Every great novelist finds in the genre of the brief recreation, liberation or even revelation.
Hence a great author like PD James It will also be lavished on the story or the tale as that space of reencounter with the imprint or with the muses.
Because when the plot of the novel in turn gets stuck or when the characters mutiny without any signs of a solution, nothing better than to abandon them to their fate, blurring the mind towards another lighter and always satisfactory plot.
The story has that I don't know what of brief pleasure, of literary onanism that offers much with less effort. And of course, there are few genres more conducive to short storytelling than that detective that poses a fast, exciting challenge, a pleasant and suggestive exercise in deduction with the addition of the twist, much easier to insert in the story than in the novel.
"Sleep no more," the words that terrified Macbeth could well apply to the characters in the six stories collected here: authoritarian professors getting what they deserve, unhappy marriages and unhappy childhoods finding revenge, the new mansion owner murdered In the early hours of Christmas day, an octogenarian who plans an exquisite punishment from his nursing home ...
Revenge - that dark motive - is the real driving force behind each of these plots, in which the penances imposed on the guilty seem to be dictated more by the invisible forces of natural justice than by those of human law.
PD James managed to endow the classics of the golden age of detective fiction with a greater psychological and moral depth, thus giving them a second era of splendor. In these master stories - always between homage and irony - she demonstrates once again why she is unanimously considered the last great lady of crime.
You can now buy "Sleep No More", a volume of stories by PD James, here: