Cover Her Face

[sawyl]

Returning to the beginning, I've jumped back to PD James' first novel, Cover Her Face. Although not as nuanced as some of the later novels, it's still a good read that paints a convincing portrait of a genteel upper class family living in straitened circumstances in the early 60s.

Everything changes for the Maxie family on the day of the local church fete when Sally Jupp, the house maid, announces that Stephen, the heir, has proposed to her. When Sally is found dead the next morning, strangled in her bed, Adam Dalgliesh is called in to investigate. He quickly finds himself confronted with tricky problem: was the murder committed by an intruder, or was it committed by a member of the Maxie household; and if the murder was committed by a family member, who was it?

Cover Her Face is country house murder in the best traditions of the genre. It features rampant class prejudice, repressed sexual tension and an almost Austenian obsession with the preservation of the the family's dwindling inheritance.

Unlike many of the subsequent Dalgliesh mysteries, the Chief Inspector doesn't take a particularly prominent role in the narrative. Instead most of the developments come out thanks to the work of two members of the Maxie clan, dedicated not so much to the truth as to ensuring the protection of the family. One consequence of this structure is that Dalgliesh remains relatively undeveloped as a character. The only significant things we learn about him are that he is a poet and that he is a widower, his wife and infant son having died a decade or so earlier.

The resolution, when it comes, is just as traditional as the form of the mystery itself, with the villain unmasked in the drawing room in the presence of the rest of the suspects. While the conclusion might lack the strength of some of the endings of the later books — the climatic scenes in Devices and Desires and A Certain Justice being particularly good — it's a perfectly satisfactory and consistent with the rest of the book.