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'Death In Holy Orders' by P.D. James

Mystery Roundup: ‘Death In Holy Orders’

Friday, April 13, 2001

By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor

	Death In Holy Orders By P.D. James Knopf $25.00

Much like the queen of British mystery, Agatha Christie, P.D. James enthusiastically writes on past her 80th birthday.

And with plots that resemble Christie’s, James centers her newest Adam Dalgleish tale in a remote English country setting where a varied cast of characters is gathered, then murders occur.

The site is St. Anselm’s, a seminary for Anglican priests on the windy Suffolk coast. With only 20 students, it’s targeted for shutdown. Its demise seems even more certain when one of the scholars is found dead, an apparent victim of the collapse of the sea-eroded sandy cliffs.

Because the dead boy was the son of a powerful industrialist, Dalgleish is dispatched to guarantee that the local constabulary has not botched the investigation. He’s also familiar with St. Anselm’s, having spent several summers there as a youth when his father, a minister, was assigned to the area.

As James devises it, Dalgleish arrives on a busy weekend for visitors. The list includes Archdeacon Matthew Crampton, who has the authority to close down St. Anselm’s; a burned-out police detective who investigated Crampton’s role in his first wife’s suicide; and Emma Lavenham, a visiting poetry instructor who, luckily for Dalgleish, is the best-looking professor at Cambridge.

Add to that cast St. Anselm’s collection of emotionally damaged clergy and suspicious staff and you’ve got a Christie classic brew of setting and character.

It doesn’t take long for Crampton to get his head bashed in with an altar candlestick. Dalgleish takes command and soon, everybody’s a suspect.

Despite the creaky plot and some carelessly lost clues, James has never written more lyrically on the beauty of the English countryside and set a mood more effectively.

It’s easy to get lost amid the Victorian architecture, crashing seas, howling winds and glasses of ruby claret until James brings readers up short with lapses of taste such as this one: “The chest of drawers held shirts and underclothes, knickers washed but stained at the crotch...”

Did we need that observation?

Regardless, “Death in Holy Orders” gives no indication that James is contemplating retirement; instead she seems to be cooking up some romance ahead for her lonely hero.