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As always, James is especially adept at sifting and sorting the motives of people who live in intimate professional relation—their rivalries of class and personality, their secret griefs and public clashes, their fundamental inability ever to know one another, perhaps not even themselves. More than any of her rivals, she has made the detective novel an instrument of serious moral and psychological discernment. Over and again, she provides eloquent descriptions of outward scenes that reflect inward realities, offering her readers wisdom that is at once assuring and disturbing:
Tally never liked to sleep with her window closed. Now she opened it wide and the cold air [from the heath] washed over her, bringing with it the peace and silence of the night. This was the moment at the end of the day which she always cherished. She knew that the peace stretching beneath her was illusory. Out there in the dark, predators were closing in on their prey, the unending war of survival was being waged and the air was alive with millions of small scufflings and creepings inaudible to her ears. And tonight there was that other image: white teeth [of the burnt Neville Dupayne] gleaming like a snarl in a blackened head. She knew that she would never be able to banish it entirely from her mind. Its power could only be lessened by accepting it as a terrible reality with which she would have to live, as millions of others in a war-torn world had to live with their horrors. But now at last there was no lingering smell of fire and she gazed over the silent acres to where the lights of London were flung like a casket of jewels over a waste of darkness which seemed neither earth nor sky.
This is not mere elegant writing, much less a melancholy longing for an irrecoverable past. It is, instead, a repudiation of all nostalgia for the world that was permanently obliterated at Ypres and Passchendaele and the Somme. It is a confrontation with the cultural nihilism which, destroying all illusions about Western immunity from the world's ills, has become the chief legacy of the past century. James suggests that a British generation which has never known the threat of political evil, except for a bout of IRA terrorism in the 1980s, is susceptible to a new kind of moral nothingness—the kind that leaves people uncaring and uncommitted to anything other than their own pleasure and power.
It is the cultured and well-off folks of the Dupayne Museum who turn out to be most severely afflicted with this deadly malaise. One of them manages Club 96, a secret society of the wealthy and powerful who repair to the museum at night in order to indulge in anonymous group sex. These mask-wearing swingers are incapable of ordinary lust, since sex is for them a mere anodyne. Lord Martlesham, a peer of the realm also noted for his philanthropy, sees nothing amiss in seeking erotic relief from the anxiety of living amidst a dying culture: "No one was being exploited or used, no one was doing it for money, no one was under-age or vulnerable, no one had to pretend. We were like children—naughty children, if you like. But there was a kind of innocence there." These "innocent children," James reveals, are the movers and shakers who occupy the high places of our culture—these practitioners of our normal everyday nihilism. Her devastating critique of them demonstrates that she is hardly a wistful trader in cozy traditionalism. On the contrary: The Murder Room stands finally as one of P. D. James' most morally and spiritually bracing novels, a masterful detection of our paradigm crime.
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