A Taste For Death – P. D. James, 1986 ★½

Too Many Notes

Reading this brought to mind a line in that great Mozart movie Amadeus, when Wolfgang asks the Habsburg court why their emperor doesn’t like his latest piece. One courtier answers: “Too many notes.”

It’s a comic scene, and on the face of it ridiculous, particularly directed at Mozart. But I kind of knew what that hapless lackey meant. There can be too much of a good thing, at least as I see it, a surplus of invention, particularly when it comes to writing mysteries.

Thus came my wonderment and annoyance about this novel. P. D. James’ ability to create involving, multi-dimensional characters and settings ultimately gets in the way of what a mystery should be about.

Paul Berowne is a baronet and Parliament member who is found one morning in a rundown London chapel with his throat cut. He is in the company of a vagrant, also dead of the same cause. At first they think murder-suicide, but who killed whom? Then as the last days of Berowne are investigated, aspects of his life come into focus, such as an affair, a scandalous letter, and Berowne’s curious decision to walk away from politics and embrace religion. The possibility emerges of another killer.

London police investigator Adam Dalgliesh has cause to recall the words of an old detective sergeant: “Love, Lust, Loathing, Lucre, the four L’s of murder, laddie. And the greatest of these is lucre.”

The list of suspects is long, and include an estranged wife, her cousin-lover, her brother, and a committed leftist radical. Even Sir Paul’s rebellious daughter merits attention. Basically, it’s a pretty hefty roster of suspects which keep one guessing but mainly populate a world that serves up more blind alleys than a marble maze.

Two years after A Taste For Death was published, it was made into a BBC-TV miniseries, featuring (from left) Wendy Hiller as Lady Ursula Berowne, Roy Marsden as Adam Dalgliesh, and Fiona Fullerton as Lady Barbara Berowne. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0156122/mediaviewer/rm2224441600.

A lot of great prose, too; a Jamesian hallmark:

His eyes were small and upward-slanting. When he was amused he would narrow them into twin creases of flesh. The most remarkable thing about his face was the restless mobility of his small, delicately formed mouth, which he used as a moist focus of emotion. He would press it in disapproval, turn it down like a child’s in disappointment or disgust, lengthen and curve it when he smiled. It seemed never the same shape. Even in repose he would munch with it, as if relishing the taste of his tongue.

There is a Dickensian quality to that description of a fairly minor character, a magazine publisher who trafficked in some Berowne dirt but doesn’t otherwise figure in the overall story. James ladles similar descriptive attention on other characters, to the point where the filigree hampers a focus on plot. Too many notes, as that Viennese fellow observed.

Yet I enjoyed this filigree most of the way through. Ultimately, my problem with A Taste For Death centered as much around its relentlessly downbeat tone. Starting with a macabre murder scene in a deserted chapel, it spends a lot of time pondering the death of God and other finer aspects of British life at the close of the last century:

“Our basic needs are pretty straightforward – food, shelter, warmth, sex, prestige, in that order. The happiest people go after them and are satisfied with them. Berowne wasn’t. God knows what unattainable intangibles he thought he’d a right to. Eternal life, probably.”

Author P. D. James at home in 1988. She died in 2014, at age 94. Image from https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/aug/11/reading-group-a-taste-for-death-by-pd-james-is-our-book-for-august.

Adam Dalgliesh is the main character here, as he is in most James novels. In three novels I have yet to catch myself enjoying his company. He is a refined figure, a well-regarded poet when he isn’t solving crimes who says little and seems at least three chapters ahead of the reader.

Perhaps recognizing he’s hard to warm up to, James offers an alternative sleuth to follow this time, a new police investigator named Kate Miskin, about whom Dalgliesh acknowledges a sort of attraction:

It would have been dishonest to say there was no hint of sexuality between them. In his experience there nearly always was, however repudiated or unacknowledged, between any reasonably attractive heterosexual couple who worked closely together.

Like much else in A Taste For Death, this idea gets flicked around briefly, then left alone. Miskin gets a backstory, where she was given up for adoption as a baby and apparently given a fitting surname to reflect her lost status.

Say this for James: she wasn’t plucking character names from a phone book. There’s Dalgliesh himself, his main assistant Massingham, a coroner named Kynaston, and other names that don’t roll off the tongue. Berowne is a character’s name in a Shakespeare play, Love’s Labour Lost, which actually comes to figure in the plot.

An early paperback edition of A Taste For Death, with the victim's last meal of bread and Roquefort cheese in the foreground. Image from https://www.thriftbooks.com.

What was driving Paul Berowne to spend his final night in a church? Why did his last day alive include a visit to the home of a once-popular romance novelist? How did his wife’s secret pregnancy figure in his death? And how did a riverside restaurant figure in the murderous goings-on?

It’s not so much James’ failure to address these points satisfactorily as much as her inability to make me care. By the time I got to the convoluted conclusion, where the revealed murderer becomes a character entirely different from everything I was led to expect, I found myself feeling like a very slow child trying to keep up with the gossip from the adults’ table, probably James’ goal all along.

While the mystery was dissatisfying, the journey getting there did capture my interest. James’ characters are vivid and singular personalities, and she takes arresting philosophical discursions. If it never comes together, it kept me reading past the point of caring much about how the mystery was resolved.

James’ astringent humanism goes well with the novel’s bleak tone. Pity is wasted on her characters. Worse, it sets them up:

The miserable batten on their victims. If you provide them with what they crave, open your heart and mind to them, listen with sympathy, they come in ever increasing numbers, draining you emotionally and physically until you have nothing left to give. If you repel them, they don’t come back and you’re left despising yourself for your inhumanity.

I don’t know if this is standard P. D. James. Other novels of hers I’ve read also wore disillusionment like a badge, most especially her non-Dalgliesh novel Innocent Blood. This time that weight seemed heavier, perhaps because it was more ingrained.

Image from the 2010 Kindle edition, depicting the opening scene of a young boy and an old woman walking to the church where they will discover the crime. Image from https://www.amazon.com/Taste-Death-Inspector-Dalgliesh-Mystery-ebook/dp/B002RI91L2.

Humor is almost non-existent. Berowne’s ancient mother, the widow Lady Ursula, gets off some choice lines about the younger generation, and there is an amusing self-portrait regarding a female mystery novelist photographed by one of the suspects, “who gazed mournfully at the camera as if deploring either the bloodiness of her craft or the size of her advance.”

Mostly sadness dominates, tinged with bitterness and despair:

People, like countries, needed someone weaker and more vulnerable than themselves to bully and despise...

“Churches are dark, empty. No silver, no gold, no lights. Nothing. Do you suppose that’s when their God comes down from His cross and walks about, goes up to the altar and finds that it’s only a wooden table with a piece of fancy cloth pinned round it?”...

Old age makes caricatures of us all. No wonder we dread it.

Funny enough, P. D. James had a reputation in her long life for being a practicing Anglican. Yet I don’t think Camus was as bleak as the author of this novel, a Sisyphean police procedural where the final solving of the crime proves not only pointless but deadly. While I enjoyed reading it much of the way through, by the time I was done it was with a shudder of relief.