Word: dalgleish
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When the Schwabbies get back to home base, they have more to tell Hubbard about the experience. Virtually all of it is enthusiastic. Simon Dalgleish, a senior analyst in the business-strategy group, says he learned that "I can do things way outside the realm of what I thought I could. And it can be a blast." He even advises others never to "shy away from a challenge. By doing so you're potentially choosing not to have...
Readers always ask if Dalgleish will rendez-vous with Cordelia Gray, James' female private-eye, but James refuses to comment on any possible future entanglements. She also denies any personal attachment to the Commander, pooh-poohing parallels to Dorothy Sayer's well-known infatuation with her own detective, Lord Peter Wimsey...
Original Sin doesn't let the reader get as close and personal with Dalgleish as in previous novels, focusing instead on his detective inspectors, Kate Miskin and Daniel Aaron. Her detectives often become emotionally involved in the cases they investigate. In Original Sin, it is Daniel Aaron, more than Dalgleish, who is drawn in. Although Aaron is not as satisfyingly developed as his superior has been in previous novels, the plot is strong enough to carry him along, and the reader will experience only the slightest regret that Dalgleish is not more in evidence...
James makes up for Dalgleish's aloofness with a host of some of her most successful characters. Victim herself of an unhappy child-hood, her best creations are solitary, melancholic types, often orphans, and here the mechanics of solitude are perceptively explored and beautifully described...
Frances Peverell, a figure of "gentle, old-fashioned formality," lives a flight of stairs away from the equally reserved Gabriel Dauntsey. They see "less of each other than if they had lived miles apart." Dalgleish recognizes Jean-Philippe Etienne, Gerard's father, as the "true recluse" he himself sometimes shows signs of becoming. Isolation in the wake of death is more than poignant, and the abandoned homes of the murder victims, as James describes them, provide the most eloquent counterpoint to living loneliness...