As always, the writing of P D James is magnificent. This one really had me interested from the beginning and kept me interested all the way through.

Very long-winded and full of boring descriptions.

Not my favourite James book. Her main character, Adam Dalgliesh, has been seriously ill and must convalesce and decide what to do with his life. Turns out his illness wasn't the fatal cancer his doctors originally feared, so he must find a way to re-engage with life (a circumstance echoed in the situation he finds himself later in the novel).

So we have an uncertain and disillusioned Dalgliesh, called to give advice to a clergyman that he has known when he was a boy. He's unsure what the man wanted to discuss, but by the time he arrives at the odd facility/community where the priest lives, the man is dead. Dalgliesh doesn't want to be an investigator any more, but he also can't turn off his brain. Perhaps it's this lack of true engagement in the main character, but I had a hard time caring whether it was a murder or not.

Of course, the mysterious events don't stop there. The deaths pile up and both Dalgliesh and I wonder why he's still hanging around this weird nursing home. Why hasn't he fled the scene, typed up his resignation letter, and written some poetry about it? During the last 20 pages, James suddenly regains her grip and the plot thunders to an inevitable conclusion.

We can't write fabulous books every time, so I am chalking this offering up to that. I'm still a Dalgliesh fan and will give the next book in the series a chance.

Cross posted at my blog:

https://wanda-thenextfifty.blogspot.c...

Un polar britannique qui ne réussit pas á m´engager. Après avoir vu le DVD (qui est á éviter, d´ailleurs) je voulais lire le livre afin de comprendre ce qui m´as échappé dans le film. A part d´avoir mieux compris l´histoire, le livre m´a juste confirmé que les polars n´est pas mon genre.

Very dry and hard to get through. Very little attention grabbing. It was like my grandma telling me an irrelevant story about her distant cousin from her childhood but without the emotional connection. I was half way through when I called it quits. Just not my kind of author I suppose.

Murderous Monks?
Review of the Sphere Books paperback (1977 orig./1986 reprint) of the Faber & Faber hardcover original (1975)

n  This, too, was a sensation which in the long dog days in hospital he had thought never to experience again, the frisson of excitement along the blood at the first realization that something important had been said, that although the quarry wasn't yet in sight nor his spoor detectable, yet he was there. He tried to reject this unwelcome surge of tension but it was as elemental and involuntary as the touch of fear.n

Scotland Yard CID's Detective Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh has decided to give up his police career after coming through a terminal scare due to a mis-diagnosis and a resulting hospital stay. For his convalescence, he takes up the invitation of Father Baddeley, an old family friend, to visit him at his cottage by the Toynton Grange Nursing Home. He arrives to find out that Father Baddeley has passed away from an apparent heart attack. This is shortly after a resident patient has apparently committed suicide by propelling his wheelchair off the nearby seaside cliff. Regardless of his planned change of career, Dalgliesh is drawn by instinct to further investigate the situation.

Dalgliesh has an excuse to stay on at the cottage, as he has inherited the Father's book collection which needs sorting. The nearby Toynton Grange facility is a private nursing home run on a spiritual basis due to its founder Wilfred Anstey's miracle cure from Disseminated Sclerosis (an alternative name for Multiple Sclerosis). The caregivers all wear monk-like habits, there are regular prayer readings and twice annual pilgrimages to Lourdes in France to take the waters.

Due to his recovering health Dalgliesh is perhaps a bit slow at first to piece together all of the clues surrounding the situation. The discovery of a series of poison pen letters further complicates matters and then there is yet another apparent natural death and yet another apparent suicide. Four deaths at the same facility in such close sequence can't possibly be natural and a coincidence surely? Dalgliesh manages to solve it all in the end but comes close to becoming the murderer's fifth victim.


Front cover of the original Faber & Faber hardcover edition (1975). Image sourced from Wikipedia.

I read The Black Tower as part of my continuing 2022 re-read binge of the P.D. James' Adam Dalgliesh and Cordelia Gray novels, which I am enjoying immensely. James is truely at the height of the Silver Age of Crime authors and puts most modern mystery writers to shame with her extensive character backgrounds and plots often set in confined communities where an atmosphere of paranoia and foreboding reign, until the cool, often detached detection of Dalgliesh is able to arrive at a clarifying solution.

Actor Bertie Carvel as Adam Dalgliesh in the Acorn TV series "Dalgliesh" (2021-). Image sourced from IMDb.

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

The Black Tower was adapted for television in 1985 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 1985 adaptation starting with Episode 1 on YouTube here. The adaptation is reasonably faithful to the novel.

The new Acorn TV-series reboot Dalgliesh (2021-?) starring Bertie Carver as Adam Dalgliesh filmed an adaptation of The Black Tower as Episodes 3 & 4 of Season 1. The adaptation is reasonably faithful to the novel, but it reduces the number of characters at the Toynton Grange Nursing Home, renames Julius Court as Julius Marsh, and adds a local Sergeant Miskin (who becomes a regular series character in Episodes 5 & 6). It has not yet been announced which books are being adapted for Season 2 (as of late July 2022). Season 1 adapted Books 4, 5 & 7.

לסקירה מפורטת בעברית, קישור לבלוג שלי -

https://sivi-the-avid-reader.com/the-...

I remember watching the TV series adaptation of this book when I was younger and I found it quite ... mysterious and dark. It wasn't like any other detective series I'd seen and it stuck with me ever since. I took some of the mysterious feelings with me when I started reading The Black Tower and soon I discovered that it also read differently from any other murder mysteries I've read so far. P.D. James goes deeper than, for instance, Agatha Christie does: Dalgliesh is much more of a round character than Poirot. The Black Tower starts off with a lot of descriptions of Dalgliesh's thoughts and these descriptions stay throughout the whole book. I really liked this! The solution to the mystery wasn't that original, though, and I soon knew who the killer was. It just couldn't have been anyone else, really!

This is now the fourth murder mystery by P.D. James, with Dalgliesh as the main character, I've read, but The Black Tower stood out more than the other three. However, I think that's mainly because of the nostalgic feelings, of watching the adaptation, I link to it.

A short take:

James writes sensual prose, while Dalgliesh continues to pull me in. I didn't go for his resolution to leave police work, but then, I know that 9 more books follow this volume, so there were no stakes in this prospect for me. As usual, the mystery, itself, is secondary to the character histories that manifest during the ensuing investigation. James is very good at writing about people and the complicated muddle they make of their lives. Murder is nasty; reading this book was pleasant.


More thoughts:

Would a murderer continue killing people in the middle of an active investigation, let alone an investigation in which a renowned officer is living within 200 meters of the victim? So far, the last three Dalgliesh books have featured this trope, without which, hypothetically, Dalgliesh would be left short of needed evidence to resolve the facts of each crime. But to keep killing in the vicinity of an officer is stupid. This judgment does not detract from my enjoyment of the book, but it does keep the plot strong attached to fiction--which is fine by me: Dalgliesh and his adventures do not need to be true-to-life for me to like them.

I know I do not like English writers in the vein of "Let's describe everything down to the atomic level" and I think this book was one of the worse I have ever read for that. It was a book club choice, so I finished but think of it was 20 hours or more of my life I will Never get back!

Read 40 pages. So.o oooo boring! Skipped to the end. Not worth reading.

The first book of my 2019 P.D. James read-a-thon is done.

I saw the film adaptation years ago, so it was playing along in my head as I was reading the story. So it made the book even more enjoyable. I forgot what happened in the ending, so I had a delightful surprise with the ending.

Now onto the next one.