T A B L E+T A L K Name your favorite biographies and discuss them in the Books area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Stanley Crouch By Jonathan Broder (02/25/98) Martin Amis By Laura Miller (02/10/98) Toni Morrison By Zia Jaffrey (02/02/98) Gore Vidal By Chris Haines (01/14/98) Russell Banks By Cynthia Joyce (01/05/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - R E V I E W S Sotheby's The Inside Story By Peter Watson Punditry about politics and culture, from the New York Daily News columnist and New Republic contributing editor (02/26/98)		_______T H E _S A L O N_ I N T E R V I E W P.D. J A M E S ____T H E _Art _______O F murder - - - - - - - - - - BY JENNIFER REESE | There is an almost alarming disjunction between the warm, grandmotherly presence of P.D. James and the chilling, elegant and very smart detective novels for which she is famous. At 77, James peers amiably through thick glasses and uses the word "dear" in just about every sentence. But she also writes razor-sharp observations of British society and coolly graphic depictions of dead bodies. Her murders are hideously baroque: In "Shroud for a Nightingale," a nurse, volunteering for a demonstration of intravenous feeding, is administered bathroom disinfectant instead of milk and dies writhing in front of a classroom. In "Devices and Desires," the killer whistles hymns while strangling his victims, then stuffs their mouths with pubic hair. And in James' most recent opus, "A Certain Justice," a bitchy, glamorous lawyer is killed in her office with a letter opener to the heart, then theatrically dressed in a blood-soaked wig and propped in her swivel chair. Grotesque murders aside, James' novels, perhaps more than those of any other living writer, inspire debate over whether detective fiction can be great literature. There are those who grouse that she has merely brought some highbrow literary tricks to a fun, resolutely pedestrian genre. But others assert that her fat, discursive and beautifully written books are nothing less than art. Her characters are complex and introspective, her settings meticulously described and her stories progress at a stately pace more reminiscent of an 18th century novel than a dime store whodunit. Her books can also be somewhat challenging: In James' melancholy, gray universe, there are few innocent victims, few completely unsympathetic killers. Phyllis Dorothy James began writing in the late 1950s under difficult circumstances. Her husband had returned from World War II so profoundly disturbed he had to be institutionalized, and she supported their two children by working at various bureaucratic jobs. Still, in her late 30s she found the energy to launch a stupendously successful writing career, producing segments of her first novel -- "Cover Her Face," published in 1962 -- while commuting to work on the train. In her San Francisco hotel room, on tour to promote her 14th novel, she talked to Salon about why she likes writing about murder, and why a lone corpse in the drawing room is more horrifying than a dozen on the street. Just about every time your name is mentioned, the question comes up about whether detective stories can be art. Are you sick of finding yourself perpetually at the center of this debate? I never get over defensive about it because I never, ever have experienced -- in England -- any suggestion that I was dealing with an inferior form. But it does seem in the United States as if the mystery is a slightly despised form. It's sometimes easy to see why genre writing is despised because you look at the number of books that you feel probably would not have seen the light of day if they hadn't been mystery, or science fiction. Everything is sacrificed to produce a puzzle, or excitement; setting is perfunctory and above all characterization has no subtlety, no ambiguity. All that is wanted is a thrill. But that of course is bad genre writing. Genre writing at its best is some of the best fiction we have, and what is interesting to me is how many so-called straight novelists are moving into it, like Martin Amis with "Night Train," which is a pastiche of an American hard-boiled crime novel. There's another genre, the spy novel. I personally regard John le Carré as a very fine novelist, as indeed is Eric Ambler, as indeed was Graham Greene. It isn't easy to make this division and say: That's genre fiction and it's useless, and this is the so-called straight novel and we take it seriously. Novels are either good novels or they're not good novels, and that is the dividing line for me. It seems to me that working within the mystery genre solves one of a novelist's biggest problems, which is plot. It offers a built-in structure -- the unraveling of a crime -- on which you can hang all kinds of interesting characters and ideas. Yes, that's it. I've tried to use the well-worn conventions of the mystery and subvert them, stretch them, use them to say something true about my characters, about men and women and the society in which they live. The mystery is an artificial form, but then all fiction is an artificial form. All fiction is the rearrangement of the author's compulsions, visions, ideas in what the writer hopes is a compelling and logical form. I've often said it's just as absurd to say you can't write a good novel within the form of a mystery as it is to say, how could you possibly write great poetry in the sonnet form? After all, you've only got 14 lines and you've got to have a strict rhyming sequence. I think many writers find that the discipline and conventions of the detective novel are in fact liberating. N E X T+P A G E +| Privileged lives, appalling events - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY SCOTT LAUMANN