Throughout the novel, Cordelia is reminded of the many repeated adages that Bernie passed on to her as pronunciations from on high, i.e., the savvy insights of his former boss, Dalgleish. In Unsuitable Job, her fifth novel, James was experimenting with a different central character, Cordelia Gray, a beautiful, slight and tough 22-year-old whose life has been shaped and misshaped by experiences ranging from a poet-revolutionary father to six years in a convent school, from the art museums of Europe to loud, crowded lower-class foster homes, from her mother’s death after giving her life to the poignantly inept ex-cop Bernie Pryde who took a shine to her and made her a partner in his private detective agency. Her first four books were centered on Adam Dalgleish, a tightly constrained, deep-feeling police detective who is also a modestly well-known poet - Cover Her Face (1962), A Mind to Murder(1963), Unnatural Causes (1967) and A Shroud for a Nightingale (1971).
James published An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, she’d been a novelist for just a decade.
0 kommentar(er)
