Innocent Blood

"This is one of P D James’s earlier works, and it’s extremely powerful, although less well known perhaps because it doesn’t feature Adam Dalgleish and it’s not a police procedural . I should say straight away that while we were training as forensic psychiatrists, I was part of a group who thought that detective fiction might be helpful—that although it’s fiction, it might nevertheless tell us something interesting and useful. In a way, forensic psychiatrists are a bit like detectives, in the sense that we know whodunnit, but we want to know why. The ‘why’ puzzles the readers of detective fiction, it puzzles forensic psychiatrists, it sometimes puzzles the killer themselves. Detective fiction is good for exploring motives. Not only does detective fiction have a long and esteemed history, but there’s a lot of critique and reflection on it too, which is also helpful. W H Auden wrote a wonderful essay on detective fiction, called ‘The Guilty Vicarage’ . And P D James herself wrote a small book on detective fiction as a kind of bringing order out of chaos, which is why it is so popular. You know: every midnight in the village of Midsummer, chaos breaks out, then somebody will come in and restore order. This idea of restoring order is something that human beings are very interested in. We are also interested in moral reasoning. Ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ preoccupy almost everybody. We see it in shows like Breaking Bad too, which is one of the most miraculous fictional accounts of how a good man might become bad. . Innocent Blood is about a young woman who discovers that she was adopted, and that her biological mother went to prison for murder. She decides to contact her mother, and the story is about the relationship between these two women—and what happens after. The mother comes across, again, as an ordinary woman who did an extraordinary thing. We, the readers, are invited to see this person as more complex than we might have first thought. It’s a challenge to the idea that we know what a murderer is like. I won’t say any more about it. I don’t want to spoil it, but there is a parallel story about somebody setting out to commit a murder, which that runs in parallel. Eventually these two stories converge. It’s very clever. I’m surprised it hasn’t been adapted for television."