Cordelia Gray

Cordelia Gray is the young female private detective protagonist of P.D. James's Cordelia Gray novels — a twenty-two-year-old who inherits a struggling detective agency from her deceased partner and proves, in two exceptional cases, that she is one of crime fiction's most capable and most underused investigators. James wrote only two Cordelia Gray novels, but they are among her finest work.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) — in which Cordelia investigates the apparent suicide of a Cambridge student — is a landmark in British crime fiction: a young woman doing a job the title tells us she shouldn't have, handling it with intelligence and moral courage that put her male counterparts to shame. The novel's examination of what it means to be a woman doing detective work in early 1970s England is as sharp as its mystery plot.

Cordelia appears briefly in James's Adam Dalgliesh novel The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982), but James never gave her a third full novel, to the lasting regret of readers who found her one of crime fiction's most compelling protagonists. Begin with An Unsuitable Job for a Woman.