A Chance Meeting on the Curb of Dacre Street

PD James is the Author of The Murder Room.
This is a weblog as I read the book.

This begins Book One: The People and the Place that sets up the murder mystery that takes place at the Dupayne Museum, Hampstead, London.

A chance meeting coming out of the St James Park Station onto Broadway (London), on the curb of Dacre Street, Adam Dalgliesh, Commander of Scotland Yard, meets an old and eccentric friend, Conrad Ackroyd.

Lady James begins by telling us that Dalgliesh visits the Dupayne Museum one week before the first murder. "The visit was fortuitous, the decision impulsive ..." If you have read Lady James' other Adam Dalgliesh Murder Mysteries, you will recognize that an impulsive action by Dalgliesh will be interesting indeed.

When we find that the impulsive action is to drive an old friend to a museum so he can continue his reasearch on murders in the "gap years" between the wars (WWI and WWII), I think how ordinary it would be to bump into a friend and be easily talked into dropping him off. But having lived in London, I know that it is also a generous gesture because Dalgliesh lives in a flat on the Thames and Conrad wants to go to Hampstead. It is going out of his way.

I live in Wash Park in Denver, so lets say that I meet an old eccentric friend at The Market, downtown. "Take me to The Cabrini Shrine," he says. "I am seeking to uncover the spiritual history of Denver and find that this saint of the orphaned and the abandoned speaks clearly to the mystical founding soul of Denver and the beauty of its 'better angels'."

My friend has to tempt me with the presentation of his quest. And so Conrad does with Dalgliesh.