When is a cliche not a cliche? The answer is, in this case anyway, when it is a novel by P.D. James. There are many opportunities for this novel to become the arsenic-laced cookie cutter detective novel; the unlikely female detective devoted to finding lost pets; the spooky and overly deathly setting; the textbook poison pen letter, complete with little skull drawings, and a butler with a chip on his shoulder and a drink problem who is o suspicious that even the police are tarting to wonder if the butler actually did do it.
James manages to avoid all of these murder novel cliches, though, by throwing a philosophical dilemma or two into the mix, and really giving the reader something to think about. By all accounts, Clarissa Lisle was not a very nice person. Blackmailer, serial cheat, manipulative to an almost narcissistic degree - already we are encouraged to see her not just as a victim, but as a person who made victim out of others. Her biggest victim was Simon Lessing, her stop-son, whose father she has driven to suicide, and whom she now expects to come to her room for sexual favors. Is Simon really just a cold blooded murderer when he killed Clarissa by accident, and whilst in the grip of revulsion after her insistence that he have sex with her?
Simon himself seems to act as his own judge and jury, drowning in the Devil's Kettle. He is more of a victim in the novel than his actual victim. Which begs the philosophical question again as to who was really in the wrong in the novel and who was merely defending themselves as definitively in the right?
