P.D. James and Commander Dagliesh (My Rating: 5+)
Highly superior and thoughtful entertainment with a poet detective
Between 1962 and 2008, P.D. James wrote 16 novels with some appearance of DCI, and later Commander*, Adam Dalgliesh (this includes two with private investigator Cordelia Gray as the main character). “Baroness James of Holland Park” is for my money the best of the British detective writers since Arthur Conan Doyle. I first came across her Dalgliesh in the PBS Mystery series during the 1980’s when hosted by the magnificent Vincent Price and Diana Rigg.
Wikipedia describes Adam Dalgliesh as “an intensely cerebral and private person.” He thinks more than he says and leaves empty spaces that other might fill with babble. (Witnesses and suspects often tell him more than they meant to though they also seek to keep secrets that would be useful for the police to know.) Dalgliesh, also a published poet, admits – to himself at least – that he derives poetic insight from the persons he meets during his investigations. He usually heads a team with two more junior but quite capable detectives, all working out of Scotland Yard. In the latter stories, when he has risen to the rank of commander, he often must also answer to political and bureaucratic demands.
James writes long books filled with detail. She usually begins not with the murder but by telling us about the victim – we know who will die at the outset – and all those who might have reason to kill him or her. We end up with some degree of sympathy for the victim and for the person who will, by the end of the book, turn out to be the killer. James also provides minute descriptions of not only the people and their appearance but every building and room anyone ever enters. At first, I found this a bit overdone. But I came to find the experience of being so immersed quite comforting. We learn a bit about English customs – they drink lots of tea though Dalgliesh and team prefer being fueled by coffee – as well as the interiors, furniture, artworks and architecture of any room or building anyone enters.
Twelve of the Dalgliesh novels were made into TV series with Roy Marsden playing the lead role in the first ten and Martin Shaw in two. While I liked Shaw in the excellent Inspector George Gently, Marsden is for me the definitive Dalgliesh. He conveys perfectly the version in the books, self-contained, attentive, laconic and yet compassionate. The supporting actors are often familiar faces for anyone who has watched lots of British TV and always perfect in their roles. The TV versions do justice to the books while simply showing the bits that James describes in detail. Highly superior and thoughtful entertainment doing justice to her works.
A new Acorn TV version – Dalgliesh – began in 2021. I’ve watched a few. They condense, rearrange, add unnecessary melodrama and flatten the characterizations. Dalgliesh comes off more melancholy than quietly reserved and observant. If you like P.D. James and you’ve run out of other things, maybe worth a try.
* UK police ranks range from constable to commander, going though sergeant, inspector, chief inspector, superintendent, chief superintendent and commander. Chief constables and commissioners fit somewhere in here. I make the “commander” to be equivalent to the military rank of colonel.