Considered by many to be the undisputed Queen of Mystery, sadly P.D. James’ reign has come to an end. It’s hard to believe she penned only 19 novels in a career that spanned five decades. It seems as if there had been so many more and it’s sad to think no more will there be.

Phyllis Dorothy James did not publish her first book until 1964 at the age of 42. It took six years to complete as she wrote only in the morning before going to work at her civil servant job in the National Health Service. Although it had always been her intention to write, with her husband mentally debilitated and broken from his service in the war, supporting the family became her primary role. “It was a late beginning for someone who knew from early childhood that she wanted to be a novelist, and, looking back, I can’t help regret what I now see as some wasted years,” James wrote in a 1999 autobiography, Time to Be Earnest.

However, after becoming a successful writer she chose to continue to work a full time day job until 1979. Of course, her last position was as an administrator in the forensic science and criminal law divisions of the Department of Home Affairs which provided plenty of rich material for her novels.

Although I enjoyed her Adam Dalgliesh detective series, my personal favorite was the critically acclaimed The Children of Men. Outside the mystery genre, James created a bleak dystopian future in which the human race has become infertile. It was unexpected and well done. Her last novel in homage to Jane Austin, Death Comes to Pemberley, James inserts a murder into the mannered world of Pride and Prejudice. She said about testing new waters, “I don’t think that we necessarily choose our genre; the genre chooses us.”

She has said that even as a child she was interested in death. When someone read “Humpty Dumpty” to her, she asked, “Did he fall or was he pushed?” However, she also said, “I think I’m very frightened of violence. I hate it. And it may be that by writing mysteries I am able, as it were, to exorcise this fear, which may very well be the same reason so many people enjoy reading a mystery.”

But the quote that truly hit home with me, mostly because she describes how I feel about writing, was this: “It seems to me, that the more we live in a society in which we feel our problems to be literally beyond our ability to solve, the more reassuring it is to read a popular form of fiction which itself has a problem at the heart of it. One which the reader knows will be solved by the end of the book.”

Thank you PD James for providing us with incredible opportunities to escape. For being a role model who held onto your dream to be a novelist, for making it happen and for stretching genre boundaries. And thank you for your generous spirit, particularly your genuine interest in supporting other writers less successful than you had been.

You will be missed PD James!