PD James

BARONESS James of Holland Park, who has died aged 94, was best-known as the crime novelist PD James, but also enjoyed a successful career as a senior civil servant.

Phyllis James once described herself as an elderly grandmother who writes traditional English detective fiction, and was often placed in the tradition of great female detective novelists such as Dorothy L Sayers (her own favourite), Agatha Christie, and her near-contemporary and closest rival, Ruth Rendell.

There was some truth in this characterisation; her novels played fair with the form, she insisted that a good story came first, she was interested in the contrast between middle-class respectability and the brutality of planned violence and her books were well-written, but largely conventional in form and style.

But she was not only a good crime writer. James's novels were also highly realistic (as the golden age novelists, such as Sayers and John Dickson Carr were not), contemporary, and did not shy away from ethical questions or the grief and emotions surrounding death; Kingsley Amis described The Black Tower (1975) as "almost Iris Murdoch with murder in it".

Her main protagonist, Adam Dalgliesh, was a professional detective with the Metropolitan Police, and she was at pains to deal with the techniques of real-life police work. Here, PD James had considerable expertise, for her career in the civil service included spells as a senior administrator in both the forensic science and criminal law departments of the Home Office.

Phyllis Dorothy James was born in Oxford, the eldest of the three children of Sidney, a tax inspector, and his wife Dorothy. The family moved to Ludlow on the Welsh border and then to Cambridge, where Phyllis James attended the High School for Girls. During her childhood, she had to cope with the remoteness of her father, and her mother's periods of mental instability. The necessity to grow up quickly was compounded by the need to leave school at 16 in order to earn a living.

She worked in a tax office, and then as an assistant stage manager at Cambridge Festival Theatre, where she met her husband (Ernest) Connor White, a doctor. They were married in 1941 and had two daughters. She was a Red Cross nurse during the Second World War, but her husband's mental health was shattered by his war service with the RAMC, and he spent prolonged periods in psychiatric hospitals.

Compelled to earn a living, in 1949, Phyllis White moved to London and trained as a medical records administrator, working with psychiatric outpatients herself. She had always thought of herself as a novelist, but the pressure of bringing up her daughters and of forging a career and acquiring qualifications meant that there was little time to write.

At the age of 35, she decided to begin in earnest, rising at 6am to write for two hours before going to work. Cover Her Face, her first novel, which introduced Adam Dalgliesh, was published in 1962 and was followed the next year by A Mind to Murder.

Her husband died in 1964 and, in 1968, she transferred from the NHS to the Home Office's forensic science department. Thereafter, she lived a dual life, writing the Dalgliesh novels in the early morning and, as Mrs White, running the Police Department and, from 1972, the Criminal Policy Department in Whitehall. After Unnatural Causes (1967), she achieved a solid measure of critical and commercial respectability with Shroud for a Nightingale (1971) and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), a non-Dalgliesh novel which introduced Cordelia Grey.

Her huge commercial breakthrough, however, came with Innocent Blood (1980), another non-series novel, about an adopted girl who discovers her birth parents' murderous background, and which brought PD James £380,000 for the paperback rights, and £145,000 for the film rights. It was more than she had earned at the Home Office in 10 years. "At the beginning of the week I was relatively poor, and at the end I wasn't," she later said. In 1979, she retired from the civil service.

There then followed a steady stream of books, most of which were adapted for television during the 1980s and 1990s. Besides the 14 Dalgliesh books, she produced another Cordelia Grey story, The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982) and Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), a continuation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with a murder mystery. She also produced an autobiography and a non-fiction analysis of the detective story.

She made one major foray out of crime fiction with Children of Men (1992), a near-future science fiction tale of a world in which infertility has become universal. It was not an especially original theme but the film adaptation, in 2006, was a triumph.

After the civil service, PD James had continuing public roles. She was an Associate Fellow at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1986 and a governor of the BBC from 1988 to 1993, and a member of its Council from 1987-88. She served on the Arts Council and the British Council and chaired the Booker Judges in 1987. She was chairman, and later president, of the Society of Authors, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts. In 1991, she was created a Tory peer as Baroness James of Holland Park. She received honorary degrees, including from Glasgow.

She is survived by the two daughters she had with her late husband.