The Black Tower

  Shroud for a Nightingale

  1. Near the end of the novel, Nurse Taylor begs Dalgliesh to lie for her. To what higher good does she appeal? Why is Dalgliesh so quick to refuse?

  2. The nurses depicted in this novel are very different in personality. Who among them is the best nurse? Is that character also the most appealing human being?

  The Black Tower

  1. At the beginning of the novel, Dalgliesh makes a decision to quit the police force. Why? How does his disavowal of police work affect the investigation of his suspicions about the deaths at Toynton Grange?

  2. During his final confrontation with the killer, Dalgliesh realizes that he has decided to return to the police force. James writes, “The decision to go on, arrived at when and why Dalgliesh didn’t know, seemed to him as irrational as the decision to give up. It wasn’t a victory. A kind of defeat even….” Do you agree with Dalgliesh that his decision to go on with police work is irrational or a defeat?

  Death of an Expert Witness

  1. While considering possible murder motives, Dalgliesh tells Massingham that “… the most destructive force in the world is … love. And if you want to make a detective you’d better learn to recognize it when you meet it.” How does the clunch pit murder that opens the novel illustrate this statement?

  2. After recalling the loss of his son, Dalgliesh suddenly realizes “that he knew virtually nothing about children…. There was a whole territory of human experience on which, once repulsed, he had turned his back, and that this rejection somehow diminished him as a man.” How is Dalgliesh’s personal loss reflected in his treatment of the teenager Brenda Pridmore and Kerrison’s children, William and Nell?

  About the Author

  P. D. JAMES was born in Oxford in 1920. She married a doctor and had two daughters, the second born in the midst of a German bomb attack during World War II. After her husband returned from the war incapacitated, she went to work in the National Health Service and the British Civil Service. She worked in various departments for thirty years, including the Police and Criminal Law Divisions of the Home Office, and later served as a magistrate and on the Board of Governors of the BBC. Her first novel, Cover Her Face, was published in the UK in 1962, and she has gone on to write seventeen critically acclaimed crime novels. She began writing an autobiography at the age of seventy-seven, following Dr. Johnson’s advice that at seventy-seven it is “time to be in earnest.” Time to Be in Earnest was published in 2000. In 1991, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park. Baroness James lives in London and Oxford.

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