I have been (very) slowly collecting the P.D. James books Faber published with the beautiful covers illustrated by Angela Harding. And by slowly, I mean I had a total of four. Two that I got secondhand and were so dirty they needed replacing, and two others. Hardly a collection at all really, but I figured I had time to acquire them slowly. I like to remind myself that there is no rush to collect books when they are in print. It keeps the mad book buying in check. Then it happened. Faber released the Adam Dalgliesh series with new covers. Without changing the ISBNs, might I add. They were coming out in instalments and I had only heard about the change after the first 9 or 10 had been reissued. I rushed to order the remaining four, and despite ordering a month before the new covers were supposed to come out, three of the four books that arrived were the new ones. What a disappointment!
This is a longwinded way of saying how thankful I am that I was able to find seven more of the Angela Harding covers after that initial incident. There are fourteen books in the Dalgliesh, so I do not have a full set in the Angela Harding covers, but I am telling myself this is fine. Who knows! Perhaps I will find the others secondhand at some point in the future. Preferably without mysterious stains on them like the other two I have. I do hope so!
My takeaway is that if in future I do decide to collect a number of books in a series to either commit to buying them as they are issued or buy one per month until I complete the collection. Otherwise, just don’t do it.
I think I have rattled on long enough about my little collecting conundrum. Let’s chat about the first book in this series, Cover Her Face.
Faber originally published Cover Her Face in 1962. The dust wrapper has a striking illustration by Charles Mozley of a woman’s face. With just a few brushstrokes the artist has perfectly captured the stillness of death. It is as striking as it is grim. Certainly a cover to grab one’s attention, but I’m not sure if I would have been attracted to it, though I do think the that cover both encapsulates the kind of sparseness that I find in P.D. James’s writing as well as the serious crime in this book. The Angela Harding covers do add a certain romanticised ideal to these books that make them more easily palatable, I think.
St. Cedd’s Church fête is held on the grounds of Martingale manor house on a July afternoon. What with running stalls, ushering nosy visitors out of the house, and checking on her bedridden husband, it’s a busy day for Mrs. Maxie, especially with guests staying over who have come up for the festivities. Oh, and the sudden engagement of her son and the parlour maid, which was not on the agenda. But the final straw is when the aforementioned parlour maid is found dead the next morning. Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh is called in and the household is not at all helpful with the investigation.
The P.D. James novels I have read have felt slow-paced for the genre, and this one was no different. These are quiet novels with few dramatic moments. That might be why when peace gets interrupted—as we know it must, these are crime novels after all—it hits all the harder.
Dalgliesh is himself a quiet man. He is more than competent, working along with Detective Sergeant Martin who is junior to him in position, but not in age. Dalgliesh is as meticulous and methodical as one would expect of a Scotland Yard detective. He is also obsessive. Living and breathing the job to an extent that he might not have done, had his wife and son not died.
One of the things that always strikes me about P.D. James’s novels is how out of date they feel. That doesn’t quite explain it. Neither does calling her novels old or dated. What I mean is that I doubt I would be able to guess what year they were published in. The setting of this one is “a typical Elizabethan manor house” that is very well-staffed, especially for the time (57). It could be the setting for a novel from a decade or two earlier. But then there is the unexpected clash of the modern. In this case, it is the unwed mother working as a parlour maid, who ends up dead. If this was set in the interwar years, I don’t think you would find an unwed mother working at a house like Martingale, even in fiction. Especially not one who was allowed to have her baby living in with her. The parlour maid, Sally, had been recommended by the woman running the local home for unwed mothers, a Miss Liddell, and Mrs. Maxie is busy looking after her bed-bound husband, so the family do not pay much attention to the servants as long as they keep the house running smoothly.
I won’t give any more details about Sally’s death, than what you would find out from reading the back cover copy. But I will say that I think P.D. James does a good job of subverting reader expectations regarding Sally. Well, to an extent anyway. Sally is our victim, so she certainly does not escape unscathed. However, there is no moralising lesson about Sally’s death being a punishment for her life choices. Thank goodness. She is a good mother, though perhaps not the best parlour maid, if the cook is to be believed.
Martha had to admit that the baby was at first very little trouble. She put this down to Miss Liddell’s excellent training since it was beyond her comprehension that bad girls could be good mothers. James was a placid child who, for his first two months at Martingale, was content to be fed at his accustomed times without advertising his hunger too loudly and who slept between his feeds in milky contentment. This could not last indefinitely. […] Sally was beginning to spend more time with her child and Martha would often see her during the mornings, her bright head bent over the pram where the sudden emergence of a chubby leg or arm showed that Jimmy’s long periods of sleep were a thing of the past. No doubt his demands would increase. So far Sally had managed to keep up with the work allotted to her and to reconcile the demands of her son with those of Martha. (19-20)
I like that we get a glimpse of the woman that Sally was when her guard was down. With many murder mysteries, there is an unknowability to the victim, and this book is no different. Because the same woman who “screamed with laughter” at her son when he fussed over his food and “caught him to her in a whirl of endearments, loved and fondled him” also shows up to the fête in a similar dress to the daughter of the house, throws her engagement to Mrs. Maxie’s son in the woman’s face, in front of a table full of guests, and threatens to divulge more than one person’s dark secret if they fail to tow the line.
P.D. James answered my burning questions about Sally Jupp. Because as the story goes along I became more and more interested in solving the mystery of Sally. And thank goodness, Dalgliesh has the presence of mind to realise that to uncover a killer, he must first uncover the victim. The title, Cover Her Face is more than just a line from this book where a character quotes John Webster’s play, The Duchess of Malfi. (Although, I should perhaps have read The Duchess of Malfi before even addressing the reference. Oh, well. Too late now!) The full line is, “Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young” (IV, ii). There is the heavy suggestion that Dalgliesh, if not ‘cover her face,’ at least, look outside of Martingale for Sally’s murderer. But Dalgleish knows when he is on to something, and gives a most emphatic ‘no’.
I had such wonderful time with this one that I did something I rarely do. I went ahead and started reading the next book in this series right away. I will have a review for that one up shortly. For now I will say that I enjoyed A Mind to Murder even more than Cover Her Face. I am very much looking forward to continuing on with this series, though I may have to skip some titles until I find those coveted Angela Harding covers!
Speaking of which, I have shared affiliate links to the current editions of Cover Her Face and A Mind to Murder. However, if you prefer the Angela Harding covers, I got mine from an online bookseller in the UK called Postscript Books. They are selling the first four Dalgliesh books together. (You can see them in the last photo.) This is not sponsored or an affiliate link, but I was really impressed with the care they took in packaging my orders, and I will always advocate buying from small businesses, like Postscript Books, when possible. It appears that sell a lot of publisher remnants, and they recently acquired some Handheld Press titles, but they also sell new, non-remnant books as well.
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