Remembering P. D. James on her birthday 🎂
🎨 Michael Taylor
oil on canvas, 1996
@NPGLondon
"I came to believe that it is perfectly possible to remain within the constraints & conventions of the genre & be a serious writer."
P. D. James by Dudley Reed
Kingsley Amis called her “Iris Murdoch with murder”.
P. D. James, Baroness James of Holland Park, by Nick Sinclair, 1992
@NPGLondon
"When you go to vote in the House of Lords there is a long corridor down which you walk & when I go down I often have people saying ‘shouldn’t you be off working on another novel?’."
"When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?"
P. D. James by Ulf Andersen, 1987
Today we're celebrating the great mystery writer's birthday 🎂
This quote is from P. D. James's excellent Art of Fiction @parisreview interview with Shusha Guppy, from 1995
theparisreview.org/interviews/162…
P. D. James reads Sayers’ Have His Carcase
📷 Michael Putland, 1982
"I had always enjoyed the genre - Dorothy L. Sayers was a potent influence - and I was fascinated by the challenge of trying to do something new with the well-worn conventions of the detective story."
P. D. James channels Julia Child, with some extra menace of her own.
Photo: Terry Smith for Life Magazine
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