Interiors: The Private Patient

The Private Patient/P.D. James

Vintage, 2010

Whether it’s describing a publishing house along the river, a small local museum or a religious community, PD James is adept at setting her mysteries in interesting spaces.  Invariably, the fate of the place is bound up with the solution of the mystery.  The Private Patient, the newest Adam Dalgliesh mystery, is no exception.  The Manor, a Tudor-era house converted into a private clinic by a successful private surgeon, is an important element in the story, if not exactly a character itself.

Rhoda Gradwyn is a well-known investigative journalist with a bad facial scar.  Now nearly forty, Gradwyn decides to have surgery to reduce the scar.  A deeply private person, she chooses to have the surgery done at the Manor rather than in a London hospital where her surgeon, George Chandler-Powell, also treats patients. She chooses a couple of weeks before Christmas, a quiet time at the Manor.  The day after her successful surgery she is found strangled to death in her bed in the Manor’s west wing. 

Because Gradwyn made a preliminary visit to the Manor before her procedure, we have the layout of the house through her cool, analytical eyes. The mystery is a “cosy,” where the murder happens indoors in a closed room, so we need to see how the rooms connect, where the lift is and which doors lock.  Gradwyn has researched the house and its inhabitants because that’s what she does.  She does not appreciate it.   That’s left for others. The new owner, Chandler-Powell, finds it a place of peace, a symbol of wealth.  For David and Kimberly Bostock, the cooks,  the kitchen  is both a refuge and the death of a dream.  Helene Cressett, whose family owned the manor for four hundred years, only to lose it in a stock market crash in the 1990s, does not reveal her feelings about the place at all until the end of the book.  

Chandler-Powell’s assistant Marcus Westhall and his sister Candace, who live in a cottage on the property, seem less interested in the manor than other spaces, particularly, for Marcus, the manor’s small chapel with its troubled history.  And the circle of standing stones where a woman was burned as a witch in the seventeenth century exercises a fascination for at least one resident. 

James waits until after the murder, when Dalgliesh and his Metro Squad team arrive, to show us the grandeur of the place.  She does this less with physical description than with the reactions of her characters: 

Dalgliesh wondered whether [Chandler-Powell] had intended this first sight of the hall to be so dramatic.  He experienced an extraordinary moment in which architecture, colours, shape and sounds, the soaring roof, the great tapestry on the right-hand wall, the vase of winter foliage on an oak table to the left of the door, the row of portraits in their gilt frames, some objects seem clearly  even in the first glance, other perhaps dredged from some childish memory of fantasy, seemed to fuse into a living picture which immediately impregnated his mind. ” (p119) 

Dalgliesh is a poet as well as a detective. Kate Miskin, a girl born into council housing who has clawed her way out, sees wealth and privilege, while Sergeant Benton-Smith notices the place in relation to Helene Cressett, who looks as if she stepped out of one of the Elizabethan paintings. 

As in her other books, James shows the destruction murder can wreak on survivors, and the manor’s fate is precarious.  Chandler-Lowell and Helene, who is the general administrator, feel that the murder will cast a pall over the place; no one will ever come there to have surgery again (unlike in America, where the surgeon would probably get his own reality TV show). 

To solve the mystery, Dalgliesh’s team must explore other interiors; Gradwyn’s unusual three story apartment in Absolution Alley; a church school, a stylish Edwardian villa in Maida Vale.  They explore the interiors of their suspects as well, uncovering the secrets of the manor’s inhabitants and the hidden connections to Gradwyn.  This mystery is not the strongest of James’s books, and this may be in part because some of the suspense is personal.  Dalgliesh is due to marry his beloved Emma in five weeks.  He doesn’t doubt their love, but his job has always been an obstacle, and this is a tender time. Some of the book is given to Dalgliesh’s, and Miskin’s, musings about how things will change on the Squad once Dalgliesh marries and presumably retires. 

Some of the secrets here seem to be a stretch, and one verges on the preposterous.  There is a clever subplot with a convenient death, a grasping relative and a will that plays out convincingly if predictably.  The final “twist,” after the murder is solved, is not much of a surprise, and I wondered if it were really necessary. 

James does a good job of playing with the “country house” theme made famous by Christie and Marsh.  In this case, as in all of PD James’s novels, life does not go back to normal once the mystery is solved.  Irrevocable changes have taken place, for all of the characters.  She reserves a gentle and optimistic fate for the house itself.  The Manor, repository of history, hopes and dreams, will enter a new phase, but it will survive.