Tag Archives: mystery fiction

P.D. James and the Literary Legacy She Left Behind

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Cover image for the detective murder mystery series Dalgliesh.

As has already been discussed on this blog here and here, P.D. James is the best. What has previously been commented upon succinctly by my colleagues, will now be expanded upon heartily.

In my house, we have fallen in love with the television adaptation of James’ excellent mystery novels. The show is simply titled Dalgliesh, after the central Detective Chief Inspector figure. Each novel is covered by two episodes; therefore, each mystery is given an hour and a half of introduction, development, and resolution. The stories have that shimmer of reality because of the complex detail James devotes to them. More than that, our detective Dalgliesh feels real as well. Slowly, the audience is told that he is a somewhat famous poet, a widower, and a fully-fledged person with emotions and friendships.

I suppose it’s somewhat backwards to have started with the TV show and now gone back to the novels it’s based on, but that’s just how it goes sometimes. There are 14 Adam Dalgliesh murder mysteries to gorge yourself on. Woefully, there are only four print books and two audiobooks in our collection. But if you are intrigued, fill out a Suggest a Title form, and we will try to borrow a copy for you from another library system!

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Disappearing Earth

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Book Cover of Disappearing Earth by Julia PhillipsI’ll confess that before reading Disappearing Earth, I hadn’t heard about the indigenous Even people of Russia, nor of Kamchatka (my knowledge of history and geography, let alone the two combined, is woeful at best), but I can say that Phillips’ beautiful rendering of the landscape of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and descriptions of the women living in the town (or the wide vicinity of it) in the novel made me want to find out more. (In fact, one of the characters in Disappearing Earth, the mother of the disappeared girls, also notes how she is unfortunately more ignorant than she’d like regarding the history of the treatment of indigenous peoples in Russia because it wasn’t in the curriculum when she was in school; she notes how her daughters would’ve known more, because they’re taught in school now about the indigenous peoples of northern Russia: what is taught, I’m not sure.) Disappearing Earth begins with the kidnapping of two girls – Alyona and Sophia, aged 11 and 8 – while they were walking around by themselves along the beach in late summer. But it doesn’t follow the same path other novels that start with a kidnapping might: the format itself is a twist on the thriller/investigative mystery genre, the portrayal of the useless and often misguided police officers only incidental to the much larger story told through different women in the area affected in various ways, large and small, by the kidnapping. This centering of women explores the ways in which women, especially indigenous women in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, lack power in their lives; and immediately brings to mind the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women in North America (see Highway of Tears by Jessica McDiarmid, for which other resources I’ve also listed in a previous post). Which, interestingly enough, Phillips herself admits in an interview with The Paris Review:

I don’t think of myself as engaging with the Russian literary tradition at all, really. I feel like what I brought to the story and the place were very much American concerns and American ideas. As much I tried to accurately reflect what I was seeing, what I was seeing was deeply informed, if not completely informed, by my Americanness.

(Julia Phillips in interview for The Paris Review: The Ideal Place to Disappear)

So then… why this isolated Russian Far East peninsula of Kamchatka?

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