SOURCE: "Who Caused the Deaths and What the Deaths Caused," in Spectator, Vol. 279, No. 8829, October 18, 1997, p. 48.

In the following excerpt, Waugh praises James's A Certain Justice.

P. D. James was an eminent civil servant during much of her writing life. I do not know whether it was on retirement from her job that a secret rebellion took place against the way the system works here, but it is odd that since she wrote A Taste for Death, published in 1986, no murderer of hers has had to face a jury of his peers in a criminal court or sweat it out behind bars. This could, of course, come out of a belief in good civil service economy. It is the taxpayer, after all, who finances the criminal justice system. So, instead, she dispenses with all that, and has her murderers die rather melodramatically. Oddly, this seems to give their...