Shroud For A Nightingale – P. D. James, 1971 ★★★½

Death Visits the Nurses's Wing

A mystery can be too good to properly enjoy when one of two things get in the way: 1) Getting too invested in one possible outcome to the point of resenting another the author goes with instead, or 2) Being so caught up that you race through the final pages and miss key details.

I think Shroud For A Nightingale might have been for me an example of the first. I definitely did not rush the ending, but it still caught me short. I found myself more interested in the red herrings than the final solution.

But hey, whosever fault it was, I still liked it!

Set somewhere near London in a community hospital and its detached dormitory, Nightingale House, Shroud For A Nightingale gives us P. D. James at her world-building best. A pair of nurse murders prompt a visit from James’ regular protagonist, Adam Dalgliesh, here in his fourth novel and his first as a police chief superintendent.

James emphasizes Dalgliesh is one cool customer:

He seldom did care. Human beings were perpetually interesting to him, and nothing about them surprised him any more. But he didn’t involve himself.

Dalgliesh’s superhuman detachment helps him peer through the drama of Nightingale House to draw out the stuff that matters. Namely, why did one nurse ingest a container of poisoned milk during an intra-gastric feeding demonstration, and another take a fatal dose of nicotine at bedtime? Was it a murder-suicide, brought on by one girl blackmailing the other’s adulterous escapades? A prank gone horribly wrong? Or something else entirely?

Like I say, James is in fine form when it comes to developing a layered, engaging milieu. “It’s never been a happy house,” is how head nurse Mary Taylor describes the place. A ghost is supposed to haunt the surrounding woods, while Nightingale House itself is an old Victorian pile of small rooms and outdated fixtures where shadows scurry through dim hallways to grab at some semblance of a private life. At times, it suggests a sly social commentary of Great Britain in 1971.

The connecting, more modernized hospital is known as John Carpender Hospital, almost as if James foresaw the Halloween series by the director of very nearly the same name who even set his first sequel almost entirely in a hospital. A murderer is on the loose here, too, less conspicuous and quicker of foot. Dalgliesh seems certain it wasn’t one of the victims; who then?

Getting to watch Dalgliesh perform his investigation mastery is the marquee pleasure of this novel. The inspector and his creator were by now both seasoned professionals; both move with efficiency and élan.

Take James’ description of Dalgliesh’s first moments, looking on as the body of the second victim, Josephine Fallon, is photographed on the bed where she was found:

There was a click, an explosion of light, and the image of the dead girl leapt up at them and lay suspended in air, burning itself on Dalgliesh’s retina. Colour and shape were intensified and distorted in that cruel, momentary glare. The long black hair was a tangled wig against the whiteness of the pillows; the glazed eyes were exophthalmic marbles, as if rigor mortis was squeezing them out of their sockets; the skin was very white and smooth, looking repulsive to the touch, an artificial membrane, tough and impermeable as vinyl. Dalgliesh blinked, erasing the image of a witch’s plaything, a grotesque puppet casually thrown against the pillow.

Our cast of characters includes Mary, the imposing “Matron;” a pair of creepy twins; a brusque surgeon who likes to fool around; a man-hating lesbian nurse and her pretty young lover who toys with her; and a rustic character who propositions Dalgliesh when he meets her in a shack near Nightingale House. Really, though, it’s Nightingale House itself which dominates the story, putting Dalgliesh through his paces as he sets up his investigation headquarters there as unobtrusively as possible.

The heavy mood helps offset a lack of action. After the second murder, there’s a lot of foreboding and some pregnant asides, but no further criminal incident until nearly the end. Slack is taken up by Dalgliesh’s sly interrogations and a scene outside the hospital grounds where his deputy, Masterson, becomes a reluctant tango partner to a witness with ideas of getting what she can for her information:

“What did he tell you?”

“After the dance.”

“Tell me now if you don’t want to end on the floor.”

Humor like that is not frequent, but strategically deployed. I liked also how James explains management of Carpender’s cafeteria menu: “Liver and kidneys were never served on days when the urinary surgeon operated, and the nurses were not faced with the same menu as that which they had just served to the patients.”

Little touches like that go a long way to make Shroud For A Nightingale delightful in its dark way. James was a real maven for detail.

P. D. James in 2010. Already in her fifties when Shroud For A Nightingale was published in 1971, she passed away in 2014 at 94. Image from http://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/p-d-james-encore-1.2853985. 

This is a fine thing for a mystery writer. When she goes off on a tangent about a particular nurse’s romantic involvement with a married handyman, you wonder whether James is just playing out a scene for some observational humor about their shared taste in ugly Valentine’s Day cards or building out a potential motive for the crimes. A lot of mystery writers spin side-stories for a page or two; James’ uniqueness I think lay partially in her ability to make the reader care beyond the confines of the mystery itself.

But this kind of fiction mastery can be a drawback; by the time Dalgliesh enters the story fifty pages in, both murders have already taken place with more than 200 pages to go. I enjoyed very much the opportunity to observe James’ plate-spinning talent in full hum; should I reasonably expect others to as well?

James seems to have sensed this; at Page 100 in my paperback she includes the following piece of narrative, beginning with a comment from Sgt. Masterson:

“Nightingale House does seem to be touched with ill-luck, but I can’t see the killer having another go while we’re around.”

It was to prove a singularly unprophetic remark.

With that ominous note put in play, one expects something to happen by the end of the chapter, maybe the chapter that follows. Yet the next attack is 150 pages away, and over quickly without fatal result. Then the story moves into its final resolution, a touch too neatly.

Another concomitant drawback some Amazon.com reviewers note ties into Dalgliesh’s singular powers of observation as presented by James. We are told several times he is very clear about what happened and has firm ideas regarding a killer’s (or is it killers’?) identity, but he keeps those thoughts to himself. Other lead investigators in mysteries toss up ideas and theories; Dalgliesh, a cagey old bird, keeps them to himself, making only elliptical comments about how this or that development was to be wholly expected.

Why does James have him play his cards so close to the vest? Perhaps she didn’t want Dalgliesh exposed as less than the perfect crime-stopper. This cuts against an opportunity for needed tension.

It’s not a flaw so much as an occasionally frustrating idiosyncrasy in James’ narrative, which in most respects is entirely forthcoming, especially when drawing out the inner thoughts of those around Nightingale House and John Carpendar Hospital.

One visiting nurse we meet in the opening scene, who disappears from the narrative until the end of the book, is said to breathe in the smells of disinfectant “like an addict,” so immersed is she in a life of medicine. A senior nurse at Carpendar takes a hard stance to the investigators, yet oddly enjoys it when Dalgliesh responds by telling her off.

The deaths themselves expose a hardness among the rest of the staff:

Already she saw that shock was giving way to that half-ashamed excitement which can follow tragedy, so long, of course, as it is someone else’s tragedy.

That holds true for me, too. Shroud For A Nightingale maintains a level of steady excitement around the tragedies of others, see-sawing smoothly between mystery and discovery. Even when that discovery takes its own sweet time arriving, and does so with less aplomb than I hoped, the overall experience of reading it is a fine one, and rather whetted my appetite for more opportunities to check on the exploits of Dalgliesh, however cool a cucumber he may be.