Adam Dalgliesh is the platonic ideal of the English detective. Though she lived into the twenty-first century, she was born closer to the nineteenth, and you feel it in her writing. In this James was very much a woman of her time she reads more like Sayers than she does Tana French or Louise Penny.
The sentences never waste a word, but they take their time. More, it’s English: you can tell this is a woman who knows her eighteenth and nineteenth century poetry and novels. It’s readable-she was popular, after all-but crisp, detailed, and stylish, too. Put them together, and you’ve got the best of the genre.įirst is the prose. What makes James’s work so royally perfect? The answer may be boring, but it’s true: she’s a master at the mechanics of what makes a mystery novel work. (I’m reading Gladys Mitchell’s Rising of the Moon right now perhaps I’ll come to agree that that half-forgotten peer to Christie is a worthy competitor for the throne.) I’m not a fanatic of the genre, but I’ve read widely across the decades (and across the Atlantic), and I’m not even sure who should come in second. They are, in my humble and mostly uninformed opinion, the finest detective novels in the English language.
#Expanse books in chronological order series
The series spans 14 novels written across 46 years. The Queen is famous for many things, but most of all, and deservedly, for her series featuring Adam Dalgliesh. referendum on leaving the European Union. Born two years after the end of World War I, she lived to see every one of the wonders and horrors of the twentieth century she then died-to give some perspective on the sheer expanse of her life-some 18 months before the U.K. Just before her 90th birthday, in 2009, she published Talking About Detective Fiction, a winsome and leisurely stroll through the genre she mastered, having received it from the reigning women before her (Christie, Sayers, Marsh, et al) and made it her own. From her early 40s to her early 90s she published more than 20 books, one every 2-3 years. Long may she reign, even in death.īorn in 1920, James published her first novel in 1962.
James, or as I affectionately call her, The Queen. Doubtless Rebecca West is chief among all women and men of English letters during this period.
Of all the brilliant British women writers who lived to a good old age in the long twentieth century, who is your favorite? The candidates are many both Mary Midgley and Agatha Christie come immediately to mind.
0 kommentar(er)
