"'My claim is on the ground of justice, not legality': P.D. James' Equitable Perspective on Crime"

P.D. James’s detective fiction is characterized by an ongoing engagement with specific legal issues that intersect with the portrayed criminal cases and open up to wider intellectual investigations after their final solution. Her detective Adam Dalgliesh represents the readers’ alter ego in his attempts to face the gap between his own idea and ideal of justice and its enactment in legal institutions. PD James’s innovation of the genre consists in her shaping of it as a legal forum which addresses the individual as a legal person and puts at its centre relevant ethical and human questions.