I got to meet her back in 1998, when she came to the Mystery Lovers Bookstore in Oakmont, PA. I asked her about her writing schedule, and she told me she started out every day fixing herself tea and feeding her cat - then sat down to write. I have an autographed copy of one of her Adam Dalgliesh thrillers, "A Certain Justice." She was then in her late 70's but enjoying a demanding book tour.
Phyllis Dorothy James, published her first mystery in 1962, while working in the criminal section of Britain's Department of Home Affairs. She's also served on the BBC board and saw many of her books turned into successful TV productions, broadcast here on the PBS program "Mystery."
from Wikipedia:
James was born in Oxford, the daughter of Sidney James, a tax inspector, and educated at the British School in Ludlow and Cambridge High School for Girls.[3]
James had to leave school at the age of sixteen to work, because her family did not have much money and her father did not believe in higher education for girls. James worked in a tax office for three years, and later found a job as an assistant stage manager for a theatre group. In 1941, she married Ernest Connor Bantry White, an army doctor. They had two daughters, Claire and Jane.
When White returned from the Second World War, he was suffering from mental illness and James was forced to provide for the whole family until her husband's death in 1964. With White in a psychiatric institution and their daughters being mostly cared for by his parents, James studied hospital administration and from 1949 to 1968 worked for a hospital board in London.[4]
James began writing in the mid-1950s.[5] Her first novel, Cover Her Face, featuring the investigator and poet Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, named after a teacher at Cambridge High School, was published in 1962.[6] Many of James's mystery novels take place against the backdrop of the UK's bureaucracies, such as the criminal justice system and the National Health Service, in which James worked for decades starting in the 1940s. Two years after the publication of Cover Her Face, James's husband died and she took a position
as a civil servant within the criminal section of the Home Office. James worked in government service until her retirement in 1979.
In 1991, she was made a life member of the House of Lords.
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