Dead to rights

BY PD James

Faber & Faber, 400pp, 17.99

THE CLASSIC MYSTERY is out of fashion. Instead we have the crime novel in which the emphasis is less on whodunit than on police procedure. The crime novel deals, as often as not, with the sort of murders we can read about in the newspapers every week; it aims to be realistic, and, at its best tells us something about society today. Ian Rankin's novels are the best example of this - the recent Fleshmarket Close began with an asylum seeker's murder.

The classic mystery may have little to say about contemporary social problems but has more, when well done, on ethics and the psychology of murderers. Nobody does the classic novel better than PD James; indeed, nobody does it half as well.

The Lighthouse is in form a classic novel of detection, but it is also a true novel of character - classic because it is artificial. The setting is closed, the murder suspects properly isolated, as isolated as those in Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap or her novel Ten Little Niggers. We have an island, off the Cornish coast, which belongs to a trust, established to provide a period of rest and seclusion for VIPs. It consists of a well-staffed main house to which the temporary guests may repair for dinner, and a number of scattered cottages where they lodge.

There is also, as the title suggests, a lighthouse, and the island has only one landing stage. Elsewhere, steep cliffs protect it.

The victim is as suitable as the setting. Nathan Oliver is a successful novelist, permitted, according to the terms of the trust, to come to the island whenever he chooses because he chanced to be born there. He is eminently dislikeable, and has quarrelled with all the other residents, including his daughter and his secretary, whose decision to marry one another offends him.

The sole exception is a German diplomat, but he is linked to Oliver by a mysterious episode in the war. When Oliver is murdered, the others on the island are suitably surprised; the reader isn't.

Enter Commander Adam Dalgliesh, dispatched from London to clear up the business, on the grounds that politicians sometimes take advantage of the terms of the trust, and national security may be involved. This is a bit thin, but acceptable.

James remains as careful, honest and ingenious a constructor of plots as ever. The clues are cunningly planted, and if you find them and interpret them correctly you will spot the murderer. All this - the detective business, that is - is in the classic Sayers/Christie mould.

But The Lighthouse is a novel of character, not just a puzzle. This is what makes James so satisfying a writer. All her people have been thoroughly imagined, and are thoroughly realised. We learn backgrounds, tastes, qualities. One way or another, all of them are damaged - and this goes for Dalgliesh himself and for his two subordinates, Kate Miskin and Francis Benton-Smith.

Best of all, murder in a James novel is always horrible. I don't mean that it is violent, bloody, lurid - though it often is; grotesque too, sometimes. But it is horrible in a more important sense: in its effect on the other characters. She recognises, and shows us, that murder is a dislocation of what we like to think is the natural order.

One difference between James and most writers of crime and detective fiction is that she writes from a Christian standpoint: murder is an offence against the sanctity of life, therefore against God. So her novels are serious in a way that crime fiction rarely is.

Serious and marvellously done.