Having published the final Adam Dalgleish novel The Private Patient in 2008, Death Comes To Pemberley came along at just the right time. "It combines two of my greatest enthusiasms: writing detective fiction and reading the novels of Jane Austen," she says. "I thought it would be a very jolly and unusual thing to do. I'd finished the last detective story, which was a very long one and one of my most successful. I was pleased with it because I'd married Dalgleish off at long last and everybody's lives were changing direction. It was a very valedictory novel but I was 90 and I wasn't sure if I had the creative energy to do something as long as that again. Then this idea came along and I did it."
A long time member of the Jane Austen Society, Baroness Phyllis Dorothy James of Holland Park - to give the author her full title - hopes that her fellow Austen devotees will warm to her work. "I haven't had any reaction from them so maybe I've been cast out," she laughs. "They must have been horrified by what some people have done but this is really a tribute to her as far as the writing is concerned."
Having read Austen since childhood, James found that her style came naturally to her. "I tried not so much to mimic her but to basically write with the same kind of sound," she says. "I don't have so many of those happy epigrams that she did but I got one or two in. I hope some of it is quite funny and raises a smile. People seemed very surprised that I could do that but if I was asked to write a fast action, hardboiled crime novel in the way of Dashiell Hammett or Ross MacDonald, I couldn't do it."
From cynical cash-ins like Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to Joanna Trollope's forthcoming contemporary update of Sense and Sensibility, Austen has provided an enduring template for many other novelists over the years. "Maybe I was being innocent but it wasn't until after I began the book that I asked my secretary to get on the computer and see what other people had written," says James. "We were amazed by all the extraordinary man-eating animals and sexual get-ons with people proposing to Darcy and all these other crazy ideas. It was very strange. The characters seem to have exerted such a strong pull over people's imaginations that they feel the need to carry the story on but why carry it on in such a bizarre way?"
With Pemberley's splendid surrounds and the nearby forest, Darcy and Elizabeth's stately home makes for an ideal location for a murder mystery. "You've got a community of people and then you've got that contrast between order and beauty, reason and heritage and also the Wildwood, which is the source of these strong emotions," says James, who found the period's lack of forensics very different to the relative high tech of Dalgleish's era. "I'm not sure that they even had fingerprints."
In one scene, a doctor tells chief investigator Sir Selwyn Hardcastle that they cannot distinguish between the bloods of two separate individuals, as they do not consider themselves to be gods. "The idea that they would ever discover that wasn't even on their minds," says James, who admits that Darcy and his colleagues also wouldn't think twice about removing a corpse from a crime scene. "Nowadays you absolutely wouldn't do that but it wouldn't have occurred to them. But they wouldn't have learnt so much from the body back then as we could now."
At her time of life, it would be understandable if James wished to retire gracefully into the sunset. But over the course of the hour I spend with her at her Holland Park residence, she proves as sharp as ever, if a little tired. Completing more media engagements than many authors half her age, she patiently answers my questions and quizzes me about New Zealand, which she has visited on several occasions. "I suppose one was most impressed by the emptiness," she recalls. "The fact that there was so much wonderful countryside and you hardly ever saw another car. For those energetic enough, you could swim in the morning and ski in the Alps in the afternoon. It seems like a very good life but it's also very remote, like the ends of the Earth."
Her mind has already turned to her next novel, which might once again star her most famous creation. "I've been busy with this new book but when I do get time to think about it, Dalgleish keeps coming into my mind," she says. "But the last book did very well so maybe it was a very sensible last book. But I do enjoy writing about him and the Dalgleish books are the ones that people have enjoyed the most."
