The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories

Foreword

Like so many crime writers, P. D. James was drawn to her vocation out of love. Before she took up her pen, she was a keen reader of detective novels, and over her long career she remained fascinated by the so-called Golden Age that followed the end of the First World War. But she was more than a fan. She applied her keen intelligence to what she read and developed a genuine expertise on the subject. I once heard her lecture on the four Queens of Crime—Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh—and she even wrote a fascinating monograph on the subject, Talking About Detective Fiction. That love for the work of her predecessors is evident in this collection of her short stories: she picks the pockets of the mechanics of Golden Age plotting; Agatha Christie is referenced several times; and there are knowing nods to the conventions of traditional “cosy” mystery stories.

This appropriation of the conventions of the past sometimes misleads people into thinking of P. D. James as a cosy writer. The reality is that she was anything but cosy, and she takes on those conventions only to subvert them in an often witty way. But one thing in particular sets P. D. James apart from the mainstream tradition of Golden Age English crime fiction, with its stately homes and bourgeois villages where reality never rears its ill-mannered head. She understands that murder is nasty and brutal, that it is fuelled by the most malevolent of motives, and she’s not afraid to face that darkness head-on. Her understanding of what she often called “wickedness” is creepily accurate. There’s nothing cosy about the murders in these stories, however much the settings mimic their forerunners.

And those settings are another hallmark of P. D. James’s work. Her stories are always very specifically located in terms both of time and place. She is meticulous in her descriptions, summoning up backdrops against which we can readily picture the events as they unfold. She makes those settings work for a living—they create atmosphere and often foreshadow what is to come. Here is our first sight of Stutleigh Manor: “It loomed up out of the darkness, a stark shape against a grey sky pierced with a few high stars. And then the moon moved from behind a cloud and the house was revealed; beauty, symmetry and mystery bathed in white light.” We know right now that something sinister and mysterious lies ahead.

As well as wickedness, P. D. James understood the importance of respectability. She wrote about people who would kill to preserve reputation and status, but who would never do it in a vulgar way. Her elegant prose always plays fair with the reader, and lulls us into a sense of false security, as her killers try to do. Behind those untroubled façades, the malice and suspense build, taking us to places that are dark, vicious and shocking. But always beautifully written. These stories are a delicious gift to us at a time when we thought we would read no more of P. D. James’s work.