Shroud for a Nightingale

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Seventeen days later, Nurse Fallon is found dead in her bed, her eyes wide open but cold and opaque. Nurse Pardoe shrugged and pursed her lips into a little secret smile. She said: "By accident. Or it might have been a practical joke. Or perhaps it was done on purpose." Written in a completely classic style this may seem a bit slow-moving for modern tastes, but is downright explosive when compared with earlier, similar, stories. I've recently been reading Mignon Eberhart's nursing mysteries from the 1930s, and if you want "slow-moving thriller" (not *exactly* an oxymoron...), then her earliest work is for you! But while Eberhart was entertaining, James is an overall much better writer, and it is fascinating to see here how little of the attitudes towards nurses and their craft had changed in the intervening forty years. And while outside of the small-hospital environment (the nurses live-in, and don't spend much time in The Real World) things are changing rapidly in the social sense, here the ethos is of an older Britain even in 1970 - the values are traditional, the plotting traditional, the writing style traditional. But not stuffy, not at all boring. James is a peerless creator of atmosphere. She herself has always claimed that the first thing that comes to her when embarking upon a new novel is the setting. Undoubtedly, Nightingale House, the setting for most of the events in this book, singularly inappropriate for a nursing college, is almost as vividly described as any of the characters. It is a dark, nasty house, an evil house, where crimes of abuse, neglect and death had previously taken place. The final scene, when the house is finally demolished, is a masterpiece of descriptive writing which conveys so much more than just a sense of place. It was then that the door opened. Matron came quietly in and shut it behind her. There was a creak of starched linen as the twins slipped from the desk and stood to attention. Nurse Harper rose gracelessly from her chair. All of them turned towards Miss Taylor.

Whilst acting as a patient during a demonstration at a nurses’ training school, one of the students — Nurse Pearce — dies in agony. Somebody had switched the milk she was supposed to have been fed by an intragastric tube with bleach. I exaggerate a bit, but their condescension and awareness-of-status/position/class is glaringly clear in so many books I read by English writers, even those set in the present day. If you don’t want the facade of a cosy novel but would rather abstain from the gratuitous drugs, sex and violence of hardboiled fiction, P.D. James dominates the middle ground. Shroud for a Nightingale is a mystery, long on clues, characterisation and plot, and a dollop of emotional nastiness thrown in for good measure. Excerpt There was a murmur from the class. Sister Gearing raised an interrogative eyebrow. The spectacled student said:nightingale) из женской разведсети, воспетому Кристиной Ханной, роман "Тайна Найтингейла" (Shroud for a Nightingale) отношения не имеет. Хотя отголоски событий Второй Мировой сыграют здесь немалую роль, а местом действия окажется школа медсестер. But there couldn't be! Shirley and I took a fresh bottle of milk out of the kitchen fridge first thing this morning. Miss Collins was there and saw us. We left it in the demo room and didn't pour it into the measuring jug until just before the demonstration, did we, Shirley?" Courtney-Briggs remains reticent and actually misleads the police, claiming he had left the building immediately after surgery and had put a white scarf on a fallen tree to warn other pedestrians. Police also find out that Sister Mavis Gearing had invited Leonard Morris, the chief pharmacist of the hospital, to dinner; they had parted ways several minutes after midnight. Morris had seen Sister Brumfett leave the building, too, but testifies that at 12:17 a.m., he injured himself after stumbling over a fallen tree in the dark. Contrary to Courtney-Briggs’s earlier claim, Morris had injured himself because the tree did not have a warning marker. A weakened pane of glass that had been blown out in the evening storm suggests an outside intruder, but the absence of other indicators turns the investigation on those who had been inside the building. It was the dark sulky-looking girl who answered, her voice carefully repressing any note of enthusiasm or even interest. Certainly not an agreeable girl, thought Miss Beale.

IF anyone could help me in finding the original running time of this series, I would be so appreciative. It still remains at nearly the pinnacle of AD favorites, but was originally so much more. Nurse Pardoe said: "Well, there's one person who knew that Fallon wouldn't be acting patient this morning. Fallon herself." James is one of my favorite writers, and I've reread most of her books several times; this time I listened to SHROUD in audio, read by Michael Jayston, courtesy of my library. He's a smooth, excellent reader, and this was very enjoyable. And now to the plot...This was the early 70s, so the beginning of the cult of the individual, the overly cynical and dehumanising psychological turn which pathologised anything we might have liked to think of as a virtue or truly relational so James would not have been alone in this world-view and she writes it compellingly. History has shown us the resultant rise of the independent, personally responsible individual and the eroding of any sort of public feeling or sense of community, we live in a neoliberal age that logically comes out of the bleak cynicism of writers like James. You don’t just see the everyday, the banal, the human beings running this little planet, thinking everything they do matters and has meaning. You see the underneath, our souls. You know me. Five pairs of eyes gazed at her with startled incomprehension. But the efficient student -- as Miss Beale still thought of her -- quietly identified them. The bottle of disinfectant is missing from the lavatory. You know the one I mean. It's always kept there on the little shelf. Pardoe and I couldn't find it."

Miss Beale glanced at the girl, surprised. It was an odd remark to come from Nurse Goodale, a little insensitive in the circumstances, disconcertingly out of character. She noted, too, the use of the past tense. Here was one student who didn't expect to see Nurse Pearce alive again.

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I wasn't completely convinced by the solution a hidden Nazi! And such a cliched one that I guessed who it was as soon as the Nazi trial was mentioned. It's a sobering reminder of how close the 70s were to the aftermath of WW2 though. The characterization, too, of the nurses is slight so that even by the end, it was hard to keep them apart, other than the twins and the murdered. And Dalgleish's 'detective instinct' is well to the fore: amidst all the plodding police work, he just miraculously finds the poison bottle... P. D. James, byname of Phyllis Dorothy James White, Baroness James of Holland Park, (born August 3, 1920, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England—died November 27, 2014, Oxford), British mystery novelist best known for her fictional detective Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard.