At 38, British National Health Service employee Phyllis Dorothy James White (1920-2014) reinvented herself as P. D. James, crime novelist. By the time of her death at 94, she had long been known as England's "Queen of Crime." Sixteen of her 20 novels featured one or more of her beloved series detectives--Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard and private eye Cordelia Gray. Her 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 mystery plotting has earned comparison with Golden Age British detective writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Yet James's work is thoroughly modern, with realistic descriptions of police procedures and the echoes and aftereffects of crime. This definitive literary companion includes more than 800 encyclopedic entries covering the characters, settings and themes of her published writing, along with a career chronology, a chronological and alphabetical listing of her works, and an exhaustive index.