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Sleep No More by P.D. James


I usually have a problem with short stories. The problem is that they are short! All too often I am just getting into the story when suddenly they’re done and I’m sitting there going, but, but, but I’m not ready to leave yet.
Having said that Sleep No More by P.D. James is a little toothsome chocolate box of the best bitter chocolate you could hope for as a present. It’s no coincidence that there are chocolates on the book cover, or at least there are in my version.

The book is subtitled ‘six murderous tales’, and that kind of sums things up. As the back cover says, “When it comes to crime, it’s not always a question of ‘who dunnit?’ Sometimes there’s more mystery in the why or the how.” It is this variation – the different flavours and different approaches to each murderous tale that makes this little collection work so well. For example, in some cases we know the murderer straight away, and even the why, but what is fascinating is the aftermath. And of course sometimes there’s something incredibly satisfying about the twist in the tale.

All of the short stories in this collection are deceptively simple. I think it’s the art of a good crime writer to make things seem effortless so you don’t notice their slights of hand. As someone who used to string words together for a living, pre-retirement, I wanted to dismantle all these stories and try to work out exactly how they were constructed and just it is that makes them go down so smoothly and yet taste so wonderfully bitter. But to try to deconstruct them would be to take away the magic, so I’ll just sit back and appreciate these delightful, twisty examples of a great writer offering up six very elegant examples of her craft.

Sleep No More by P. D. James was published in 2017 and my copy was published by Vintage Canada.

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