PD James: Heroine with a taste for life

Every reader of PD James knows that institutions give rise to their own micro-climate, with local habits and habitats every bit as exotic as the seething life of a sheltered bay or a deep ravine. "I'm fascinated by organisations, the way in which people relate to each other at work," says the perennial bestseller, who was already almost 20 years into an acclaimed career of crime when she retired from the civil service in 1979. From the NHS and the Home Office to the BBC (she served five years as a Governor) and the House of Lords (where she takes the Tory whip), she can underpin her detective fiction with wider inside knowledge than almost any author in the history of the genre. "Of course, it has been tremendously helpful to have had a bureaucratic life apart from the writing. I don't think I'm the kind of writer who would do well sitting in a country cottage, frankly."

Baroness James of Holland Park, a Londoner by choice if not by birth, does not sit in a country cottage and conjure up fantasy backdrops for the "contaminating" deaths that shake small worlds – from churches to publishers – to their roots in her novels. "When I see people who have got other jobs," she explains, "I long to question them about how their day is organised; how they make their money; what are the problems, and so on." All the same, the engine-room of her empire of mystery feels as if it stands at a slight angle to its place and time.

Once behind the front door, the high-volume traffic and big-ticket shops of her west London patch fade into a distant dimension. In this micro-climate, amid the graceful furniture and gentle prints, elegance and efficiency converge – from the idiot-proof CV she supplies and the discreet presence of her cherished PA, Joyce McLennan, to the spine-stiffening crispness of her conversation. Seldom have I played back an interview tape and heard so little flannel or flab.

Not even life-threatening events can derail this focused dedication. Phyllis Dorothy James, whose second child (Jane, for Jane Austen, a lifelong heroine) was born as doodlebugs dropped in a fatal hail around Queen Charlotte's Hospital in 1944, turned 88 this month. Until last year, she recalls, "I was extraordinarily lucky with health. I really didn't feel particularly old... We don't grow gradually into old age. Throughout our lives, we're on a plateau and then suddenly, whoosh! We're five years older, and then we're on a plateau again." She hit another plateau when, after a hip replacement, she suffered heart failure.

"Suddenly I realised that I was old and this was a condition that couldn't be cured, but had to be lived with." And worked with - convalescent in Oxford, with Joyce McLennan arriving to take dictation as usual from the author's longhand, she galloped ahead with her 18th novel: "I've never known the last part of a book go so easily." Aptly enough, in The Private Patient (Faber & Faber, £18.99), Commander Adam Dalgliesh investigates the killing of a hard-bitten but high-principled reporter at a Dorset manor converted by a top surgeon into a clinic for reconstructive operations.

James joined the new-born NHS as a hospital administrator in 1949. After a stellar performance in the entrance competition, she moved to the Home Office 20 years later. Naturally, for this latest assignment she did her medical homework, consulting a specialist about the credibility of running a country clinic on top of NHS commitments in London. "I can't write about these people unless I know they're in a viable world."

As in all her mysteries, the setting has a leading role. Dalgliesh the policeman-poet tunes in to the sinister Hardy-esque landscape of Cheverell Manor. A pagan stone circle hints at a bloody ritual past, while the ambient cries of predators and prey evoke "the inexorable succession of kill and be killed". James knows the region well, and visits her long-standing editor at Faber & Faber, Rosemary Goad, at Wareham. "It is such a beautiful county, but I think it's one in which horrific legends abound."

Murderous turmoil has intruded on English tranquillity in her fiction ever since Dalgliesh cracked his first case in Cover Her Face, in 1962. "We don't choose a genre; it chooses us," she reflects. "I think there are strong psychological reasons why this one appeals to me: the bringing of order out of disorder."

She grew up in Ludlow and Cambridge on the fringe of the middle class, her war-veteran father protected but confined by "a rather boring job in the Inland Revenue". "To be born in 1920 was to grow up in an atmosphere of national grieving. The shadow of all that loss, almost the wiping-out of a very talented generation, hung over everyone I think. It made pessimists of us. And then there was the unemployment". In Ludlow, she recalls the "No hands wanted" signs. "One grew up with a great sense that life was basically insecure."

Then James became a mother under another shadow of annihilation. Later, a tough and lonely climb up the NHS career ladder coincided with long-trem care for her husband, Dr Connor Bantry White, after he returned incapacitated from war service. He died in 1964.

Meanwhile, she declined to give up the day job until retirement loomed. "Largely because of this insecurity about work and income in my childhood, and having the children to support, I felt that I needed to have that cheque coming in regularly at the end of each month." "Stoicism" seems far too bland a word for the heroic fusion of gift and grit that has given us the novels of PD James.

James relates her work readily to the "Golden Age" detective novels of her youth, with gory breaches of decorum in rural backwaters swiftly restored. Playfully allusive, The Private Patient sports the Christie-esque isolated manor and the ill-assorted cast with fast-unravelling pasts. Yet, as always, the surface cosiness of James's fiction proves a trap. Fans know that human complexity, and the unsettling breath of modernity, will complicate the case. A formal solution will not mean a spiritual resolution. Her books leave post-traumatic loose ends, I suggest. "In life, there is always some disorder left. Absolutely. Murder is a contaminating crime. Every single person who comes in touch with it is changed for good or ill."

The Private Patient abounds in toxic families and their lingering traumas, but it's also a novel rich in love. Fellow crime novelist Joan Smith told its author it was about "varieties of loving". James agrees. The slow-burn romance of Dalgliesh and his academic fiancée, Emma, reaches a classic finale. And two warmly-drawn gay couples offer a firm moral centre amid the misery. Strangers to James's writing, who may see only the Tory peer and headline scourge of "political correctness", will have no idea of the scope and depth of her empathy.

Behind that empathy rests the faith of "a very maverick Christian... Some people would say I don't really qualify!" I ask about the knots her beloved Church of England has tied itself into around this aspect of love. "If I were – God forbid! – the Archbishop of Canterbury, I think my attitude would be that there is nothing in the Gospels which says anything about homosexuality, and this is therefore a matter between people's private conscience and their God. But what is important is fidelity and kindness, whatever the relationship is."

Her conservatism can sound just as maverick. She took the whip only when the Major government looked doomed: "I moved to the losing side, which rather accords with my character. And if I have a political principle, it is in the freedom of the individual and the lessening of the power of any large organisation, including the state of course." Against the "large organisation", James sets the ethos of trusted professionals. The intuitive sleuth Dalgliesh seems to float above the form-filling drudgery of his real-life counterparts. "You can't work always looking over your shoulder, terrified that what you're doing is wrong or illegal," his creator laments.

When it comes to James's own profession, she plans to stay an active member for a while yet. The Private Patient may have a "slightly valedictory" mood, but nothing is set in the Dorset stone. As for future novels, "This is going to be a matter of what happens to my heart, and how long it's going to go on beating for me: I hope for some considerable time." Meanwhile, this expert in sudden extinction rejoices in the present: "To live under the continual fear of death is to diminish the quality of life that you have." Long may this patient, private icon remain a precious public asset.

PD James

Born in Oxford in 1920, PD James grew up in Ludlow and Cambridge, where she attended the High School for Girls. Married to a doctor, with two daughters, she joined the NHS in 1949 and moved to the Home Office in 1968. Her first Adam Dalgliesh mystery appeared in 1962; the latest, 'The Private Patient', is now published by Faber. Other books include novels featuring investigator Cordelia Gray ('An Unsuitable Job for a Woman'), 'The Children of Men', and a memoir, 'Time To Be In Earnest'. PD James, who has five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, was made an OBE in 1983 and a life peer in 1991. She lives in west London.