The Private Patient, PD James

The great thing about reading murder mysteries when life is stressful is that no matter how bad your day was, it was certainly a lot worse for that poor dead person. Somehow we horrible members of mankind find it comforting to know we're slightly better off than someone else. And then there is the lovely predictability of the form of the genre, and habit is always soothing.

PD James is especially good for the seeming paradox of the comforting mystery. She is more British than the Queen, always has people dressing in "fawn" as though beige were the answer, and then her characters drink lots of tea and want to reach out and hold beloved people undergoing grief but hold back and merely watch, yet somehow we are to understand they are nonetheless good and caring....the formality of her world restores order in the troubled mind.

The Private Patient is a relatively recent work, and having just read a very, very old James it had a ring of familiarity. Much like The Skull Beneath the Skin (circa 1982), there is a group of people in a mansion in the country, alas one of them is murdered and then one by one each of the guests is revealed to have motive and means. Well, James churns out these books at a clip and can be forgiven for revisiting a few story lines.

Those who follow her detective, Adam Dalgliesh, who sounds like the dreariest man alive if you strip out James' own infatuation with him, might be distressed to learn that in this one he marries some equally dreary sounding woman named Emma, who for no apparent reason is apparently beloved and revered by everyone who meets her. Dalgliesh is a detective and a poet, and anyone who has ever met a real detective will know how deeply unlikely it is that such a man would exist, if for no other reason than he'd have been laughed off the force long ago. Cops are macho boys' club members, "poets" not allowed.

In this novel the dreary Dalgliesh, who ruminates a lot, doesn't say much, leads a carefully controlled existence, really feels bad that his girlfriend/fiance Emma's close friend has been raped, and really wants to reach out and hold good old sobbing Emma, but decides it's not appropriate to do so. He aches to do it though, but doesn't, because he felt it would be "an insult to her grief" (huh??) and he was "afraid she would withdraw. Anything would be better than that." The man is clearly a cold hearted nutter. If such a response occurred in the real world Emma would have called off the wedding after putting a dagger through his icy chest.

Nonetheless it's an entertaining read with lots of twists, Big Reveals, murky motives, the whole lot. A classic.

There is a nice, very literary bit at the end which is worth pondering -- something you don't find in your average murder mystery:

"It was for her, not him, to decide how much she had been harmed by him. He could have no lasting power over her without her connivance."

Then

"The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all the earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defence against the horrors of the world but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all that we have."