Devices and Desires

Following on from A Taste for Death, I've been reading P.D. James' Devices and Desires. The story is set around a year after the Berowne murder and finds Dalgliesh writing poetry again, having overcome his four year bout of writer's block.

Having inherited Larksoken Mill from his aunt, Adam Dalgliesh decides to go and stay there while he tries to decide what to do with the place. Invited to a dinner party by Alice Mair, a successful cookery writer, at the house she shares with her brother, the intensely ambitious director of the local nuclear power plant, Dalgliesh is reminded of his outsider status when one of the guests arrives late, having just found the body of a woman believed to have been killed by Norfolk serial killer, the Whistler.

When one of the guests at the dinner party, Hilary Robarts, the administrative officer at the power station, is murdered a few days later, everyone immediately assumes that the serial killer is to blame. But after incontravertable evidence turns up to show that she could not have been murdered by the Whistler, suspicion quickly falls on the dinner guests, on the the assumption that only they could have known enough to mimic the killer's modus operandi.

Devices and Desires is interesting in that although it features Dalgliesh, it doesn't really feature him as the main protagonist. Although he provides some key evidence to the detectives investigating Hilary Robarts' death, he doesn't take much a role beyond offering a sounding board to DCI Rickards, the man in charge of the case, and acts more to add depth to the plot.

Of the other characters, the Mairs and Meg Dennison stand out as particularly fine. Alex Mair, the director of Larksoken reactor, comes across as an old fashioned paternal scientist who controls everything in his domain with great authority, managing his personal affairs with an utter ruthlessness when they start to impinge on his desire to return to Whitehall as the national director of nuclear power. Alice, Mair's sister, is equally strong and assured, confident in her profession as a cookery writer and dismissive of the suggestions that she is subservient to her brother — when she's asked if she keeps house for her brother, she laughs and points out that it is she who owns the house and she who puts her brother up, not the other way round. Meg too is rather good. A former teacher, forced to quite her profession after some sort of scandal involving racism, the details of which are never quite spelt out, widowed after her husband saved a child from drowning, she has found sanctuary in her role as housekeeper to an elderly clergyman and his wife and drawn comfort from her rather touching friendship with Alice Mair.

The rest of the mystery is rather enjoyable and the moment when it all wraps up is particularly fine; more so because it throws some of the earlier events of the book into sharp relief, forcing them to be reconsidered and redefined in the light of the new evidence.