To my taste there's not a great deal of charm in the writing of P.D. James, at least in comparison with some other female British writers of detective fiction. She's not the kind of writer who makes me think "that was a nice stroke" at some turn of phrase or bit of wit. There's a somber quality about her prose, though it is smooth and graceful; the word "careful" comes to mind. And the plots are slow-moving and low-key–also careful, you could say. But of the four of her mysteries that I've read, three have stuck with me pretty well, which is certainly not always the case for me, with fiction in general and particularly with detective fiction. (However, the fact that I remember vividly at least a few important things from those books is not saving me from the inability to recall the names of two of them. That's age at work. The one title I do recall is A Taste for Death.)
One of those is a fairly early book which I remember because the identity of the murderer quite surprised me, not so much as a result of the intricacy and subtlety of the clues as that I was surprised that the character, who had certain qualities not ordinarily attributed to fictional criminals, in fact generally regarded with some sympathy, was in fact pretty vicious at heart. The other, a late one, is set among conservative and somewhat eccentric Anglo-Catholics, and the portrayal of the milieu was interesting in itself. (I suppose "eccentric" is almost redundant there: Anglo-Catholics are now almost by definition eccentric in the sense of being unusual in relation to Anglicanism at large.)
So now The Black Tower joins these other three, and one of the reasons is that it, too, is set in a small and somewhat odd more or less Christian community. In this case it's a nursing home for critically ill, mostly terminally ill, patients who require a lot of care. And I say "more or less" because its founder and head seems to be somewhat vague about his beliefs–or maybe that's just the Anglicanism (he said mischievously). At any rate it exists because of the founder's conviction that he had been miraculously cured at Lourdes, and he takes the patients who are able to travel on an annual pilgrimage there. Police Commander Adam Dalgliesh gets involved because an elderly priest (Anglican), chaplain to and resident of the community, has written to him asking for help with a situation the nature of which he does not disclose.
The role of the priest in the book is relatively small in scope, but quite important. And it's he who pretty much guarantees that I'll remember at least something of it. His original connection with Dalgliesh is that he had been curate to Dalgliesh's father, who was rector of a parish in a Norfolk village. And Dalgliesh remembers a conversation, in which he, age ten, had inquired about the daily diary kept rigorously by the priest:
"It's just an ordinary diary then, Father? It isn't about your spiritual life?"
"This is the spiritual life; the ordinary things one does from hour to hour."
James was in fact an Anglican, and not in a merely nominal way. She was a "lay patron," whatever that means, of the Prayer Book Society. And I think it's at least in part her serious Christian sensibility that gives her work, not explicitly Christian, its depth.
As any fan knows, ITV (British) did a series of adaptations of several Dalgliesh novels back in the '80s. Roy Marsden played Dalgliesh in these, and I saw most (or all?) of them at the time (including The Black Tower, which I did not remember at all). I enjoyed them greatly, but whether it was Marsden's work, or the director's, or a difficulty in transferring the interiority of the character to the screen–probably the last–I found Dalgliesh a pretty vague character. Not so with this book. He seems very much alive, and more interesting than I remember. He's a quiet and close sort of person, and if you had to work almost entirely with his actions and speech it would be difficult to make him distinctive.
There is a new Dalgliesh adaption out, by the way. It's on the Acorn streaming service, which I don't have, so I haven't seen it.
Light On Dark Water 
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