SOURCE: "Crime and Puzzlement," in New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXVII, No. 7, April 26, 1990, pp. 35-7.

In the following review, Mantel complains that the detective genre is too confining for James's talent.

February 1990: the literary editor of a British newspaper writes to The Spectator, protesting about what he sees as an elitist stranglehold on literary prizes. "Booker judges have ignored the merits of authors like William Boyd, Graham Greene, P. D. James." The reader who does not keep up with the politics of the review columns might well be puzzled. Doesn't P. D. James write best-selling detective stories? What is she doing in the company of Greene? When did the categories of fiction become so confused?

Those commentators who would elevate James's books to the status of literary novels point to her painstakingly constructed characters, her elaborate settings, her sense of place, and her love of abstractions: notions...