Devices and Desires was the first PD James novel I ever read, back in my teens after a long, much-loved run of Agatha Christie. Admittedly, it was quite late in his career to meet the series detective, Adam Dalgliesh, for the first time but it was a wonderful gateway to what was already a remarkable body of work.
Devices and Desires — published in 1989 and the eighth in the 14-novel sequence that began with Cover Her Face in 1962 — is a sparkling showcase for James’s writing. It distils everything that she does brilliantly into one superlative piece of crime fiction: beautiful descriptive writing and a strong sense of place; a consummately plotted detective story that re-energises the genre; and credible crimes that stem naturally from deep-seated personal motivation, not just for murder but for everyday acts of love and hate.
Returning to the book many times since, it’s easy to see why I devoured the backlist and every subsequent novel, and why PD James would go on to be the single most important influence on me as a writer. Its East Anglian setting — on a stretch of coast that I love and was brought up with — also makes Devices and Desires special for me; and it was a visit to that remote beach that gave James her inspiration. “There was a small fishing boat drawn up,” she recalled in a foreword to the book, “and I reflected that the scene hadn’t changed since the Vikings had invaded this coast. And then I turned north and saw on the horizon the stark bulk of an atomic power station. I thought of all the centuries of change on that desolate coast, the contrast between its ruined abbeys and churches … and the symbol of a new and terrifying power.”
• The best shops in London for rare books
James translates that experience into powerful fictional scenes, recreating the same landscape for Dalgliesh: “And now he was passing a second and more dilapidated pillbox and it struck him that the whole headland had the desolate look of an old battlefield, the corpses long since carted away but the air vibrating still with the gunfire of long-lost battles, while the power station loomed over it like a grandiose modern monument to the unknown dead.”
Advertisement
This passage comes early in the book, before the central crimes begin, but James cleverly paves the way for her fictional bloodshed through references to the landscape’s troubled past. The essential bleakness, the barely suppressed violence, is well established — and so we readily believe in the violence that she invents for us. Over the course of the book, the landscape is explored through the eyes of several different characters and each time it adds to the story.
Past and present ebb and flow through these pages like the ever-constant tide: in the scarring and layering of the landscape, and in the way that Dalgliesh revisits his childhood after the loss of his aunt, whose death has brought him back to Norfolk. It’s perhaps the novel where he is at his most personal, made vulnerable by grief and the unwelcome attention surrounding his latest volume of poetry, even by the fact that it is he who finds the body. Just for a moment, before his professional mind kicks in, Dalgliesh experiences the shock and revulsion of a layperson to violent death; it’s a very human reaction and it brings us closer to this famously private, occasionally impenetrable hero.
Phyllis Dorothy James White, aka PD James
BEN GURR FOR THE TIMES
The finding of a body is always a compelling set piece in a PD James novel, a physical expression of the havoc that murder wreaks on loved ones and on society in general. Her writing has a cinematic understanding of fear and horror, and I can still feel the impact that the book’s opening chapter first had on me, where a young girl — close to my own age at the time — misses her bus and finds her way home in the dark, becoming the fourth victim of a serial killer nicknamed the Whistler. In lesser writers, those murders would be the focus of the book; in Devices and Desires, the Whistler is merely a subplot — but that scene still has the power to terrify me.
• The 10 best crime and mystery books of 2024 so far
Some lines in the novel became particularly poignant after James’s death, ten years ago this month. As Dalgliesh sorts through his aunt’s things, pondering inevitably on what she meant to him, he reflects: “Jane Dalgliesh had indeed seemed to him immortal. The very old, he thought, make our past. Once they go, it seems for a moment that neither it nor we have any real existence.” Those of us lucky enough to miss Phyllis as a friend as well as an inspiration felt much the same when she died; in Devices and Desires, though, we have a powerful reminder of the richest of legacies.
Nicola Upson’s latest novel is Shot with Crimson (Faber £9.99); Devices and Desires is being republished by Faber this week (£9.99)
This post was originally published on here
