The Black Tower

About the Author

P. D. JAMES was born in Oxford in 1920. She married a doctor and had two daughters, the second born in the midst of a German bomb attack during World War II. After her husband returned from the war incapacitated, she went to work in the National Health Service and the British Civil Service. She worked in various departments for thirty years, including the Police and Criminal Law Divisions of the Home Office, and later served as a magistrate and on the Board of Governors of the BBC. Her first novel, Cover Her Face, was published in the UK in 1962, and she has gone on to write seventeen critically acclaimed crime novels. She began writing an autobiography at the age of seventy-seven, following Dr. Johnson’s advice that at seventy-seven it is “time to be in earnest.” Time to Be in Earnest was published in 2000. In 1991, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park. Baroness James lives in London and Oxford.