SOURCE: "The Queen of Crime: P. D. James," in New York Times Magazine, October 5, 1986, pp. 48-50, 54, 58, 60, 70.

In the following essay, Symons discusses James's new book, A Taste for Death, and talks to the author about her life and writing in the detective genre.

The bodies were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18 September by Miss Emily Wharton, a sixty-five-year-old spinster of the parish of St Matthew's in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged ten.

These are the opening lines of P. D. James's new book, A Taste for Death, and they are typical of her work in their factual exactness, their brisk presentation of what we need to know about two characters who are there not just to discover corpses. The bodies, of a tramp and a Minister of Parliament, are in the Little Vestry of the church. The scene is horrific, the room a...