Crime novelist PD James, who penned more than 20 books, has died aged 94.
Her agent said she died “peacefully at her home in Oxford” on 27th November morning. The author’s books, many featuring sleuth Adam Dalgliesh, sold millions of books around the world, with various adaptations for television and film. Her best known novels include The Children of Men, The Murder Room and Pride and Prejudice spin-off Death Comes to Pemberley. She gained international recognition in 1980 after the publication of her eighth book, Innocent Blood. During the 1980s, many of James’s Dalgliesh novels were adapted for television.
The author was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association’s Diamond Dagger award in 1987 for lifetime achievement, and received the Medal of Honour for Literature in 2005 by National Arts Club. . Over a five-decade career as a published writer, James won countless honors for her thoughtful, probing mysteries featuring Dalgliesh, a Scotland Yard detective who was also a poet. She was named a Grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America, earned the Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association and received a life membership in the House of Lords in 1991, named Baroness James of Holland Park.
Phyllis Dorothy James was born in Oxford in 1920. At 16, she left school and went to work as a civil servant in the tax office. She married Ernest Connor White in 1941. James didn’t publish her first novel, “Cover Her Face,” until 1962 – when she was 42 – but she always knew she wanted to be a writer. Aside from the mysteries, her best-known work is probably “The Children of Men,” which was made into a highly praised Alfonso Cuaron film in 2006. It is set in a near future in which a disease has rendered women infertile and humanity is slowly dying off, erupting in chaos in the process.
James is survived by two daughters and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
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