Hot on a murderer's trail

PD James begins her new crime novel with an apology for erecting a Victorian imitation of an Inigo Jones villa on the outer edge of Hampstead Heath to house the Dupayne Museum. This is a small foundation dedicated to memorabilia of the inter-war years, with books, periodicals, artefacts and pictures of the period 1919-1938.

Most attractive to visitors, however, is the Murder Room, containing items relating to killings of that era: a trunk, for example, reputed to be the very one into which Tony Mancini stuffed the body of his mistress in Brighton in 1934.

Unfortunately, the inquisitive are not allowed to open it and search the interior for bloodstains.

Max Dupayne, the rich and eccentric founder of the museum, is now dead: its trustees are his three children, Marcus, Caroline and Neville, all of whom must sign a new lease if the museum is to continue in existence.

Marcus and Caroline are determined to keep it going at all costs; Neville, a psychiatrist, who believes, in fuzzy New Labourish fashion, that "a kind of national nostalgia" prevents us from coping with the problems of the present, and who hated his father, is equally determined to close it down, and is refusing to sign.

The impasse is resolved when someone pours petrol over Neville's E-type Jaguar and sets light to it, carelessly omitting-to remove its owner from the driver's seat beforehand.

Although one would expect the investigation of the murder to be handled by the local division, P D James's usual policeman, Commander Adam Dalgliesh, and his Special Investigation Squad (Detective Inspectors Kate Miskin and Piers Tarrant, Detective Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith) are given the task in order, we are told, to stop the press getting too inquisitive.

It would, of course, have the opposite effect.

Though The Murder Room has the form of a classical detective story, the actual process of detection is treated somewhat perfunctorily, its unimportance exemplified by the fact that the obligatory final explanation of the crime is given not by Dalgliesh, but by the wholly unimportant figure of the Home Secretary.

The author's attention is fixed, rather, on buildings and people. No house or flat can be mentioned without some telling description of its architecture and interior decoration, while characters not only receive a detailed, strikingly phrased account of their physical appearance, but are also often developed as individuals to a far greater extent than is usual in the genre.

The attraction of the book, therefore, lies not so much in discovering the identity of the murderer - not too difficult a task - as in submerging oneself in a carefully constructed, densely populated, fascinating, fictional milieu, occasionally lit by the lightning flash of a swift, acerbic comment on some folly of the present.