The Fake Heir

"By the power of Grayskull!"

"He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" 

Now I think about it, this is probably the first time I ever read (listened to) anything by P. D. James. 

Cordelia Gray returns to the UK after the death of her father, with whom she had been roaming Europe. She becomes the secretary of Bernie G. Pryde, a private detective and as she shows potential, Bernie eventually makes her his partner. After being diagnosed with cancer however, Bernie takes the easy way out, and he leaves the detective agency to Cordelia. While initially overwhelmed by the death of her business partner and the realization she's made the chief of an agency even though she barely has any experience as a private detective, she decided to keep the agency open with the help of the old secretary Mrs. Maudley. On the day of Bernie's funeral, Cordelia is visited by Mrs. Leaming, assistant to the famous scientist Sir Ronald Callender. She originally had an appointment to see Bernie, but considering what's happened, she has no choice but to bring Cordelia to her boss. Sir Ronald decides to hire Cordelia anyway for the job he had intended to hire Bernie for: his son Mark recently hanged himself, and he wants to know why Mark committed suicide. Mark had been studying at Cambridge, but recently left the university and started working as a gardener, even though his grades were good and was going to inherit a considerable amount of money via his maternal grandfather. Mark had been living in a run-down cottage on the estate he had been gardening for, and Cordelia decides to stay there too, to get a glimpse in Mark's life. But as she meets with Mark's friends and acquaintances and goes through his belongings in the cottage, Cordelia slowly starts to suspect Mark's death was not suicide at all. Can the young detective find out the truth in her first real investigation on P. D. James' An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972)?

I first heard of the character of Cordelia Gray via Detective Conan, where the character Haibara is named after Cordelia ("Hai" being gray), so that would have been about two decades ago, but for some reason I never got around to reading the books with Cordelia Gray, even though there are only two of them. I'd occasionally come across other references to the books (like Houjou Kie's 2024 novel Shoujo ni wa Mukanai Kanzen Hanzai ("An Unsuitable Perfect Crime for a Girl")), but somehow I just never actively went looking for them. But a few weeks ago, I came across a reference to The Skull Beneath the Skin, and it was at that point I learned that was actually the title of the second Cordelia Gray book. I figured I might as well get started on them now... but then I also learned there were actually two radio adaptations of the books by the BBC, so I decided to listen to them, instead of reading the books. I can't say how faithful they are to the book, but comparing the audio adaptation of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman to the lengthy summary on Wikipedia makes me think they're pretty faithful to the source material.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman was written in 1972, so it should not surprise the reader Cordelia is not presented as the great detective who solves everything with brilliant chains of deductions during the denouement with everyone present in the drawing room. Cordelia is portrayed indeed as a private detective in a realistic world, far removed from both the great detectives of yore as well as the hardboiled tradition. Cordelia knows she's been trained well as a private detective, but is also aware she lacks experience, so her investigations are careful, slow and methodical, with an emphasis on her humanity. Her investigation for example consists of living in Mark's cottage to get an idea of his life after he left university and interviewing his friends to see if there's a clue to why he would have hanged himself. While there's a segment with a kind of code-cracking, the emphasis lies on Cordelia sifting through the stories of everyone involved and just following each thread to their conclusion to see if they lead anywhere. The result is a detective novel that is admittedly not exactly of the type I like: it's a very mundane investigation without really surprising twists, reveals or deductions. I do have to say I was surprised I didn't mind following Cordelia in her slow investigations though. As a character, she's interesting to follow, exactly because she's new at this and everyone's saying how she might be unsuitable of the job, and Cordelia falls right in the category of both being more capable than most people assume she is, but she's still not a Great Detective, so she fits well in this realistic world P.D. James depicts, being not a flawed person, but simply a struggling young detective, who also happens to be a woman.

The story does feel a bit dated though, or least, some characters do. When Cordelia for exampls asks Sir Ronald about Mark's romantic relationships, he says he doesn't know about them, but he assures her that if he had them, they would certainly be of the heterosexual kind. Err, okay, I guess. Similar elements are connected to the mystery of Mark's death and while not exactly jarring, it does make you think, oh yeah, this was written a while ago, with the idea of portraying a realistic world.

The mystery of Mark's death ultimately isn't super exciting, with 'twists' that feel a bit forced at times (attempts are made to scare Cordelia away, or even kill her even though she has no real conclusive clue or evidence yet) and again, an investigation that develops mostly just because Cordelia bothers to ask people a few questions (a lot of the characters she meets along the way are not really helpful or even fun people to talk with). I do like the way the story begins: with the end of Cordelia's investigation and then retelling all the events that led to that ending: the in-media-res opening starts rather abrupt, but is properly recontextualized through the reader learning the events leading up to that opening, and that is perhaps the most interesting of this book in terms of a mystery story.

Cordelia Gray returns in The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982), where Cordelia is asked to keep an eye on the actress Clarissa Lisle, wife of Sir George Ralston. Clarissa is going to star in a performance The Duchesss of Malfi set to be held on Courcy Castle, located on the private island of Courcy, which is owned by Ambrose Gorringe, a succesful author, who had the castle, and its theater, restored. Clarissa has been receiving letters with quotations from plays she's starred in, all being threats of death, accompanied by a drawing of a skull. Clarissa is really nervous with the play approaching, so Cordelia is to intercept new letters so Clarissa can focus on the play. At the castle, Clarissa meets with the people in Clarissa's circle, ranging from her stepson of a previous marriage, her not-so-wealthy cousin and a theater critic. It doesn't take long for Cordelia to learn there are quite a lot of people close to Clarissa who don't really like her, and she soon finds out the writer of the letters is probably one of the people currently on the island. On the evening of the performance, Clarissa want to be alone in her dressing room to clear her mind so she can focus on the play, and she sends everyone, including Cordelia away. When Cordelia later returns to wake Clarissa for dinner, she finds Clarissa dead, her face battered. 

This second Cordelia Gray story has a far more interesting setting than the first one: a closed circle murder mystery set on a creepy castle with a collection of macabre memorabilia, secret passageways and a cryp, located on a private island. We have an Obvious Victim-To-Be, anonymous threatening letters and a theatrical backdrop. Perhaps it's just me, having listened a lot to the Agatha Christie radio adaptations by the BBC, but the plot with the threatening letters, actresses making comebacks and hidden pasts and all of that reminded me a lot of Christie's work, like Lord Edgware Dies, The Moving Finger and The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, so it felt a lot like classic mystery to me than An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, with a setting that is more exciting, moving away from the realism of the first novel and moving towards the more bombastic of the Golden Age. At the same time, it's also a much slower story. The BBC radio adaptation itself is nearly a hour longer than the one of An Unsuitable Job for..., which is quite a lot for an audio adaptation. The story-telling isn't that much different from how it felt in the first story, with Cordelia just poking around, and people very gladly telling their life stories and revealing how they all had a reason for wanting Clarissa dead. Which still takes a while for it to happen.

So then we get to the mystery, which is, at least to me, unfortunately still closer to An Unsuitable Job for... than to actual Golden Age mystery fiction. The reveal of the murderer is done very dryly, with a motive that probably should've been explored more given the weight of the matter, but it is just... dropped on the reader like that. It has some parallels with the first novel in terms of themes, so reading them back-to-back does add something extra. A different element of the mystery (not the identity of the killer, but the exact reason for the threatening letters) is probably going to be remembered by more readers given the way the presentation of the solution is framed, and I do think this part is a bit more interesting mystery-wise, but not really enough to build a complete novel around. The ending is a bit a-typical perhaps, but it fits well with the way the first novel also ended, and also with the character of Cordelia, who at this point is a capable detective, but not experienced enough to be a Great Detective.

Both An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and The Skull Beneath the Skin are not the kind of mystery novels I usually read, and while both books do have elements I do find interesting, on the whole, they're not stories I'd recommend if you're looking for puzzle plot mysteries, not even The Skull Beneath the Skin, despite its setting being more like a Golden Age puzzle plot mystery. Cordelia as a PI character is probably the more interesting part of these stories. I'm glad I finally got around to consuming these books though, as now I won't be wondering anymore whenever I come across the occasional reference to these books.