PD Jame's first mystery novel, and a confusing one it is.

Though I did enjoy it, one must quickly become accustomed to her very, very literary writing style. Two things stand out: long sentences and a somewhat confusing omniscient POV. There were moments when I thought: who is this talking? What? Whose head am I in? There's also the custom of placing quotation marks around thoughts, so very often I'd be thinking - what? Is She or He saying that aloud?

However, Ms. James does conveniently write, 'his thoughts were,' or 'she thought,' etc.., but if you read quite speedily and are accustomed to quotation marks indicating spoken dialogue, well then, get with the program! This writer is an artist and one of the finest of her generation!

So I did. I buckled down, read more slowly and found the book a delight. I'd originally read it about thirty years ago, but as I read, remembered most of it.

A young, unmarried and uppity maid - mother of a child, no less! the horror! - is found dead in her bed. Her cocoa has been tampered with; her neck bears marks of strangulation. There are several members of the wealthy, entitled family she works for hanging about, not to mention two sort of live-in or visiting guests. (I love this about murders set in English country homes - they always have these hangers-on about who just mess up things in a lively and entertaining manner.)

Of course Mr. Adam Dalgliesh - or Detective Chief Inspector - is called in to solve the case, and he does, quite handily. With lots of interviews, most of which makes everyone nervous and suspicious, and a bit of tidy detective work involving fingerprints, bolted doors, outer doors and who locked them up and when, a ladder, a young boy, the local vicar (naturally!) and a country doctor. It all makes for a lively and fascinating read.

(I especially love the fascination of locked and unlocked doors when it comes to English country homes. There's often a lot of discussion about who has a key, who came home when, who 'locked up' or forgot to, and often why 'we' don't lock our doors because, of course, nothing ever happens out here or in this tiny village, and so on. This kind of discussion can go on for pages!)

But read this book very slowly or you will get lost!

P.D. James first novel and is the first one I have read. A cracking good mystery with a few clues and a myriad of red herrings. Sally Jupp was a very sneaky and unlikeable woman who liked to play games with peoples minds. Bolted doors, drugged drinks, ladders and a list of suspects that all hated her. The family she was the maid, foster parents and a jealous woman as well as Martha the cook.

The Maxie dysfunctional family and hanger ons created a great background with Inspector Adam Dalgliesh there to bring all the clues together.

The ending was very reminiscent of Poiret solving a murder by outlining the story and ultimately the motive laid bare. Really looking forward to reading more P.D. James.

A good classic English countryside mystery. Got me out of COVID world for awhile.

2.5 stars

If you are looking for a fast-paced thriller, this book is NOT for you.  I read it for several weeks at bedtime and dropped off each night after a couple of pages.  I give it high marks for inducing sleep! I just now realized that I read this book nine years ago and remembered none of it. I had given it a two star rating then, but didn't review it.

In this first book of the series, Inspector Dalgliesh interviews and investigates each murder suspect at length.  The suspects include the family, staff and dinner guests at a country estate, relatives of the murdered woman and several villagers.  Dalgliesh conducts his investigation in great detail, somewhat like peeling back the layers of an onion, until I nodded off.

It was heartening to know that attitudes about sexual harassment have advanced since the publication of this book in 1962.  Here is an example that made my jaw drop:  ". . . Sally was sent down to the packing-room with a message.  Apparently he made some kind of sexual advance to her.  It can't have been serious.  The man was genuinely surprised when he got the sack for it.  He may only have tried to kiss her.  I never did get the whole story. But from the fuss she made you'd have thought she was stripped naked and raped.  It was all very estimable of her to be so shocked, but most girls today seem to be able to cope with that kind of situation without having hysterics." p. 199.   Unbelievable!  Blame Sally for not being able to cope with the disgusting creep!  At least he got the sack, which was probably unusual for the time.
   
I upped my rating slightly based on the ending which had a couple of unexpected twists.  The ending was actually pretty good.  I'm not sure if I will continue with the Dalgliesh series, but maybe book 2 will also be a good soporific.

3.5 stars

PD James' first novel which self-consciously takes all the formulaic tropes of the classic murder mystery (think Agatha Christie) and overlays them with elegant writing, thicker characterisation, and a sense of slow social change.

The setting is that hoary old chestnut: the village fete; but at the centre of the book is the uppity lower class Sally who has the temerity to flaunt her red hair, her single-mother status and her sly manipulations of the master of the house... small wonder, then, that she ends up dead (James, let's not forget, was eventually made a Tory peer and her conservatism with a big and little C is on show from the start).

Enter DCI Adam Dalgleish, all restrained and cerebral intelligence, hiding a secret emotional trauma and, it turns out, with a pash on one of the suspects, filtering through the closed circle all of whom have a motive to kill Sally.

I felt at times that James is overly constrained by the conventions of the genre, most pressingly at the end when Dalgleish, quite unbelievably, gathers all the suspects in the library (oh, alright then, the 'business room', because that's the sort of family the Maxies are) and does a Poirot-style revelation of what happened on Murder Night. Nothing could be more out of character for the unflamboyant, undramatic Dalgleish who later wants to apologise for arresting the murderer.

James is a very earnest writer, verging on the pompous, and there's no sense of humour in either the book or any of the characters. Her snobbishness is on fine show maintaining class differences via taste (that plastic dog in the window! the metaphorical forelock-pulling of the groom who would do anything for the Maxies!) even while they begin to blur in 1960s society. The time setting seems earlier both in having Sally employed as a 'parlourmaid' at the Big House, and the constant references back to the war. There's a similar confusion about the son of the house: he's referred to as a 'boy' and various people splutter about him being in no financial position to take on a wife with baby - only it turns out he's a London surgeon which, surely, speaks to age and a lucrative salary even in the 1960s?

I enjoyed this for what it is, enough to read on in the series, but it doesn't have the same pleasurable lightness of touch and self-deprecating wit as Christie: 3.5 stars.

This was James’ first crime novel, debuting DCI Adam Dalgliesh who gets far less character padding or attention than the victim, suspect pool, or even his accompanying sergeant. I enjoy James’ character building enormously, it’s really her forte, and especially the way she often leaves Dalgliesh to the role of observer, concentrating on the crime rather than the draw of a serialised detective. In Cover her Face, none of the characters are overly likeable, but they are all very strongly presented, their actions, opinions and dialogue very human… if a little dated, in places.

The Maxies have taken in Sally Jupp, single mother, and recent resident of a refuge for women in similar ‘trouble’, to be their maid. Sally proves to be ambitious, secretive and a trouble maker. When she is found dead, the family reaction is more affront than surprise. But the motive that seems obvious dangles just out of the reach of provability… only painstaking assessment of the family and guests’ movements and characters will winnow out the culprit. Good old fashioned detective work, in other words.

I’ve read these out of order over the years, just now coming to the first book, and was surprised to find it so cohesive. It isn’t perfect; for a start this is written to be a puzzler, not a gripping page-turner, but James’ writing skills cover up any small flaws; she’s no less competent a storyteller at book one than book fourteen.

Коя всъщност е Сали и дали това, което всички виждат е това, което е. Криейки се зад фалшивата маска на добрите обноски, някой от обитателите на Мартингейл извършва убийство. Сали Джъп е самотна майка, прислужница, която е мистериозно убита в леглото си. Всяка една нова следа в разследването води до друга. Инспектор Адам Далглиш от Скотланд Ярд се заема с трудната задача за разрешаване на случая, а П.Д. Джеймс ни предоставя един прекрасен финал, наситен със съспенс.

I was working in London the summer of the year this book was first published but only now have I got round to reading it for the Kindle English Mystery Group. Although P. D. James shared with her friend Ruth Rendell the honour of making the detective story into a serious literary genre, Cover Her Face seems now to belong to the world of Agatha Christie than to ours, where crime fiction is the form of the novel that best engages serious moral and spiritual issues. Of course it was James and Rendell who accomplished it. I need to read Innocent Blood again to experience the difference. I'll write a review for the spoiler thread for the group to discuss plot details, but in summary would say that here it's an intricately constucted rather a Heath-Robinson device; too many unrelated threads have to coincide at the point of the murder and characters emerge from the backstory to account for all the clues. In hindsight the whole thing fell apart for me. The treatment of the victim's status as a single mum will remind all of us that we are extemely fortunate to be living now, not five decades ago.

This introduction to the Adam Dalgliesh series is a cross between an English country house mystery and a police procedural. It tends to feel more like the former since the detective is mostly absent and the family members seem central. Sally Jupp, a household employee with a secretive past, dies at the hands of a killer in an apparently locked room. Neither Sally nor the family members were likable. I would prefer more involvement from the police detective. I listened to the audio version read by Penelope Dellaporta who did a good job capturing family voices.

Напоследък доста ми харесва да чета мистерии тип Агата Кристи, но тази беше наивно написана. Разследването е създадено прекалено хаотично, за да се отклони вниманието ни. Действието се развива предимно чрез диалозите, разсъжденията и разпита на английския инспектор Далглиш. Заподозрените в къщата за убийството на прислужницата Сали говореха, обсъждаха и разследваха сами различни варианти, което създаде само хаос, объркване и скука в четенето. Даже и характерите им не бяха описани задълбочено, а мистерията не ме заинтригува достатъчно.

Where I got the book: Audiobook on Audible.

I thought it was about time I listened to the entire Adam Dalgleish series—I’ve read some of them but certainly none of the early ones. In this 1962 story you can see the tradition that goes back to the Golden Age of the detective story in the 1930s. All the clichés are there: the stately home, the nerve-ridden war hero, the lower classes kowtowing to the upper, the vicar a sort of go-between in terms of social status.

Except that it wasn’t, of course—James updated her stately home mystery to portray a society shaken by (another) War and by the social upheaval that followed it. The staff at Martingale is reduced to a sort of housekeeper, Martha, with no butler in sight to do the dirty deed. Martha is aided by a housemaid, Sally Jupp, an unmarried mother who seems to take lightly what would once have been a cause of shame. The lower classes are decidedly uppity, with their carefully tended council houses and a distinct touch of attitude toward their betters. The money is all gone, the master of the house is dying, and standards are always just a step away from slipping disastrously down the cliff face. And yet the Maxies struggle on, holding the village fête in their grounds, giving dinner parties and doing good wherever they can—such as taking in Sally and her child, whose father is unknown.

Manipulative Sally announces that she’s marrying into the Maxie family, but is found dead the next morning and the chief constable calls in the Yard, in the form of Dalgleish. We learn little about the detective, who comes across as rather two-dimensional, prone to saying “yes, we know all about that,” when a new clue is revealed (and if the police knew all about it, why wasn’t the reader informed, I’d like to know?) Dalgleish is admired by his sergeant and clearly thought a Sexy Beast by the family’s attractive widow, but I never really got a clear impression of what made him such a striking figure. I guess it took James a while to build him into the Sensitive Loner Dectective that sent readers’ hearts a-fluttering.

Two factors in particular made this story seem very dated to me. One was the omniscient narrator, popping happily into the suspects’ heads without warning and in a very erratic fashion, as if the writer occasionally became tired of doing the storytelling and handed the job over to someone else for five minutes. The other, alas, was the voice of audiobook narrator Penelope Dellaporta, which was standard BBC refined actress—I’ve become so unused to hearing this voice that its plumminess tends to get on my nerves. Furthermore, when I was listening to the audiobook without earbuds, there were odd popping noises as if people were playing ping-pong in the background. It didn’t happen when I put my earbuds in—very strange.

And, oh my goodness, every upper class character in the story was a resounding snob. Except, perhaps, the vicar, and vicars are, socially speaking, neither fish nor fowl. The descriptions of the lower orders’ houses were spectacularly condescending—was James playing to the sensibilities of her supposed readership, or was this how she actually thought? It seems almost impossible that English society was that hidebound just fiftysomething years ago.

The story wasn’t bad, apart from the tendency the characters had to explain their actions very carefully in chronological order, helpful if you’re the sort of mystery fan who loves the timetable aspect of investigation but not very realistic. There were some nice twists, and the whole thing culminated, very satisfactorily, with the great detective gathering all the suspects together in one room and methodically explaining what happened, with further twists in the tale being provided by timely interruptions. All very mechanical, really, but interesting—you can see the straight line going back to Dorothy L. Sayers and forward to the writer P.D. James would become in her later life. Development of the Mystery Story 101.

This methodical method of building up a story was a bit on the slow side, of course. But it’s a true portrait, I think, of a world that was being swept away even as P.D. James was writing. I’m looking forward to seeing her move into the 70s . . . although, of course, if I remember anything of the Dalgleish stories I read, she tended to adopt the closed-community scenario where people were sort of stranded in time.

James spent a lot of time introducing the suspects and setting the scene. In fact, had I not known this is the first in a detective series, I might have thought it a good piece of literary fiction. For awhile, I wasn't even sure which of the characters was to be the victim. And then, of course, a body was discovered and the mystery was on.

This is all to say that prose and characterization are the best of this. By that I don't mean that there wasn't enough mystery - I had as many ideas who was the perpetrator as there were characters from which to choose. It is that James' prose and characterization is better than one might expect for a detective novel. I do hope, however, that in subsequent installments, I come to know Inspector Dalgliesh and Sergeant Martin better, as, strangely enough, these characterization is the least fleshed out.

My disappointment actually comes from too much interaction between the suspects and not spending enough time with the investigators. There were too many surprises at the end, which made it feel contrived. This is a first novel I can't help but believe that James shows too much potential even in this first novel to improve greatly.

I read this in a collection of the first six of the series (P. D. James's Adam Dalgliesh Mysteries: Cover Her Face, A Mind to Murder, Unnatural Causes, Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower, and Death of an Expert Witness) and I will definitely continue it. With the strong points here being the elements I most like in a novel, I will stretch this to 4-stars.