Book review: “A Certain Justice” by P.D. James

It’s pretty clear, early on, that Garry Ashe, young and silkily clever, is a murderer although maybe not the person responsible for the killing at the center of the 1997 P.D. James novel A Certain Justice.

Indeed, only fifty pages into the book, Venetia Aldridge tells her daughter that Ashe is dangerous. “He may even be evil, whatever that word means.”

This is quite a judgement since Aldridge, a high-powered criminal defense attorney, has just won acquittal for Ashe on a charge of killing his aunt. It was a close-run thing, even though the dead aunt wasn’t likely to elicit much sympathy, given her middle-age sexual voraciousness, proven by photographs that her nephew took at her direction.

The novel opens in the midst of his trial, and, in the third sentence of the first page, James explains that, at this moment, Aldrige, prickly and more than a bit hard, has four weeks, four hours and fifty minutes left to live.

That’s the mystery of A Certain Justice — Aldridge is found in her locked office at Pawlet Court, a fictitious London Inn of Court, dead from a stab wound to the chest and wearing a full-bottom court wig drenched in blood.

Quickly, Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team from Scotland Yard investigate the movements and motives of other lawyers and staff members in chambers and outsiders as well. But, as much as they might like to — since they’re as savvy as Aldridge regarding the young man’s earlier acquittal — they can’t find a way to suspect Ashe since he seemingly has an ironclad alibi for the time of his former lawyers killing.

“He saw the hands”

So, throughout the novel, as Ashe insinuates himself into the affections of Aldridge’s disaffected eighteen-year-old daughter Octavia, the reader knows he’s not to be trusted.

And, yet, James doesn’t present him as a cardboard villain. Instead, she fleshes out his difficult upbringing — how he was thrown out by his mother and her boyfriend at the age of seven and then moved through a series of bleak foster homes. And she brings the reader into his thoughts, such as when he is looking at reed beds in a secluded place that was, for him, a kind of sanctuary:

And then he saw the hands. They moved like a shoal of pale fishes stretching out towards him through the reeds. But the reeds entangled them and held them back. There were forgotten hands and the hands he remembered too well. Hands that thumped and punched and wound belts lovingly through their fingers, over-busy hands that tried to be tender and made his nerves creep, exploring hands — soft, moist, or hard as rods — that came under the bedclothes at night, hands over his mouth, hands moving about his rigid body, doctors’ hands, social workers’ hands, the schoolmaster’s hands with their square white nails and the hair like silk threads on the back of the fingers.

Rarely has the reader of a mystery novel had such insight into the psyche of a killer — chilling, yes, but also evocative of the emotions and experiences of another human being.

Storytelling challenges

By the time James wrote A Certain Justice, she had published nine other mysteries featuring her poet-cop Adam Dalgliesh, starting thirty-five years earlier with Cover Her Face (1962).

It took her a while to find her sea legs as a mystery writer, getting caught up in overly complex plots with her initial book as well as with the following three: A Mind to Murder (1963), Unnatural Causes (1967) and Shroud for a Nightingale (1971). With that fourth book, however, James began to exhibit what became a hallmark of her writing: her insights into human nature and her rich and vivid language about humans and the ways they act around each other.

From then on, James seemed to relish new storytelling challenges. The Black Tower (1975) opens with Dalgliesh face-to-face with death, believing that he has contracted acute leukemia until the doctors realize they’ve made a mistake. It is very much a novel about what is going on inside the policeman, emotionally and psychologically.

Even so, in that novel, James went deep into the psyches of her other characters, fleshing them out as real people with real quirks and motivations. And this continued in Death of an Expert Witness (1977).

A new twist

The center of A Taste for Death (1986) is an in-depth portrait of one of Dalgliesh’s top aides, Inspector Kate Miskin who, by the end of the book, has had her confidence shattered and isn’t sure she can ever work for the police again.

In Devices and Desires (1989), Dalgliesh is there at the beginning and at the end and pops up at various points in the story, even finding the body of a murder victim, but he spends most of the book on the sidelines, watching other cops track down the killer. And it’s a similar story in Original Sin (1994) where Kate Miskin and Daniel Aaron do most of the investigating.

Dalgliesh returns to center stage in A Certain Justice, but there’s a new twist.

James has already done much in her earlier books to detail the inner lives of Dalgliesh and Miskin, so she doesn’t focus on their back stories. She does bring readers deep into the lives of perhaps a dozen people who had personal or professional relationships with Venetia Aldridge.

“Obsessive love”

But the new wrinkle is that she has found ways to give voice to killers.  There is Ashe, of course, as I pointed out in the opening of this review.

And there is another murderer who, in the course of shadow-boxing with Dalgliesh, asks if he’s ever experienced obsessive love:

After a moment, Dalgliesh replied: “No. I was close to it once, close enough, perhaps, to have some understanding of it.”

“And close enough to feel its power and draw back. You are armored, of course, by the creative artist’s splinter of ice in the heart. I had no such defense. Obsessive love is the most appalling, the most destructive of all love’s tyrannies. It is also the most humiliating.”

The humanity of killers

It is obsessive love — and loss — that are at the heart of one of the killings detailed in A Certain Justice.

The killer’s revelations don’t explain away the violence that resulted, just as Ashe’s vision of hands doesn’t excuse him from responsibility for murder.

But what James makes clear in the novel — and what she does in all of her books since Shroud for a Nightingale — is the humanity of these killers and of their victims and of all the other men and women who are touched by the violence.

And of the cops as well.

Patrick T. Reardon

6.24.25