THE PRIVATE PATIENT By P. D. James

THE PRIVATE PATIENT By P. D. James

Despite a Ghastly Murder, Remember Your Manners
A book review byJanet Maslin

November 20, 2008

Books of The Times

THE PRIVATE PATIENT, By P. D. James
352 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

“The Private Patient,” P. D. James’s latest exercise in impeccable detection, begins with a woman named Rhoda Gradwyn. She is something of a muckraking London journalist. But she sounds like one of Ms. James’s patricians just the same. Miss Gradwyn (Ms. James does not put her readers on a comfortable first-name basis with characters) is soon to enter an elite clinic where a top-flight plastic surgeon with a hyphenated name, Mr. George H. Chandler-Powell, will at long last remove a scar from her face.
“Why now, Miss Gradwyn?” the doctor inquires. “Because I no longer have need of it,” she answers, offering no further explanation. Hm.
Several weeks later the surgery is performed at the doctor’s picturesque clinic, which is located in the grand old Cheverell Manor in Dorset. The operation is a success. And then Miss Gradwyn is throttled in the middle of the night by a mysterious person who wears latex gloves to do the deed. This is dreadful news, not only for the victim but for her renowned doctor, too.
“The clinic could hardly continue after Miss Gradwyn’s murder,” one of the book’s many characters surmises. “Only patients with a pathologically morbid fascination with death and horror would book in at the Manor now.” And only aficionados of tales of detection in grand English country houses will want to know more about this story.
As usual Ms. James nestles her tale of malice in a seductively tony setting. “The Private Patient” does this particularly well. First of all there is a deceased Uncle Peregrine, and the disposition of his fortune will affect members of the clinic’s staff. Second, the woman whose family had to sell Cheverell Manor to the wealthy doctor is still hanging on as part of the household, perhaps peacefully and perhaps tacitly boiling with rage.
And third, as the book’s title indicates, the place proudly treats its patients with the utmost discretion. Should the fact that an investigative journalist has wormed her way into it raise any eyebrows among those investigating the murder? Along comes Commander Adam Dalgliesh, Ms. James’s specialist in elegant country house crimes, with an answer: most assuredly yes.
When Ms. James, the best-selling 88-year-old Baroness James of Holland Park, is not complaining about taxes (taxpayers are “the milch-cows of the rapacious Revenue,” or “it will come to you in time, what’s left after a rapacious government has extracted its loot”), she is wringing as many questions as possible from Rhoda Gradwyn’s death. Why was her gold-digging young male friend, himself distantly linked to poor old Uncle Peregrine, on the premises when this patient died? Why were midnight lights seen at the circle of 12 Cheverell Stones near the manor house, a spooky outdoor spot once associated with witch-burning?
In a story that explicitly reminds one of its characters of Agatha Christie’s classic manor-house mystery “And Then There Were None,” Ms. James spends time luxuriantly introducing each member of the clinic’s elaborate household and signaling their status by means of tweeds, physiognomy (“That face is pure Plantagenet”), ability to quote Thomas Hardy’s poetry, fondness for long country walks and the use of words like “chatelaine.”
The provenance of Cheverell Manor also gets its due. (“The long gallery. Sir Walter Raleigh danced there when he visited the Manor.”) And it goes without saying that Dalgliesh’s major holdings-forth are conducted in the elegantly appointed library, with staff and suspects all gathered ’round.
The killer, who attacked just before midnight, is given a suitably lofty name. (“How about Noctis — by or from the night?”) And the incidental conversation runs to remarks like this: “While Father was ill, I became obsessive about making marmalade. God knows why. He liked home-made preserves but not that much.”
All of this goes to show that Ms. James sets her mystery on comfortably familiar terrain and makes the most of its atmospherics. But the plotting of “The Private Patient” is not up to this author’s diabolical best. True, the book’s array of red herrings is choice. And its characters have ample motives and opportunities to do wrong. And the isolated setting yields its strokes of ingenuity, as with the news that latex gloves like those used by the killer were readily available at the clinic. Nobody outside Cheverell Manor would have known that. Everyone on the premises did.
If Dalgliesh’s deductions are not at their Holmesian sharpest this time, it’s true that he has other matters on his mind. “The Private Patient” inches him closer to both retirement and to Emma, the woman who brings out the poet in him and the atypically cumbersome wordsmith in Ms. James. “All that Dalgliesh knew of Emma’s childhood had been told in those desultory snatches of conversation in which each explored with tentative footsteps the hinterland of the other’s past,” the reader is told. Happily, Emma has a father who sounds like Oscar Wilde and who gives Dalgliesh license to be even more smitten with Emma in the future.
Somewhere along the way to its denouement “The Private Patient” loses both track of and interest in its title character. Rhoda Gradwyn’s past is of great interest to some of the book’s characters but not to the reader. And her scar, the book’s original detective-ready detail? The scar has a story but not a great one. Sometimes plastic surgery is just plastic surgery, after all.

http://www.nytimes.com/