The magnificent P D James received an Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction award at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival last week.
Five decades of outstanding contribution, to be precise, and still going strong, aged 90. She admitted that she had been troubled by ageism: “There was something rather valedictory about The Private Patient. I had been very reluctant to begin a long detective story because I feared that I might die before I finished it, and that there would be a falling off in quality, so reviewers would say ‘considering she was 91 or 92, it is a remarkable achievement, but hardly vintage P D James’.”
“A remarkable achievement for her age” – the barbed compliment implies that it’s a marvel for her to be writing at all, when she should be sitting in a high-backed chair by the window.
And though James intimated that the worry of any “falling off in quality” was her own, it isn’t helped by a literary culture that tilts horribly towards the cult of youth.
More recently, there was The Wandering Falcon, a sensational debut from Jamil Ahmad, a 78-year-old former civil servant in Pakistan’s “tribal belt”. Meru Gokhale, the editorial director of Vintage India at Random House, who discovered Ahmad while at Penguin, feels that age enriched his fiction: “The timeless quality of his writing must come from experience, and also the fact that he has lived a long and extraordinary life. He has lived in a society where minute human interaction determines your fate, and this gives him unusual powers of observation.” - Sunday Independent