SOURCE: "'Sweet Thames, Run Softly': P. D. James's Waste Land in A Taste for Death," in Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 9, No. 2, Fall-Winter, 1988, pp. 105-18.

In the following essay, Richardson delineates the common symbolism and imagery between T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James's A Taste for Death and asserts that work is still meaningful to readers who do not recognize the influence.

The considerable popular success of P. D. James's A Taste for Death defies current conventions of detective and suspense publishing. A Taste for Death is 459 pages in hard-cover edition at a time when detective novels more often are between 170 and 230 pages. The writing is literate, and it is literary: the novel teems with allusions to literature and other arts. Of violence there is little and of explicit sex, none.

The reader sees the slaughtered bodies of Sir Paul Berowne and tramp Harry Mack...