Remembering P.D. James with fellow crime writer Peter Robinson

She's being remembered as a great crime writer. But the fact is, British author P.D. James was a great writer, regardless of genre. Phyllis Dorothy James White died today at her home in Oxford, England. She was 94.

James rose to fame for her series of mystery novels featuring police detective Adam Dalgliesh. He was a handsome, intelligent character, and the crimes he investigated were realistic and not romanticized. Many of those mysteries adapted for television in the UK.

"Detective fiction before [her] was largely a matter of playing games with the reader in terms of here's the clue, can you guess whodunnit," author Peter Robinson, who knew James, tells As It Happens host Carol Off. "P.D. James turned detective fiction into novels like any other. Novels about life that usually took a murder, an extreme event, and used that as a way of talking about the people involved in it."

In her personal life, Robinson describes James as "sharp-minded."

"[She was] a little bit intimidating to somebody who's just starting out in the crime-writing business because she's achieved so much and paved such a course for us," he says. "But there's no reason one should think she's intimidating, she's always been really pleasant."

James also authored books of other genres, including The Children of Men, which was made into major film, and her final novel, Death Comes to Pemberley, her successful sequel to the Jane Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice.