Deep mysteries

Christian Century, Sept 27, 2000 by Ralph C. Wood

Though only 44 when she was widowed, James never remarried. Even before her husband's death, she was required to support her family through often tedious secretarial and administrative jobs. Yet James makes no complaint for what must have often been a troublous life. On the contrary, she confesses that she has received immensely more than she has given. She also notices the many gracious ironies that have befallen her. Not least among them is that her skill as a detective writer has been hugely enhanced by the intimate knowledge of homicide she gained from her work in the forensic and criminal justice system. She is also grateful, despite the pain entailed, to have lived at the juncture of two ages. It has required her to engage the Christian liberalism of a previous age with the hedonism and relativism of our own time. The resulting tension has made for excellent popular art.

A British critic has complained that Time to Be in Earnest lacks the quality of her novels. Neither diary nor memoir, the writer complains, the book is only "a genteel kind of gossip." Another reviewer has lamented James's prim and infuriating refusal to disclose "the hidden, inner, private impulses which drew [her] to the ordered but violent form of the murder mystery." Such critiques fail to discern that James's kind of Christian liberalism, with its almost Victorian regard for reticence and privacy, dictates the form no less than the substance of Time to Be in Earnest. Rather than writing a standard autobiography, James reflects on her life and times through diary entries. Beginning with her 77th birthday in August 1997, she reveals what it is like to live for a year as a celebrated author. James thus serves up her memories and judgments as they are sparked by dinner parties and book signings, interviews and speeches, visits with family and friends, walks in her London neighborhood and especially in the city's magnificent gardens and parks.

Readers who care little for the humdrum details of social life will indeed be put off by James's coolly distancing approach. Yet those who appreciate inklings and hints and subtle indirection will learn all they need to know about the inner "devices and desires" that have prompted James's distinguished career in detective fiction. Nowhere are they more nicely revealed than in the tribute she recently offered to Samuel Johnson at his grave in Westminster Abbey: "We honour him both as a writer and as a man, remembering his generosity and humanity and the courage with which his great heart endured poverty, frustration, neglect and private pain."

Ralph C. Wood teaches theology and literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.