This is a superbly clever crime novel. While the who and how around the murder of a former minister and a tramp found in the vestry of a neglected church is interesting and satisfying, what's sets the book apart is the intelligence and subtlety with which the author draws her characters. Usually even well plotted crime novels depend on a coterie of stereotypes who collectively ham it up for the readers in various wince worthy ways. With this novel I came for the thrills of murder most gruesome but stayed for the wonderfully developed characters. Will definetly read more of this series.

I enjoyed the first few books of this series (aside from the first which I was advised to skip) but they've become increasingly dark and this one crossed the line for me. I don't really want character development for the detective in a mystery anyway - I just want to solve the mystery - and I especially don't want to read about their experience of devastating events reflecting the author's own apparent view that life is just awful and always keeps getting worse. I don't think I'll any more of the series or this author, even though the mysteries themselves are decent.

Not my favorite of the Dalgliesh series but wonderful description. Less focus on Adam and more on Kate, who has just been added to the special investigative team. The climatic scene with Kate and her grandmother is highly contrived, yet moving nonetheless. Kate is propping her grandmother (just mugged the day before)on the toilet while held hostage by the novel's murderer when Kate learns for the first time the story of her mother and father.

Bettie's Books

I first heard of P. D. James when I was at a bookstore and picked this massive book I'd never heard of from a shelf to look at it. When I saw it was a detective novel, my first reaction was: how the hell could a mystery novel be like 600+ pages? How could it even be possible to sustain the level of mystery and tension for that long a page count? It was just weirdly inconceivable to me at that point, but interesting nonetheless.

Anyway, when I started reading James properly I did it in chronological order -- kind of out of my fear of long books, but also because I thought it'd be interesting to track the growth of her ambition from novel to novel. And I'm glad I did, because each book has been getting better and better. But now I decided to take a leap forward in the series and tackle the longest one yet, a novel truly of her peak mature period.

And it's brilliant. An absolute masterpiece.

Every qualm I had all that time ago about mystery being sustained for so long a plot has been answered, because the plot isn't even that long -- it's all about the detail. James is not just a phenomenal crime writer, but also a phenomenal novelist full stop in the astounding levels of attention she gives absolutely everything. There is literally no character in the entire story, no matter how minor, who doesn't have an incredibly richly drawn backstory or personal character, done even in just a few lines. Every setting is as depthful as if you've been there yourself. The prose is verbose and literate but never oppressive. And the plot is so well-maintained and sustained that the page count flies by like nothing.

If you're reared on American or hardboiled crime like I was you might find the level of detail distracting or even kind of boring (and let's just say I'm really glad I didn't start with this book either -- my reaction a year or two ago might've been a lot different). But I was just so drawn into the world of the story that there were hardly any digressions to me at all. Everything had a purpose and every turn of the story felt natural.

If I had one criticism it might be that the reveal of the mystery doesn't quite pay off the level of intrigue that had been built up over the preceding 600 pages (and I touched on this in my last James review too that as a mystery writer she's not quite as adept at crafting a truly surprising twist reveal as many of her peers), but that's only a judgement put up against the confines of its genre. Stories are relative, not absolute. And as a story, and as a piece of literature, this was truly near perfect for me. Friggin masterpiece of its class.

The Baronet and the Tramp
Review of the Vintage Canada paperback (2011) of the Faber & Faber hardcover original (1986)

nNo one joins the police without getting some enjoyment out of exercising power. No one joins the murder squad who hasn't a taste for death. The danger begins when the pleasure becomes an end in itself. That's when it's time to think about another job. - Adam Dalgliesh makes observations during A Taste for Deathn

Detective Commander* Adam Dalgliesh is the head of a new elite squad at Scotland Yard CID with his old assistant Chief Inspector John Massingham and new assistant Inspector Kate Miskin. The squad has been formed to handle especially high profile cases and they are called into service when ex-Minister of the Crown Sir Paul Berowne and a street tramp are both found dead in a church vestry in a poor London parish.

Berowne had resigned his minister's post apparently on the basis of a religious experience, which was also concurrent with a poison pen letter campaign hinting at his possible involvement in the deaths of two young women who had been in employ in his household and in the accidental death of his first wife. He is spending time at the church and avoiding his family: a domineering mother, a flashy 2nd wife, a freeloading brother-in-law and several servants. There is the suspicion of murder-suicide due to the death of the tramp and the use of Berowne's own cutthroat razor in both deaths, found beside him. Dalgliesh thinks it is double murder though and the suspects mount as the squad traces all of Berowne's history and that of the family.

A Taste for Death is quite a long book for P.D. James at 624 pages in this 2011 edition. Earlier books had been mostly in the 300 to 400 page range. She uses the extra space to go even further in depth for her background characterizations of the suspects, but also about Dalgliesh's assistants Massingham and Miskin who envy each other, but do not really know the pressures the other one is dealing with in their personal lives. We learn very little new about Dalgliesh himself though, except that he apparently has not written poetry for several years now and does not expect to do so again.

Despite its length this was still a reasonably quick read for me over several days, the final 150 pages or so when the wrong 'un becomes apparent lead to a increasingly suspenseful and fateful climax.


Front cover of the original Faber & Faber hardcover edition (1986). Image sourced from Wikipedia.

I read A Taste for Death as part of my continuing 2022 binge re-read of the P.D. James novels, which I am enjoying immensely. I started the re-reads when I recently discovered my 1980's P.D. James Sphere Books paperbacks while clearing a storage locker. To keep to the order of the series I realized that I had to newly source A Taste for Death, which I had not previously read. I was able to find a nice copy of the 2011 Vintage Canada paperback.

Trivia and Links
* In Book 1, Adam Dalgliesh was a Detective Chief Inspector, in Books 2 to 4 he is a Detective Superintendent and in Books 5 to 14 he is a Detective Commander.

A Taste for Death was adapted for television in 1988 as part of the long running Dalgliesh TV-series for Anglia Television/ITV (1983-1998) starring actor Roy Marsden as Commander Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard. You can watch the 6 episodes of the 1988 adaptation starting with Episode 1 on YouTube here. With a 5 hour running time, this adaptation is very faithful to the original novel.


Actor Bertie Carvel as Commander Adam Dalgliesh in the 2021 TV adaptation of "A Taste for Death". Image sourced from IMDb.

The new Acorn TV-series reboot Dalgliesh (2021-?) starring Bertie Carver as Adam Dalgliesh adapted A Taste for Death as Episodes 5 & 6 of Season 1. Season 1 adapted Books 4, 5 & 7. With a 3 hour running time, this adaptation edits out a considerable portion of the novel and the final confrontation takes place in a different location and with some different characters.

2.5

It's probably been decades since I read a PD James murder mystery. When I read them before, I liked them a lot. I used to read much faster then, or rather, I've always been slow, but now I'm very much slower. This one was my companion for weeks, and sometimes I thought it would never end. I felt this way especially as I did come close to the end. I think, as I approached the conclusion, there were like 3 places where I thought the book had ended, but no, another chapter started up instead.

I don't think I'm about to release any spoilers, but if you are staying up late tonight panting over what might happen, maybe you should stop reading this now.

I thought PD James did not sustain much suspense in this one. The killer was revealed to be the one expected. All through the book, the main tension, or the mystery, if there is one, is whether Berowne was murdered or committed suicide. This point was unconvincing, or failed to create real tension, because (and I reveal nothing here) Berowne had died by having his throat cut. Suicides, I think, slit their wrists, not their throats.

I don't know how I missed PD James's books in my earlier mystery reading--a preference for amateur detectives, I guess. This is an excellent police procedural, if not perfect. The characters are much more real and well-rounded than Agatha Christie, say, and part of the interest is how their personalities and choices serve the same purpose as red herrings did in earlier mysteries. Still, more real doesn't mean completely real, and she sacrifices some of the reality--particularly of the minor or weak characters--for the sake of taking the story where she wants it to go. But I will read more.

My goodness. I must be getting crankier and more impatient by the week!. P.D. James (Nora Roberts) spends pages and pages and pages and then some more pages describing rooms, windows, window dressings, statues, views, portraits, paintings, music, elevators, bookcases, clothing, balconies, facades, paths, flowers, hair styles, cars, doors, Norman architecture, Victorian architecture, food, the weather, accents, gossip, eye color, embraces, physical features, family history, health, upholstery, &ct. &ct that I just can't stand it anymore.

Also, she uses this very strange dialogue device, as in

Dalgliesh said:

He said:

She added:

She said:

I am declaring that the priest did it (given the dried blood in his nose observed by Miss Wharton, and the lipstick stain he tried to hide from Mrs. McBride.) He was convinced to do it by the wife, who did not want the husband to change his will in favor of the unborn son. That's my story and I am sticking to it (even if I refuse to finish the book to see if it is true.)

Extremely well done. The pace is a little slack in the middle but things really move extremely quickly in the final quarter of the book. Twists and turn come on every page at the end. For the most part there are enough villains in the piece to be the potential killer, which keeps you guessing.

Of the villains my favorite was Lady Ursula. Of course I will not reveal whether she is the killer or even if there was a killer. I thought she had murdered her son for the house.

There is a good balance of the left brain/right brain in this: the analytical and the metaphysical. That helped this book overcome it’s few weaknesses which I cannot reveal without spoiling the plot for others.

Trying to decide? Buy it!

Some of the prose is admittedly quite fine, but reading this book was like having to finish an enormous, tasteless salad with some tasty bits of avocado and shrimp among the bloated, watery kale of extended descriptions of every character’s goddamned house and political sympathies.

And the end? Hostage, liver, leukemia? Just ridiculous.