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positiveness rather than from any careful weighing-up of the relative advantages and disadvantages. But I would certainly never dream of pretending to be other than a woman. Not only would this be pointless, since the truth becomes known fairly quickly, but women are generally well regarded as crime writers and only a minority of readers would reject a book because they disliked the sex of the author, although I have to admit I have known cases. My memory is that when the manuscript was ready to be sent off to an agent or publisher, I wrote down Phyllis James, Phyllis D. James, P. D. James, and decided that the last and shortest was enigmatic and would look best on the book spine. It never occurred to me to write other than under my maiden name. I have never regretted my choice, particularly now, when I may have to sign as many as three hundred books at an American signing. That is seldom a problem here; the British are much less addicted to standing in long lines to meet an author.
    I began writing
Cover Her Face
when I was in my mid-thirties. 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 regretting what I now see as some wasted years. In the war there was always the uncertainty of survival and one needed more determination and dedication than I possessed to embark on an 80,000-word work when the bombs were falling and lack of paper made it difficult for anyone new to get published. There is also in my nature that streak of indolence which made it more agreeable to contemplate the first book than actually to begin writing it. It was easier, too, to see the war years as a preparation for future endeavour rather than an appropriate time to begin. I can remember the moment, but not the date, when I finally realized that there would never be a convenient time to write my first book and that, unless I did make a start, I would eventually be saying to my grandchildren that what I had wanted to be was a novelist. Even to think of speaking these words was a realization of potential failure.
    I can’t now remember how long it took to write
Cover Her Face
, but I suspect it was years rather than months. When I began the book I was working at Paddington Hospital Management Committee, and the book was largely planned on the Central Line as I travelled from Redbridge to Liverpool Street, then on by the Metropolitan Line to Paddington. The writing, always by hand, was done in the early morningswhen I would get up in time to spend about an hour writing before I needed to leave for work, occasionally at weekends between visits to Connor in hospital, and sometimes on the journey. The work was hindered by family emergencies, by pressure of my job and by the need to spend some evenings at the City of London College in Moorgate, studying for the qualification in hospital administration which I hoped might eventually result in a job sufficiently well paid to support my family. I don’t think it occurred to me then that writing novels would be either lucrative enough or dependable enough to rely on.
    It didn’t occur to me either to begin with anything other than a detective story. They had formed my own recreational reading in adolescence and I was influenced in particular by the women writers: Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Josephine Tey. I had no wish to write a strongly autobiographical novel about the war or Connor’s illness. I suppose, too, I have a streak of scepticism, even of morbidity, which attracted me to the exploration of character and motive under the trauma of a police investigation of a violent death. I could always imagine myself writing a novel which wasn’t a detective story—indeed, I have written two,
Innocent Blood
and
The Children of Men—
but I can’t imagine myself writing a book which doesn’t include death. Death has always fascinated me and even in childhood I was always aware of the fragility of