Cold People

By Martha Duffy

INNOCENT BLOOD

by P.D. James

Scribners; 311 pages; $10.95

Over the past decade or so, P.D. James has become perhaps the best living writer of traditional mysteries. She has, of course, the necessary virtue of strong and resourceful plotting, but two far more remarkable qualities mark her fiction. One is a skill in writing about white-collar work. James is almost 60 now, and has spent her life in the British civil service. She understands the lower and middle levels of bureaucracy, and she takes the nurses, supervisors, administrators and the people who fetch their tea and coffee seriously. Though she often describes routine, her novels can be very refreshing: she is someone who writes about offices without ridicule, irony or condescension. She knows the regimen of a hospital as well as Jane Austen knew the rigid cycle of the Assembly Rooms at Bath.

James' other specialty is a high-wire act: a high proportion of her characters are unsympathetic; they are frequently meanspirited, selfish, or simply victims of profound emotional exhaustion. Even in suspense writing, this is perilous stuff for a full-length course.

Innocent Blood is James' so-called breakout novel. Her gloomy detective, Adam Dalgliesh, is absent, and the publishers have billed the book as "a major work of fiction." Commercially their hunch was right: Innocent Blood has been sold to the movies for $350,000, and the paperback rights went for $813,000. If it is not a thriller, neither is the new book a conventional novel; it depends solely on suspense for its sustained pace -- and that is all to the good. The sad news is that the author has emphasized her real but riskier talent: writing about a collection of people who are emotional misers, helpless prisoners of their warped, florid but powerful brains. Also, because they are well-off Londoners or criminals, they do not bother much about work.

The book's first scene is in some ways its best: Philippa Palfrey, 18, a privileged girl, adopted, visits a social worker to start the legal process of learning the identity of her natural parents. Philippa is beautiful and cold; long ago she guessed that the Palfreys had selected her, when she was eight, because of her grave intelligence and unusual looks. For her and the reader the cruel blow comes early: her real parents turn out to be murderers of the most melodramatic sort. For the rest of the story James must crawl back from a cliche that might have been assigned to her in a nightmare game of charades. That she does so is no small achievement, but she must use all the devices of suspense: obscene acts that are half-forgotten, split-timed suicide, public facts that are fortuitously hidden, a man who tirelessly stalks his victim for revenge.

There are real surprises here, timed adroitly and written with fine economy. But in an alien context, they merely reaffirm James as a mystery writer. Hers is a tough, literal mind, an exacting memory that knows where files are kept and where administrators hide their short cuts. The free-floating menace and dread in the novels of Diane Johnson or Beryl Bainbridge do not suit James because -- like a classic mystery writer -- she pins down her characters. Innocent Blood is full of cold people who have too little to do. One lays down the book half-satisfied, but with a chilling conclusion: good novelists rarely write really bad books, but some of the strongest writers have a very narrow range. --Martha Duffy

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