“Cover Her Face” by P. D. James (post 2): Author’s hero of opposite sex may be clue to author’s multiple personality trait

From Miss Marple and Nancy Drew to the present day, it has been obvious that very successful fictional detectives may be female. So P. D. James probably had personal reasons for making her hero (Adam Dalgliesh) a man.

I used to have the misconception that detective novelists, since their stories have to be so carefully plotted, are not subject to the same psychology (multiple personality trait) as literary novelists. But when I studied various detective novelists (Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sue Grafton, etc.), I found that they, too, had multiple personality trait, although the evidence for it may be in lesser known things that they said or wrote.

I don’t know if there is any such evidence for P. D. James. So far, all I know (beyond what I said in the previous post) is that she, as is true of many novelists, had a sense that her novels came to her (from alternate personalities?), not from her (regular personality):

“It is almost as if the whole book and the people already exist in some limbo outside myself and it is my business, by a long process of thought and effort, to get in touch with them and put them down on paper” (1, p. 4).

Moreover, a number of novelists have acknowledged that their heroes or heroines are their idealized alter egos (alternate personalities).

And it is common in multiple personality to have some alternate personalities of the opposite sex.

So, all in all, I am tempted to consider an author’s hero of the opposite sex as a clue to the author’s multiple personality trait. (A hero of the same sex is neither for nor against it.)

1. Richard B. Gidez. P. D. James. Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1986.