P. D. James

Born in 1920 in Oxford to parents who didn’t value women’s education, Phyllis Dorothy James left high school at sixteen with dreams of becoming a writer. Marriage, family, and the carnage and disruption of World War 2 derailed James’s dreams for a time—she worked as a Red Cross nurse throughout the war and, after its end, was forced to support her family following her husband’s debilitating and dangerous struggle with PTSD. After securing a job in hospital administration, James spent her mornings writing before heading to work, and set many of her early novels in hospitals. She began writing detective stories, her devotion to the form and love of the challenge of using the form to “say something true about men and women and their relationships and the society in which they live” spurring her on. She “exorcise[d her] fear” of violence through her chilling mysteries, and her books—the most famous of which include Innocent Blood, The Children of Men, and Death Comes to Pemberley—have sold over ten million copies in the United States alone. In late 2014, she died at 94 years old at her home in Oxford, revered by fans the world over as the “Queen of Crime.” Her work continues to be published posthumously