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The Murder Room The Murder Room P.D. James Knopf Knopf, 2003 432 pp. $25.95

Having published her 16th crime novel (and 12th in the Adam Dalgliesh series) during her 83rd year of life, P. D. James seems to be approaching the end of her distinguished career as a worthy successor to Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Yet chic critics find her work objectionably nostalgic and reactionary. For all the horror of its murders, they complain that James' world is too cozy and upper-crust. She re-creates a patrician Britain where there is no raw sex or crack or rap—a realm populated, instead, by posh traditionalists whose perfectly grammatical sentences are also uttered by lower-class characters. One of these critics thus sniffs that James' work is "fundamentally Christian and Tory."

The Murder Room would seem to validate these charges. It is set in yet another of the close-knit professional enclaves that James renders so convincingly: a publishing house in Original Sin (1995), a law firm in A Certain Justice (1997), a theological college in Death in Holy Orders (2000), and now the Dupayne Museum on Hampstead Heath. This fictitious museum memorializes the years between the first and second world wars, the decades of mourning as James once described them, when she came to her own adulthood. James husband returned from World War II so psychologically damaged that she was effectively widowed by this last great act of British moral heroism. Hence her narrator's praise of "those inter-war years in which England, her memory seared by the horrors of Flanders and a generation lost, had stumbled through near dishonour to confront and overcome a greater danger."

That the same Brits who once bravely stood up to Hitler recently created the disastrous Millennium Dome would seem to provide James yet another occasion, under the guise of detective fiction, to lament the decline and fall of all that once stood as right and good. Because the novel also contains several unknotted threads, as well as a subplot that never really riveted this reader's interest, James would seem to be showing signs of artistic decline as well. Yet such judgments, while partially just, are also premature, perhaps even wrong in the largest sense.The Murder Room reveals that P. D. James remains fully engaged with the postmodern world, even as she renders a searing verdict against its unacknowledged nihilism.

Early in the novel, a minor character observes that murder is the paradigm crime of every age. Ever since Cain slew Abel in Eden, murder has been the primal sin. To take that which no one can possibly give, a human life, is to commit the one offense which permits no restoration. It is to arrogate unto oneself, even if unconsciously, a terrible divinity. The methods and motives of our murders thus serve to identify the moral character of our time. One of Dalgliesh's assistants names our deities well: "the modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity." Rather than offering another diatribe against decadence, however, James the alleged conservative shows that it is also the educated and the comfortable and the well-placed—not the uncultured hordes alone—who commit murder in the worship of these latter-day Baals.

The struggling Dupayne Museum, founded by the wealthy and eccentric Max Dupayne, is housed in a Victorian mansion, and it is controlled by his three children, Marcus, Caroline, and Neville. Marcus and Caroline are determined to keep it open at all costs, while the psychiatrist Neville wants to close the unprofitable venture. He believes that Great Britain, as a nation already obsessed with its past, pays far too little heed to its present concerns, especially the elderly and the mentally ill. In addition to Caroline and Marcus, there are six employees who stand to gain from the museum's being kept open. And when Neville is doused with gasoline and set afire in his Jaguar as he prepares to leave the museum one evening, suspicion naturally falls on these eight. Another murder follows, as well as a third attempted slaughter, and all three crimes seem to be copy-cat versions of notorious homicides commemorated in the museum's only popular attraction: the Murder Room.

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