On Thursday afternoon, travelling home from a meeting at university, I’m mid-phone call with my friend when he announces that P.D James has died. It seems to have been a year of deaths for the celebrity and writing community, but something about James’s passing really hit me. Which is probably why it’s taken me two days to write down my thoughts about it. In the final year of my undergraduate degree, I opted to write my dissertation on detective fiction. To my utter dismay, I was paired with a lecturer who, whilst being a complete expert in her chosen field, had no interest or knowledge in the area in which I was exploring for my project. Four weeks into my dissertation meetings, I presented to her the three authors (and their respective works) that I would be investigating, analysing, and using as a blueprint for my own writing. P.D James was one of them. Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler were the other two, and so, as a young female writer interested in female writers, James had
Writing about writing, or trying to at least...