Book Review: The Part-Time Job by PD James
Entry posted by Drew Payne in Book review
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This is a slim volume, just one short story, The Part-Time Job, and an essay, Murder Most Fowl, but it’s a perfect quick read as an eBook.
The Part-Time Job is a story about revenge and murder. The unnamed narrator was bullied at school by Keith Manston-Green and at twelve vowed to kill him. The rest of the story is how he achieves this. As a motive for murder this might seem petty and trivial but to anyone whose school days were blighted by bullying will identify with this narrator’s actions, though may not agree with them. But this is a very pedestrian plot, the narrator achieves his goal in a rather obvious way. What lifts this story is the unexpected and dark twist at the end. If you stay reading to the end, then you are rewarded with a very dark and satisfying ending.
Murder Most Fowl is an essay about why James wrote mystery crime novels, and this is a real gem. She doesn’t write about how she writes, where she finds her plots and inspiration. Instead she writes about why she writes in mystery/crime genre and what she hopes to achieve doing that. It also gives an interesting reading list of her favourite authors, what she enjoyed from their books.
PD James was an amazingly talented author, whose novels were always more than just about the puzzle of who the murder is. Her novels also explored different and interesting themes, underneath her murder plots. Like so many great authors, after her death there seemed a rush to publish the remainder of her unpublished work, the short stories and essays that had been published in magazines and newspapers, but were never published in book form. This slight volume is a product of this. James was always a great writer, even here, but this book is more for the PD James fan, it isn’t a place to first discover her work, there are several of her novels that are better for that, but this book is still an interesting read.
Edited by Drew Payne
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