The internet seldom lets you down

To paraphrase David Burke as Dr. John H. Watson in the Granada TV production of "The Final Problem," the internet seldom lets you down. With a sketchy memory and a few minutes' search, I now know what I'm going to take to the dinner party I'm attending tonight. Palm Sunday Potatoes, receipe by Hollis Easter, currently of Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. The dish sounds both simple and yummy, and it does not require anything I do not currently have in the house. Except maybe the thyme.

*tries to picture spice box and read lables on jars with green tops*

*realizes that 'except maybe the thyme' is a pun, but swears that it was not consciously made*

Adam Dalgliesh

It's been a long time since I read any P. D. James. After this spurt of thinking about Sherlock Holmes, I've been thinking about mystery novels quite a bit. The fact that the dramatizations of Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, and Gaudy Night that were broadcast on PBS about ten years ago are finally being issued on video/dvd later this month also may have something to do with it.

Right now, however, I'm thinking about Adam Dalgliesh, the primary recurring character in P.D. James' novels. He's a somewhat Holmesian figure, both physically and emotionally, and has explicitly the tortured past that some (including me) attribute to Holmes. One of my frustrations with P.D. James' more recent mystery novels is how she has moved the focus away from Dalgliesh without bringing in another central character. My oft-repeated complaint about Original Sin is that on page 350 I didn't know anything more about whodunnit than I did on page 150. All I knew was that a lot of very, very, very unhappy people worked at a publishing house in London. On the river. Where it stank. I didn't find the book effective as a novel, because the story was not cohesive, and I certainly didn't find it effective as a puzzle.

My favorite James novels date from the late seventies and early eighties - An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, The Black Tower, and my all-time favorite, Unnatural Death. In all of them, the mystery is entwined with the story-arc of the central character (Cordelia Gray in the first case, Adam Dalgliesh in the second two). And in Unnatural Death we finally are able to glimpse Dalgliesh's often-mentioned poetry, when he writes a poem for the woman he cannot decide if he will marry.

Remember me, you said, at Blythburgh,
As if you were not always in my mind
And there could be an art to bend more sure
A heart already wholly you inclined.
Of you, the you-enchanted mind bereave
More clearly back your image to receive,
And in an unencumbered holy place
Recall again an unforgotten grace.
I you possessed must needs remember still
At Blythburgh, my love, or where you will.

[EDIT: As mommybird kindly pointed out to me, Unnatural Death is a Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. The P.D.James book to which I meant to refer is Unnatural Causes