Interview: PD James

Jake Kerridge of the Telegraph interviews crime writer extraordinaire, PD James:

"Detective fiction is the literature of escape. It is surprisingly popular with very powerful men in positions of great authority and people whose lives are fairly arduous intellectually. People who are confronted by serious puzzles in their daily
lives.”

Baroness James of Holland Park is musing on the sort of puzzles one would expect to preoccupy a Conservative peer. “Social puzzles that are really beyond anyone’s ability to solve, that we pour money into, and social workers’ time into, although it doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference. So there is a comfort in reading something with a puzzle at its heart which is solved by the end of the book, with order being restored.”