P. D. James is the inheritor of some of the most distinguished literary mantles in popular fiction, those previously worn by detective-story writers who achieved near perfection in their craft. James's works hearken back to Agatha Christie's ingenious plotting, evocative settings, and quirky series detective Hercule Poirot, sometimes faintly echoing her predecessor's models but updating them and making them uniquely her own. A James plot, like Christie's best, is a well-oiled machine, efficient and balanced in a style many modern detective-fiction writers hardly aspire to attain. Her settings, like Christie's, reflect an impressive variety of interests, often esoteric and sometimes obscure. Like her predecessor, she speaks for a certain social class and way of life, one quintessentially English, without excluding readers who are different from the persona suggested by the narrative voice, as her success in the United States attests. By James's time, however, the detective genre had...