Reading matters

The writer P D James has died at the age of 94. Her Commander Adam Dalgliesh was seen by some as too middle-class, a figure created for middle-class readers. Fine... call me middle-class.

"At the end of a book, I want to feel, well that’s as good as I can do... not as good, perhaps, as other people can do... but it’s as good as I can do. There are thousands of people who do like, for their recreational reading, a classical detective story, and I think they are entitled to have one which is also a good novel and well written. Those are the people I write for. They don’t want me to adapt to what I think is the popular market. They want a good novel, honestly written and I think they are jolly well entitled to it."