British National Health Service employee Phyllis Dorothy James White (1920-2014) reinvented herself at age 38 as P.D. James, crime novelist. She then became long known as England's "Queen of Crime." Sixteen of her 20 novels feature one or both of her series detectives, Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard and private eye Cordelia Gray. Stand-alone works include the dystopian The Children of Men (1992) and Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), a sequel to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. James's careful plotting has earned comparison with Golden Age British detective writers such...