3 August: PD James

British crime writer PD James was born 100 years ago today. Here are 10 facts about her:

1. The PD stands for Phyllis Dorothy.
2. She was born in Oxford, the daughter of a tax inspector. She left school at sixteen.
3. She married Ernest Connor Bantry White in 1941. He was an army doctor but when he returned from the war he was suffering from mental illness and was in hospital much of the time, leaving James as the sole breadwinner for the family. He died in 1964.
4. She had a long, varied career before she started earning enough from writing to do it full time at the age of 60. She was an NHS clerk, studying hospital administration in her spare time. From 1949 to 1968 she worked for a hospital board in London. Later, she became a civil servant and worked for the Home Office, appointing scientists and pathologists to forensic science laboratories and advising ministers on juvenile crime. Not to mention serving as a magistrate, becoming a Governor of the BBC, being on the board of the British council, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature. She was also a lay patron of the Prayer Book Society. As a guest editor of the Today Programme, she showed a talent for interviewing as well, taking BBC director Mark Thompson to task.
5. Her most famous character, detective Adam Dalgliesh, was named after her English teacher at school. The first novel to feature him was Cover Her Face, her first novel, published in 1962. She revealed in 2011 that The Private Patient was the final Dalgliesh novel.
6. Her jobs informed her writing. Many of her mystery novels are set around UK bureaucracies, such as the criminal justice system and the National Health Service. Death of an Expert Witness, for example, was set in a forensic lab in East Anglia. She was a devout Anglican and her book Death in Holy Orders, shows her familiarity with the hierarchy in the church.
7. She received an OBE in 1983 and took a seat in the House of Lords as Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991.
8. In 2011 PD James was awarded the Theakstons Old Peculiar Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award.
9. She carried on writing into her 90s. Her last full length novel was Death Comes to Pemberley in 2011. She died in 2014, aged 94, but two collections of her short stories were published in 2016 and 2017.
10. Many of her novels have been made into TV series and films. Her Adam Dalgliesh novels were adapted into a series starring Roy Marsden and An Unsuitable Job For a Woman was made into a series starring Helen Baxendale. Her books which were made into films include Children of Men, Death In Holy Orders and The Murder Room.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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