The Poet Dalgliesh and Kate from the Block: P.D. James's Partners in Crime

Abstract

The interwar years of 1920 to 1940 in Britain provided a cultural context for the Golden Age of crime fiction. Writers of this era - household names such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham - created a fictional environment with a stable, hierarchical class structure that held appeal for a nation jaded by the turmoil and social upheaval created by World War I. Both the setting of the fiction in an isolated cultural and physical space and the basic premise of the resolution involving a return to the stability of an elite social order catered to the desires of the times since, according to Stephen Knight, "the world of the Christie novel ... is a projection of the dreams of those anxious middle-class people who would like a life where change, disorder and work are all equally absent." Golden Age crime fiction presented a destabilizing crime that intruded into a secure society, and then the re-establishment of order by the detective main character. The detective, then, functions to provide both the embodiment of the social order and the means by which it is reinstated. P.D. James, writing thirty to forty years after this Golden Age, adopts some of its strongest stylistic elements in plot, setting and main character while challenging the basic premise of such writing - that the notion of justice is both stable and knowable, and so its re-establishment forms a desirable conclusion to the fiction. In this challenge, James actively engages with justice as a socially embedded concept but often withholds a resolution in social or legal terms in her novels, even while the detective presents a solution to the crime in the traditional manner of Golden Age fiction.