“Cover Her Face” by P. D. James: Adam Dalgliesh detective mystery opens with reminiscence by murderer, whose memory is “selective and perverse”

After finishing this novel, and looking back at the opening paragraph, my first thought was that the author was guilty of unreliable narration, which in the detective mystery genre is considered cheating (except in exceptional works, such as Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) (1926). Search “unreliable narrator” for past posts.

However, rereading the opening paragraph, I see that P. D. James may avoid the charge of cheating, because the character, Mrs. Maxie, was not knowingly lying; rather, she was at the mercy of her memory, which was “selective and perverse.” That is, at the moment of this reminiscence, Mrs. Maxie evidently has a memory gap, a symptom of multiple personality (search “memory gaps”), for having committed the murder:

“Exactly three months before the killing at Martingale Mrs. Maxie gave a dinner party. Years later, when the trial was a half-forgotten scandal and the headlines were yellowing on the newspaper lining of cupboard drawers, Eleanor Maxie looked back on that spring evening as the opening scene of tragedy. Memory, selective and perverse, invested what had been a perfectly ordinary dinner party with an aura of foreboding and unease. It became, in retrospect, a ritual gathering under one roof of victim and suspects, a staged preliminary to murder. In fact not all the suspects had been present. Felix Hearne, for one, was not at Martingale that week-end. Yet, in her memory, he too sat at Mrs. Maxie’s table, watching with amused, sardonic eyes the opening antics of the players” (1, opening paragraph).

Sally

The other character who may have had unacknowledged multiple personality is the murder victim, Sally, who has claimed to be an unmarried mother. Sally is killed by Mrs. Maxie after Sally gets Mrs. Maxie’s son to propose marriage, which happens only days before Sally’s husband, as Sally knew, was to return to England from his job of several years in Venezuela.

Sally is described as a “complex personality” (1, p. 189), who was “a clever little liar” (1, p. 198) (search “lying” for past posts), which, by itself, is rather meager proof of multiple personality. But she had been sponsored for the job at Mrs. Maxie’s mansion by a home for unwed mothers. So she had not just told a little lie, but was actually living a lie, and I find it beyond belief that a young wife and mother would do that, unless she had an alternate personality who believed it, and who was thereby helping her to cope with her husband’s “abandonment.”

Comment

So was P. D. James cheating with unreliable narration? And did she attribute behavior to Sally that was unbelievable? Or does the narration and characterization make sense if both the murderer and victim had multiple personality (even if the author would deny that she had any such intention)?

As discussed in many past posts, I consider unintentional, unacknowledged, symptoms of multiple personality in a work of fiction to be reflective of multiple personality trait in the author. But I would have to find more evidence, perhaps biographical, to make that interpretation fully credible in this case. And I don’t yet know if such evidence is available. So my interpretation in this post is tentative.

1. P. D. James. Cover Her Face [1962]. New York, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2001.