The first book by P.D.James introduces D.I. Dalgleish. It was an interesting mystery reminds Agatha Christie's novels. But I found it boring. The victim was not likeable, though she didn't deserve to be killed. Strangely one of her ex-employers comments that 'she seemed in some natural way a murderee'.
The inspector interviews everyone, but we get detailed account for only a few . Then other suspects go on their own interviewing some other suspects (Which the inspector would have already done, but not disclosed to the reader). I felt this was unnecessary dragging of plot. Because of this some crucial accounts are left to the very end, when the inspector puts everyone in a room and tells what happened. We don't get to know how he arrived at the conclusion.

I am not very impressed, and I may not be reading any more of P.D.James

3.5 Stars

*An engaging mystery reminiscent of Agatha Christie with its own twist*


I came across this series on a list of classic mysteries. Although I hadn't heard of the author, I decided to give it a try.

The setup for the plot has many elements of classic British mysteries. The murder takes place in a mansion in the English countryside. And it's a locked room mystery. But it was brought up to modern (for when it was written) times. Cover Her Face was probably a bit racy for its time actually. What with all the talk about unwed mothers and other social taboo topics for the time. The story explored the drastically shifting landscape of the Post-WWII era.

I was surprised how little the main detective of the series, Adam Dalgliesh, was featured. Much like Miss Marple in her first book, the detective was barely more than a cameo. Instead, the story spent most of its time setting up the crime and following the suspects through the aftermath of the murder. While I was puzzled by the limited involvement of the supposed main character, it was fascinating to watch the inside view of that fractured group of people dealing with their own levels of guilt throughout the murder investigation.

The plot kept me guessing, and even though I didn't particularly like any of the characters, I was still engaged in finding out what would happen to them. Overall, this was a good start to the series. Not only was this the first book in the series, it was also James’s debut novel. I'll definitely check out the next book.


RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 4 Stars
Writing Style: 3 Stars
Characters and Character Development: 3 Stars
Plot Structure and Development: 4 Stars
Level of Captivation: 4 Stars
Originality: 3 Stars

I’ve always wanted to write a crime novel (I’ve got a weird mutant variation of it I keep putting off editing/ making narrative sense out of) but never have because I can’t think of a puzzle/ solution worthy of the writers in this genre that I love. It’s kind of reassuring then to read the debut of one of the most respected crime writers of their generation and realise that her puzzle is totally phoned in. I wouldn’t say Cover Her Face is a bad book, but there’s precisely nothing here to suggest James would become a giant of the form

The problem is that it’s incredibly plodding. All the characters are total cyphers: the slightly suspicious war veteran; the waspish mother; the sneaky victim; the honourable but swift to anger son; eccentric rural types; solid and dependable sergeant; and most annoyingly a hero who you suspect James kind of has the hots for (in the same way that Sayers obviously did for Wimsey), a noble, intelligent, sorrowful widower with a yacht and disdain for human cruelty etc etc. There’s even a coda where he cops off with someone, if you excuse the pun, which is utterly unnecessary (as is the bit where he thinks about the death of his son/ wife: it’s very heavy handed in this way). There’s not one character who feels either real OR memorable. It’s just a bunch of types slogging it out

And it also doesn’t really help that the solution is worked out by excluding people who couldn’t have done it. It’s like James couldn’t even think of a worthwhile motive either. There’s some heavy hinting about hands and fingers throughout the book which slightly pays off but I suspect was her trying to be clever and put in some red herrings, but otherwise it’s a dull mystery solved boringly with some boring characters. The prose is fine but suggests an author being cautious on her first go in the genre - even the title seems like an allusion for the sake of it (it reminds me, especially since there’s a poet policeman hero, of Michael Innes in this respect). I imagine she got far better from here on in - and she seems to have actively disliked this book in the end - but I’m in no real hurry to find out

3.5 rounded up to 4 stars.

The audio production was really poor. The narrator was fine but the sound was tinny. I got used to it but it sounded like it had been recorded in 1962 when written rather than 2008!

None of the people I suspected might be the killer of maid Sally Juup turned out to be the one. The murderer was really a surprise and that was a good enough reason to round up! There is little action in this book and that's just fine. The murder occurs about a 1/4 of the way into the book, after we've seen a bit of Sally Juup and know she is probably a bit of a schemer but as the story goes on we find out how very much a schemer she was. Sally is the one murdered - just after she's announced that the young man of the house -- Dr. Stephen Maxie -- has asked her to marry him. Suspicion immediately falls on the people in the house when Sally was murdered -- Maxies (mother, son, and daughter), the Maxie's nurse, daughter Deborah's friend Felix, and Katherine, a nurse in love with Stephen Maxie.

Now the Maxies own and live in the manor house. Sally Juup is their maid. Her parents were killed in the war and she was raised by her aunt and uncle. Sally got pregnant when she worked in London and goes to a "home" in her home town to have the baby and after he is born, goes to work as the live-in maid for the Maxies. In addition to being a schemer, Sally is very secretive. She tells no one who the father of baby Jimmie is. She takes a real dislike to Deborah (how dislikes her back) and just before she dies, is seen mocking her.

The local police call in Scotland yard and Malcolm Dalgleish appears to investigate. He uncovers much intrigue. Eventually the potential suspects are gathered together and Dalgleish reviews the evidence and the suspects discuss and ask questions. One by one suspects are shown to not have done it until one is left. This was an entertaining detective story. I will have to read more P.D. James.

'He spoke with satisfaction for he was a countryman by birth and inclination and was often heard to complain of the proclivity of murderers to commit their crimes in overcrowded cities and unsalubrious tenements.'
So, a murder in the English countryside! That's something very common, of course — apparently, there's a whole book on the subject: Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village.

I enjoyed the book, but I must quickly add that I am not a fan of crime fiction. What I like is reading about people and their relationships. I like reading about families, and I do like reading about the English countryside. I am easily depressed by descriptions of traumatic events, so when life gets particularly scary, I especially enjoy books where people have tea and try to be nice to each other. (And murder, of course, is an inevitable part of country life. I'm sure I often wish to be rid of my own countryside neighbours. With enough stories like this one, maybe one day I will skillfully fulfil some diabolical idea.)

I am saying this because I've seen other reviewers say that they've guessed who the murderer is, in a way as if this was a bad thing. Well, I've guessed, too, but I can see nothing wrong with it. After all, I find the resolutions of most murder mysteries so convoluted that nobody can really guess all the intricacies and coincidences, so it's not like one can guess everything.

And I've seen some people say that Dalgliesh is not effective and charismatic enough. But I've seen the recent series with Bertie Carvel and I think nobody who thinks of Dalgliesh in Bertie's interpretation would consider him uncharismatic, wouldn't they?

On the opposite, I liked it that the plot was not centred on the brilliant detective and his investigation. The characters are fleshed-out and prone to conduct their own investigations, I've found this very nice of them :)

In short, immediately upon finishing this one, I've bought the next Dalgliesh :)

Sometimes I will see a one-star review of a noir novel that isn't really a review; it's just the reader announcing that he or she should have read a cozy mystery instead. That's me and Cover Her Face, only the other way around. Man, was this tedious.

P.D. James is an author whose name I have stumbled upon a lot, and I’ve long been interested in the Adam Dalgliesh series. As eager as I was for this one, Cover Her Face did not work for me.

I think my main problem with this one was how long it took for the mystery element to become active. This was a quick read, yet too much of the book was spent with build-up. With so much build-up, I expected lots of action and intensity. Alas, I never felt any connection to the characters, and nothing shocked me. It was too bland for me, and I had hoped for a lot more. I can certainly see the appeal with this one, but it’s not my type of mystery.

All in all, this wasn’t quite for me. As interesting as the series sounded, this one has not left me wanting to read more.

I enjoyed this first entry in the Adam Dalgliesh series. The mystery was interesting, and I enjoyed the characters and the setting. It was interesting to see how the characters didn't see how Sally could have died and the inspector figured it out. I may read other stories in the series.

I'm hovering between three stars and four and pick three simply because I know the later books in the series get better, and I need a way to go up! Adam Dalgliesh is my favorite P.D. James character, and though I have read many of the novels and seen most of the BBC productions featuring him, I had never actually read this 1962 book, the first in the series. It was very interesting to see the character introduced, and gratifying to find this an engrossing read, full of the sensitivity to motivations and subtexts -- as well as the overarching class consciousness -- expected from a fine British novelist. Dalgliesh's personal history is barely touched upon in a single paragraph, which I also found interesting. You wouldn't have guessed from his oblique treatment and the focus on storyline here that this would be the tale upon which P.D. James would found a dynasty. It is not a spectacular but a solid beginning.

Maid For Murder
Review of the Sphere Books paperback edition (1974) of the original Faber & Faber hardcover (1962)

nCover her face. Mine eyes dazzle; she died young. - John Webster (1580-1634), from The Duchess of Malfi (1614)

nDalgliesh pondered on the diversity of the clues which he felt were salient in the case. There was Martha’s significant reluctance to dwell on one of Sally’s shortcomings. There was the bottle of Sommeil pressed hastily into the earth. There was an empty cocoa tin, a golden-haired girl laughing up at Stephen Maxie as he retrieved a child’s balloon from a Martingale elm, an anonymous telephone call and a gloved hand briefly glimpsed as it closed the trap-door into Bocock's loft. And at the heart of the mystery, the clue that would make all plain, lay the complex personality of Sally Jupp. - Chief Detective Inspector Dalgliesh ponders the clues in Cover Her Face.

I decided to include P.D. James' (1920-2014) Adam Dalgliesh novels as one of my re-read binges due to the fortuitous discovery of several of the early paperbacks while I was emptying a storage locker. This went together with the discovery that there was a rebooted TV-series adapting the novels as well, which began in 2021.


Rescued from storage and due for re-reading, my early P.D. James paperbacks, mostly published by Sphere Books from the 1980s.*

Cover Her Face was actually quite surprising in that Inspector Dalgliesh is mostly in the background for a great portion of the book. We learn a considerable amount of the back story and the inner lives of the principle suspects quite separately from the police interviews. We do not learn very much about Dalgliesh at all, certainly not that he is a published poet which must have been a later additional feature to the character and separates him from all other fictional police detectives in my mind.

The case involves the strangulation murder of young unwed mother Sally Jupp, who is working as a maid for the Maxie household. The investigation reveals that various motives could be behind the murder including jealousy and revenge for possible blackmail. Prior to her death, Jupp had revealed that the Maxie's son Stephen had proposed marriage to her, even though he was supposedly attached already to another house guest Catherine. The rest of the household were not approving of Sally even prior to that, her being especially in conflict with the cook Martha. The daughter of the household Deborah is friends with house guest Felix, a possibly unstable PTSD survivor of the war. The family matriarch Eleanor is nursing her dying husband who is prescribed sleep medication for his restlessness. Meanwhile, other men have been seen lurking on the property.

The solution is complicated by the discovery that Sally Jupp's cocoa was drugged with sleep medication on the night of the murder. Was that a coincidence which was separate from the murderer's plot or part of it? The reveal comes in a standard golden-age of crime scenario where Dalgliesh gathers all of the suspects in a room for the finale.

I enjoyed my reacquaintance with Adam Dalgliesh in this first novel of P.D. James and look forward to further reads in the series.

Trivia and Links
* The 1980s Sphere Books give the impression that they might be featuring the murder weapon in the cover photo, but the murder in Cover Her Face has nothing to do with a telephone.

Cover Her Face was adapted for television in 1985 as part of the long running Dalgliesh TV-series for Anglia Television (1983-1998) starring actor Roy Marsden as Chief Detective Inspector Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard. You can watch the entire 6 episodes of the 1985 adaptation on YouTube here (starting with Episode 1). NOTE: The TV adaptation is considerably different from the original novel.

There was a brief continuation TV-series for the BBC (2003-2005) starring Martin Shaw as Adam Dalgliesh, which did not include an adaptation of Cover Your Face.

The new reboot Dalgliesh Acorn TV-series (2021-?) starring Bertie Carver as Adam Dalgliesh has not yet done an adaptation of Cover Your Face. It has not been announced which books are being adapted for Season 2 (as of early July 2022).

Re-read as audiobook.

A very enjoyable murder mystery.

I've been curious about P.D James for a while now, so I bypassed my bulging 'Golden-Era' crime novel shelves and tried this second generation lady mystery author. On the whole, I wasn't disappointed.
James writes well, engages the reader with the characters, and has some very strong opinions on the state of society as she saw it, which she was definitely not afraid to air. Some of the topics to get a tongue lashing from her included the morality of youth, unmarried parenthood, and 'good old' English cooking.

This novel's greatest strength was the depth to which we got to know its characters, and James never made the mistake of introducing too many, or all of them at once. We get to know them slowly, spending a little time inside almost all of their heads, seeing the story from all angles - even the murderer's - and by the end we are invested in the situation. Agatha Christie often introduced the whole cast of characters immediately upon arrival at the old manor house, and then making them all very pale plot points with little to distinguish between them, leaving the reader (or at least, me) confused and bored. James has created just the right amount of suspects, enough to cast suspicion far and wide and still have time to delve into their psyches in some detail. The only let down here was that, having got to know all the suspects so well, the unmasking of the murderer was underwhelming; not because it was obvious (it never is to me), but because it was unsurprising.

The novel's weakness, in my opinion, was the relative blandness of James's detective, Adam Dalgliesh. While this is his first appearance in fiction, and he therefore might be excused for not being fully formed, he put me in mind of Peter Robinson's DCI Banks - a generic third party with few personal thoughts. He slides through doors, asks quiet questions, and knows all about it after a day or two. I realise that Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey are not realistic depictions of humans, and that possibly the creation of larger-than-life detectives was passe, but I can't get behind someone with no apparent personality. The point is, it could have been anyone solving that case - Dalgliesh did nothing special and showed no special crime-solving abilities. He had no little grey cells, so to speak.

However, I enjoyed reading this book quite enough to warrant reading the next one.