Phyllis Dorothy James was born in Oxford in 1920 and went to school in Ludlow and Cambridge. She married Ernest Connor Bantry White, an army doctor, in 1941. He came home from the Second World War mentally ill and spent long periods in hospital, and she supported the family while raising their two daughters.
She worked in hospital administration in London from 1949 to 1968, then joined the Home Office, working in the police and criminal policy departments until she retired in 1979. Both jobs fed directly into her fiction, which is full of hospitals, laboratories and the machinery of the law.
Her first novel, Cover Her Face, came out in 1962 and introduced Adam Dalgliesh, the poet and Scotland Yard detective who appears in fourteen of her books. She also wrote two novels about the private detective Cordelia Gray, the dystopian novel The Children of Men, which was filmed in 2006, and Death Comes to Pemberley, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice.
She was made an OBE in 1983 and a life peer in 1991 as Baroness James of Holland Park. She died at her home in Oxford on 27 November 2014, aged 94.
