The Private Patient – P.D. James

Lots of people rate Dame Phyllis as a serious writer and I like a good genre yarn, so I thought this could be a winner, but it turns out I was hopelessly awry with my optimism.

The set-up is pure Agatha Christie cheese: an isolated manor house, various suspicious characters with unlikely motives, and a murder by strangulation. Enter our hero to save the day. This stuff can work with a sufficiently ingenious plot, in this case everybody just sort of hangs around until somebody goes a bit loopy and confesses, all in a rather humdrum way. There are also various uninvolving sidetracks into the detectives’ private lives, presumably to keep long-term readers happy but baffling to me.

Then there’s the dialogue, much of which is embarrassingly clumsy exposition that takes the form “As you already know (2 pages of regurgitated research)”.

Here’s a sample from a discussion between 2 professional surgeons about a third:

“We can take his qualifications for granted – FRCS, FRCS (plast), Master of Surgery.”

What? WHAT?! They are telling each other things they already know, they are supposedly say aloud the words ”FRCS” repeatedly and they are somehow enunciating “(plast)” at the end of it. How was she picturing this scene? Where was the editor? How did this stuff reach publication?