Murder, mystery, and the millennium

Detective fiction, with its emphasis on revenge, greed, murder, and mayhem, flourishes best in an age of anxiety, according to the author P.D. James (pictured left), who delivered the Richard Hillary Memorial Lecture on `Mystery and Mayhem: The Craft of the Detective Story' at the St Cross Building on Wednesday, 13 May. As we approach the year 2000 it appears our appetite for detective stories grows stronger, she declared. `It provides a potent means by which both the reader and writer can exorcise irrational feelings of guilt and anxiety,' she said. `When the detective points his finger in the final chapter we can be sure it's not at us. It is one accusation to which we can return a confident Not Guilty'. Baroness James of Holland Park, author of fourteen crime novels—ten featuring the poet-detective Commander Adam Dalgliesh— confessed to an unquenchable curiosity to question and suspect from an early age. `My response to Humpty Dumpty as a child was "did he fall, or was he pushed",' she said. Her lecture sought to raise the profile of a genre which is often dismissed as mere formula. Readers expect to find within the pages a central mystery, a circle of suspects each with motives and means to carry out the crime, a detective—amateur or professional—who must untangle the web of lies and bring a satisfactory resolution to the affair. However Baroness James said readers also demand `deceptive cunning, but essential fairness' which is where art and artifice must be blended seamlessly by the author. Just as a good detective used physical clues and signs to point the accusing finger at the guilty, so a good detective story writer used the `firm soil of a recognised place', real traits and authentic motives to give credence to the crime of murder. The outrÄ crimes of 1930s thrillers: being stabbed with an icicle or licking a poisoned stamp, are largely out of bounds for contemporary authors. Baroness James asserted that the successful writer of detective fiction must overcome the central technical problems which make lesser examples of the genre appear farcical and inadequate, to deliver a work which is logical and satisfying and leaves the reader with the view `it could only have happened that way'. The Richard Hillary Lecture on a literary subject was established by Trinity College, after it took over the Trust in 1972. Richard Hillary was an undergraduate at Trinity College from 1936–9. He rowed in the College VIII which was Head of the River in his time. Six of the 1939 crew, including Hillary himself, were killed in the war. His book, The Last Enemy (1942), charts his physical and mental recovery from the disfiguring burns he suffered when he was shot down during the Battle of Britain. He was killed in a flying accident in 1943.