as complete as we would like. So, please help us - if the information about a particular author is out of date, inaccurate or simply very short, and you know of a more complete source, please let us know. Authors and those connected with authors: If you wish to make changes to your bio, please send your complete biography as you would like it displayed so that we replace the old with the new.

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