by Mark Steyn
Mark at the Movies
November 29, 2014
P D James died on Thursday, the undisputed heir to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers as the "Queen of Crime", although she did not care for either comparison ("Such a bad writer," she sniffed of Dame Agatha). But in her 94 years she did a lot of other things, too: She was a Conservative peeress in the House of Lords, and her time in the bureaucracy (she was a Home Office civil servant) made her an effective chairman of things - whether of the Booker Prize for Fiction, or committees concerned with more earthbound endeavors. I had a slight acquaintance with her during my time at the BBC's "Kaleidoscope", where we used to call her in as a celebrity reviewer. I can recall being slightly skeptical of her judgment only once, when she told me how much she enjoyed the Bond film The Living Daylights because, unlike Sean Connery and Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton eschewed double entendres and gratuitous sex. Whatever his other gifts, Mr Dalton's earnest approach to the role almost killed the franchise. What appealed to Baroness James about the performance was, in fact, the problem.
When she started out, she figured she'd write a couple of crime thrillers and then move on to "serious" stuff. But Adam Dalgliesh caught on with the reading public, and then with telly viewers, first on ITV and then in America on PBS. So her non-detective novels were few and far between. The enduring one - the one that will ensure her place even if she'd never written a single murder mystery - is her 1992 book, The Children Of Men. It is a book of our time, an elegy of the west at sunset. I've mentioned it a lot over the years, and it turns up toward the end of my own latest tome, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn:
To western eyes, contemporary Japan has a kind of earnest childlike wackiness, all karaoke machines and manga cartoons and nuttily sadistic game shows. But, to us demography bores, it's a sad place that seems to be turning into a theme park of P D James' great dystopian novel The Children Of Men. Baroness James' tale is set in Britain in the near future, in a world that is infertile: The last newborn babe emerged from the womb in 1995, and since then nothing. It was an unusual subject for the queen of the police procedural, and, indeed, she is the first baroness to write a book about barrenness. The Hollywood director Alfonso Cuarón took the broad theme and made a rather ordinary little film out of it. But the Japanese seem determined to live up to the book's every telling detail.-go to links-
In Lady James' speculative fiction, pets are doted on as child-substitutes, and churches hold christening ceremonies for cats. In contemporary Japanese reality, Tokyo has some 40 "cat cafés" where lonely solitary citizens can while away an afternoon by renting a feline to touch and pet for a couple of companiable hours.
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