posted on 03 Oct 2021

Cover Her Face by P.D. James

This debut novel, published in 1962, has become something of a legendary collectable, with first editions in their dust jackets retailing for eye-watering amounts – current listings for the UK first edition are pitched in the £3-6,000 bracket. If this strikes you as extraordinary, I’m certainly in agreement with you on that point but I wanted to actually read the book to see whether the eye-watering prices have anything to do with the quality of the content.

P.D. James is often referred to as a latter-day ‘queen of crime’ and the inheritor (and developer) of the Agatha Christie tradition and Cover Her Face does, in terms of construction of the story, feel like it wouldn’t be out of place in Christie’s own canon. And like Christie, James has a compelling detective but this one is a member of the police force and not a gifted amateur. Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh will go on to feature in many of P.D. James’ later novels but he makes his first appearance in Cover Her Face and is, in my opinion, the most interesting aspect of the book.

The plot itself feels as if it belongs to so many subsequent detective novels and television scripts that it’s hard to read without feeling that its weighed-down with cliché. Set within the spiteful world of upper-middle class family politics, it involves the murder of a beautiful but wilful and mischievous servant girl, Sally, who has beguiled the young son of the household. His offer to marry Sally – who (horror upon horror) is also a single mother – uncorks a nest of vipers within the Maxie family that own the house and any one of them, it transpires, has a motive to see the girl dead. But Sally is no simple servant girl: she has secrets in her present and her past that make the mystery devilishly complex.

Into this world comes the self-possessed, coolly analytical and disarmingly methodical DCI Dalgliesh and it is his presence that pushes each of the potential suspects to start unfolding their stories.

I’m clearly not going to unveil anything here that will give the game away because detective thrillers stop being thrilling is you know too much in advance about the mechanics of the plot but I have to say that even I – and I’m notoriously useless at guessing any who-done-it denouement – had worked out who the murderer was well before the end.

This isn’t a bad detective novel to keep you entertained but it’s no world-beater either. The plot works without providing huge amounts of tension, the characters seem consistent and (mostly) plausible (with, I have to say, the exception of the murder victim, Sally) and Dalgliesh is something of a master-stroke in terms of lifting it all above average. For me, however, the strongest reason to read the book is James’ prose style. I must admit I had never thought about James as a stylist in terms of how she puts sentences together but her prose is certainly idiosyncratic and muscular and requires the reader to get into the right zone when they are reading it in order to get the most from it. I enjoyed the fact that her sentence structures often challenged me and I needed to read them carefully and give my attention to what I was reading.

So, does the content of the book merit the astronomical prices the first edition fetches? No. Is it though a book worth reading? Yes.

What then explains those collector prices? Bibliophile madness. Get the paperback.

 

Terry Potter

October 2021