A Taste for Death
P. D. James, 1986
★ 4.02 from 17.2k ratings on Goodreads
Two bodies found by a canal in Paddington, a ten-year-old thief with a taste for smoked salmon, and Dalgliesh picking through the parish's polite secrets. A slow, watchful read, wry about parish manners and police procedure, with dread gathering quietly under the everyday detail.
Feels like curiosity, dread and wonder. About death, morality and power.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy literary crime novels that take their time with character and place, and don't mind a bit of moral argument alongside the investigation. Be warned, though: many readers find the middle stretches long and detail-heavy, and the large cast can feel cold before it grips you.
Why read it
James worked in hospital administration and as a magistrate, and that inside knowledge of institutions shows in how she writes the parish, the police and the quiet compromises between them.
A page from the book
The horror of a cold corpse, delivered in the most sterile, official tone.
ONEThe bodies were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18 September by Miss Emily Wharton, a sixty-five-year-old spinster of the parish of St. Matthew’s in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged ten, of no particular parish as far as he knew or cared. This unlikely pair of companions had left Miss Wharton’s flat in Crowhurst Gardens just before half past eight to walk the half-mile stretch of the Grand Union Canal to St. Matthew’s Church. What readers say
Readers are split: many find the book overlong, detail-heavy and slow, with cold or unlikable characters and a predictable/contrived ending; others praise the rich characterization, literary writing and eventual engagement.
P. D. James.James published her first novel at forty-two while working full time in hospital administration, and later sat as a London magistrate — two careers' worth of evidence about how institutions behave.
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Questions readers ask
- Is A Taste for Death for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy literary crime novels that take their time with character and place, and don't mind a bit of moral argument alongside the investigation. Be warned, though: many readers find the middle stretches long and detail-heavy, and the large cast can feel cold before it grips you.
- What is A Taste for Death like?
- A slow, watchful read, wry about parish manners and police procedure, with dread gathering quietly under the everyday detail. Feels like curiosity, dread and wonder. About death, morality and power.
- What should I read after A Taste for Death?
- If you liked A Taste for Death, try The Law of the Four Just Men (Edgar Wallace), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John le Carré) and Death on the Nile (Agatha Christie).
A taste of the feed
The speech that strips the glamour off spying, one vice at a time.
What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs? I’d have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens that they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold · John le Carré
The patiance it takes to see one true thing, everything else scrape away.
Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition—and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do—clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth—the naked shining truth.
Death on the Nile · Agatha Christie
Four short sentences, and not one of them comes easily.
There are four things that lead to wisdom. You ready for them?’ She nodded, wondering when the police work would begin. "They are four sentences we learn to say, and mean." Gamache held up his hand as a fist and raised a finger with each point. "I don’t know. I need help. I’m sorry. I was wrong’.
Still Life · Louise Penny
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