When I get a little money . . .

"When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.” So said Desiderius Erasmus, Luther's disputation partner in the free will controversy. I wonder if Erasmus considered *not* buying so many books . . . was his will free in that regard?

For my own part, I think I will side with Luther. Especially when it comes to the buying of many books. Just when I thought we might read nothing more from the pen of Baroness James of Holland Park, here comes the one volume she could have written which I am simply compelled to purchase. Even in hardbound. Even at full retail price.

Talking About Detective Fiction

In a perfect marriage of author and subject, P. D. James—one of the most widely admired writers of detective fiction at work today—gives us a personal, lively, illuminating exploration of the human appetite for mystery and mayhem, and of those writers who have satisfied it.

P. D. James examines the genre from top to bottom, beginning with the mysteries at the hearts of such novels as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and bringing us into the present with such writers as Colin Dexter and Henning Mankell. Along the way she writes about Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie (“arch-breaker of rules”), Josephine Tey, Dashiell Hammett, and Peter Lovesey, among many others. She traces their lives into and out of their fiction, clarifies their individual styles, and gives us indelible portraits of the characters they’ve created, from Sherlock Holmes to Sara Paretsky’s sexually liberated female investigator, V. I. Warshawski. She compares British and American Golden Age mystery writing. She discusses detective fiction as social history, the stylistic components of the genre, her own process of writing, how critics have reacted over the years, and what she sees as a renewal of detective fiction—and of the detective hero—in recent years.

There is perhaps no one who could write about this enduring genre of storytelling with equal authority and flair: it is essential reading for every lover of detective fiction.