An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

“She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love. Compared with this early discipline of concealment, all subsequent deceits had been easy.” 

These lines establish Cordelia’s suitability for being a private investigator: She was brought up in foster homes where she learned to lie, cementing her status as an outsider and an unreliable narrator.

“Bernie had needed to be a detective as other men needed to paint, write, drink or fornicate.” 

Cordelia is reflecting on Bernie’s dismissal from the police. The reason for that is never given, but she assumes it must be unfair because the job was his calling. This is the nearest James gets to salty, base language, used here to show the seriousness of the statement. As the reader realizes Cordelia has the same calling, this line helps us understand why she isn’t jealous of Sophie’s life, or Isabelle’s, and how she engages with her work, no matter unsuitable it may seem: She doesn’t feel she has a choice.

“This lust always to know! It’s only prying. If he’d wanted us to know, he’d have told us.” 

Miss Leaming says this while Sir Ronald is explaining his desire to understand Mark’s death. Miss Leaming is hoping to hide what she believes is Mark’s sexual experimentation; the word “lust” is a clue to her area of concern.

“I’m not prepared to go on in this uncertainty. My son is dead. My son. If I am in some way responsible, I prefer to know.” 

In these lines, addressed to Cordelia at their initial interview, Sir Ronald emphasizes “my son,” though his son’s biological mother is also in the room. Sir Ronald knows that he was responsible for Mark’s death—he killed the boy—so it’s strange that he suggests he may be responsible.

“Get to know the dead person. Nothing about him is too trivial, too unimportant. Dead men can talk. They can lead you directly to their murderer.” 

Cordelia remembers this wisdom from Dalgliesh. Though she does not yet know Mark has been murdered, she follows Dalgliesh’s advice and it works.

“It’s unwise to become too personally involved with another human being. When that human being is dead, it can be dangerous as well as unwise.” 

Miss Markland says this to Cordelia after letting her into Mark’s cottage. Miss Markland may be alluding to her own dead fiancé in the first sentence; in the second, she sounds like she’s giving an ominous warning, but it’s more likely she is remembering her own dead son. Miss Markland is repeatedly dangled as a potential bad actor, but she is a red herring each time.

“She saw the picture as a contrast between the worlds of the intellect and action and tried to remember where she had seen similar paintings. The comrades—as Cordelia always thought of that ubiquitous band of fellow-revolutionaries who attached themselves to her father—had been very fond of exchanging messages in art galleries and Cordelia had spent hours walking slowly from picture to picture, waiting for the casual visitor to pause beside her and whisper his few words of warning or information.” 

Cordelia is looking at a painting in Mark’s cottage. In this aside the narrator gives us a glimpse into Cordelia’s unusual upbringing. She must have served as a go-between for her father and his comrades, and in this way she became educated about art. There are few references to Cordelia’s father and his politics, but those included are intriguing in their mystery.

“It was only in fiction that the people one wanted to interview were sitting ready at or in their office, with time, energy and interest to spare.” 

Cordelia is reflecting on having to wait a few hours before getting an appointment to see Sergeant Maskell. James is playing heavily with irony as, of course, Cordelia is a fictional character in a work of fiction. This sly wink at the reader is a hallmark of James’s playful sense of humor.

“Cordelia had stayed on at the Convent for the six most settled and happy years of her life, insulated by order and ceremony from the mess and muddle of life outside.” 

Cordelia’s father took a haphazard interest in her upbringing, and when he did not answer a letter from the content where she had accidentally been sent for schooling, she stayed there for six years. The ironic contrast between her happiest times in an orderly place and the mess and muddle she exists in as a private detective underscores the deep sadness Cordelia feels about having the life she’d hoped for taken away from her.

“You can’t do our job, partner, and be a gentleman.” 

Cordelia is guiltily eavesdropping on Sophie, Davie, Hugo, and Isabelle when she remembers these words of wisdom from Bernie. The irony is that Cordelia is not and could never be a gentleman, which is another way James demonstrates how well suited she is to the job.

“She was in danger of being lulled into a gentle acceptance of defeat; viewing all her suspicions as a neurotic hankering after drama and notoriety, a need to justify her fee to Sir Ronald. She believed that Mark Callender had been murdered because she wanted to believe it. She had identified with him, with his solitariness, his self-sufficiency, his alienation from his father, his lonely childhood. She had even—most dangerous presumption of all—come to see herself as his avenger.”

Cordelia has a moment of self-doubt while out punting with Mark’s friends. They are trying to distract her from the case, and it’s working; it’s unclear whether the lines above are Cordelia’s thoughts or the narrator’s observation. Ironically, while Cordelia isn’t officially Mark’s avenger, she does discover the truth of his murder and allow his mother to avenge him.

“In that moment Cordelia knew how close she had come to giving up the case. She had been suborned by the beauty of the day, by sunshine, indolence, the promise of comradeship, even friendship, into forgetting why she was here. The realization horrified her.” 

In her time punting on the river, Cordelia finds herself enjoying the moment and the experiences that she might have taken for granted had she ended up at Cambridge. But the private detective’s code requires that person to remain an outsider, to shun beauty, indolence, and friendship. James stresses Cordelia’s horror to firmly show that she is choosing her life, not accepting it as a substitute.

“She was insensible with drink. She lay there emitting puffs of foul, whisky-laden breath which rose like invisible balls of smoke from the half-open mouth […] Her thin lips were thickly painted, the strong purple stain had seeped into the cracks around the mouth so that the body looked parched in an extremity of cold. Her hands, the gnarled fingers brown with nicotine and laden with rings, lay quietly on the counterpane. Two of the talon-like nails were broken and the brick-red polish on the others was cracked or peeled away.” 

James has a keen eye for description, and Mademoiselle de Congé gets a thorough treatment. De Congé is derelict in her duties as Isabelle’s chaperone, and James makes sure that her failure is reflected in her grotesque and debauched condition. It’s an interesting amount of time and effort to spend on an inconsequential character, but de Congé’s example suggests that enjoying parties like the one Cordelia is attending leads to dissolution and decay.

“[A]lienated by the last six years from her own generation, [Cordelia] found herself intimidated by the noise, the underlying ruthlessness and the half-understood conventions of these tribal matings.” 

Cordelia is at Isabelle’s party, and James uses the opportunity to again show how Cordelia is not a part of her peer group, no matter how much she looks the part. James ensures that the reader senses Cordelia’s disdain for those peers, rather than allowing us to assume she is jealous or wishes to be part of them.

“Mark said that he chose history because we have no chance of understanding the present without understanding the past […] Actually, of course, the reverse is true; we interpret the past through our knowledge of the present.” 

Mark’s former tutor says this to Cordelia, but Horsfall’s statement doesn’t ring true based on our knowledge of the present. Mark’s death was caused by his investigation into the past, which allowed him to understand the present.

“Yes, I know a father who made it an excuse too. But it isn’t their fault. We can’t make ourselves love someone just because we want to.” 

Cordelia is speaking with Mrs. Goddard, who was nanny to Mark’s mother. They are discussing what happens to children whose mothers die in childbirth. Cordelia is referencing her own father and excusing his behavior by saying that love can’t be forced. If she believes this, she can see her father’s rejection of her as impersonal. When she later confronts Sir Ronald, he says the same thing back to her, only in his case it’s how he explains murdering his own son. If Cordelia’s father did not love her and interrupted her education to serve as his cook and attendant, James wants us to consider how different he is from Sir Ronald, who tips over the edge into murder.

“Surely those two letters under an initial could only show one thing, the blood group.” 

Cordelia has just discovered Evelyn’s coded message to her son, Mark, in which she left her own initials, the letters “AA,” and a date. This line is significant because it represents a tremendous intuitive leap. Correctly interpreting “AA” is key to solving the case; it is a stretch to imagine Cordelia immediately associating those two letters with a blood group.

“Thinking of her father and Bernie, Cordelia said: ‘Perhaps it’s only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it’s too late for them to do anything about it.’” 

On first read, these lines suggest that Cordelia cared for both her father and for Bernie Pryde, but a closer look shows that Cordelia could have been thinking about them in opposition. She cared very much for Bernie and not at all for her father, which gives these words a deeper resonance than initially suggested.

“Be sure of one thing, Miss Gray, if I needed to kill I should do it efficiently. I should not be found out. […] Mark’s death was necessary and, unlike most deaths, it served a purpose. Human beings have an irresistible urge towards self-sacrifice. They die for any reason or none at all, for meaningless abstractions like patriotism, justice, peace; for other men’s ideas, for other men’s power, for a few feet of earth.” 

Sir Ronald has been found out, a fact he decides to ignore. His attempt at justifying Mark’s death has some logic to it, but he fails to notice that Mark did not actually sacrifice himself—Sir Ronald sacrificed him. Miss Leaming does the same thing a few minutes later, sacrificing Sir Ronald, raising the moral ambiguity of who should be allowed to get away with murder.

“Intense personal commitment always ends in jealousy and enslavement. Love is more destructive than hate.” 

Sir Ronald has all but admitted to killing his own son, explaining his actions were justified to protect his work. In an ironic turn, Miss Leaming shows the truth of his words when she kills him: Her intense personal commitment to him and her love for her son leads her to commit the same crime he committed, but for opposite reasons.

“Miss Leaming suddenly laughed and said with revealing bitterness: ‘What is there to be frightened of? We shall be dealing only with men.’” 

On the surface Miss Leaming is deriding the way men underestimate women. But she’s also right; it is unlikely a female police officer will be present. The implication is that another woman might have found them out, but the police will be hampered by their own sexism in sending all men to investigate. That said, James allows Dalgliesh to discover the truth. Since he and Cordelia are both detectives, this reinforces the trope that their intellect is superior to everyone’s regardless of gender.

“Never tell an unnecessary lie; the truth has great authority. The cleverest murderers have been caught, not because they told the one essential lie, but because they continued to lie about unimportant details when the truth could have done them no harm.” 

Cordelia received this advice from Dalgliesh via Bernie Pryde. It is ironic that Dalgliesh’s guidance is exactly what enables Cordelia to bluff him; it is also ironic that a police officer is providing advice to a criminal.

“If you’re tempted to crime, stick to your original statement. There’s nothing that impresses the jury more than consistency. I’ve seen the most unlikely defence succeed simply because the accused stuck to his story.” 

Cordelia is recalling advice from Dalgliesh via Bernie, which she follows during her interrogation by Dalgliesh. This again raises the question why Dalgliesh gave advice about how to get away with criminal behavior when he is a police officer and why Bernie would pass on the same. The detective exists in a liminal space and creates his own morality.