James even surpassed her classic models and elevated the literary status of the modern detective novel. Many critics and many of her peers have said that by virtue of the complexity of her plots, the psychological density of her characters and the moral context in which she viewed criminal violence, Ms. One simply cannot take these as realistic books about murder, about the horror of murder, the tragedy of murder, the harm that murder does.” “That kind of crime writing was dull,” she once said in an interview, “in the sense that it was unrealistic, prettifying and romanticizing murder, but having little to do with real blood-and-guts tragedy. James bristled at the frequent comparisons to genre authors who wrote in the golden age of the English mystery novel, in the 1930s. Seven of her mysteries were adapted for the public-television series “Mystery!” and were broadcast in Britain and the United States. A consummate stylist, she accumulated numerous awards for the 18 crime novels produced during a writing career spanning a half-century. James was one of those rare authors whose work stood up to the inevitable and usually invidious comparisons with classic authors of the detective genre, like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.

Her publisher in Britain, Faber & Faber, announced her death. James, died on Thursday at her home in Oxford, England. Phyllis Dorothy James White, who became Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991 but who was better known as “the Queen of Crime” for the multilayered mystery novels she wrote as P.

Innocent Blood by P.D. James