The death of crime writer PD James has saddened fans of her detective stories and claimed one of Suffolk's adopted daughters. STEVEN RUSSELL examines why she's claimed a place in our hearts

It was easy to be in awe of James if you'd never met her. She sold millions of detective novels and her most famous character, Adam Dalgliesh, was on TV. She became a baroness and strolled the corridors of the House of Lords. She was confident. And those initials… almost like a shield.

But PD James – Phyllis, and a grandmother – was charming and had the knack of putting people at ease.

Crime-writer Mike Ripley, who lives near Colchester, was with her in 2007 at Essex Book Festival, and last saw her in the spring of 2011, at the funeral of a mutual friend.

'She gave a sort of oration and then came up with the marvellous line 'Where's the pub?'' he chuckles.

PD James was 'very charming, and had time to talk to anybody, from schoolkids to wannabe writers. She told me she wrote her first book in order to pay for her living room carpet! I think she got a £25 advance. That was back in '61, '62. British crime-writing at that time really revolved around the thriller market. We were producing international best-sellers like Alistair MacLean and Hammond Innes, and the detective story was sidelined a bit.

'The critics were saying the most interesting stuff in detective stories was coming out of America: private eyes and so on. She put herself out on a limb, going against the tide, to write the traditional detective story.

'There was Patricia Highsmith, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, but after that I'm pushed to think of other women.'

She might have been charming, but PD James had backbone. She wasn't afraid to step outside her comfort zone – A Taste for Death quite bloody and reflecting the harder tone of the 1980s, says Mike, who points out she even tackled science fiction.

There was a memorable moment in 2009 while guest-editing Radio 4's Today programme and confronting Mark Thompson about the 'excessive' pay for some BBC executives.

'The number of people who came up to her in recent years and said 'Well done. You really ripped into the director-general.' She did a John Humphrys on him. Took him to the cleaners.'

Why is her work so good?

'I think it was a genuine love of reading. Certainly her knowledge of (Jane) Austen and Dorothy L Sayers was deep. But, also, there was a strong religious conviction. She was a devout Christian, and I think that had something to do with it, because her books are fairly moral – not like mine, where you'll do anything to get a dirty joke in, or hard-boiled stuff where the bad guys sometimes win. Hers are clear cut: the murderer just ain't going to get away with it. Adam Dalgliesh comes across not exactly as an avenging angel but at least an angel who is on the side of the righteous.'

Really, though, it's her sense of place. 'She told me, and the audience in Witham, that she always started a book with a place. Forget the plot; forget the characters. She'll see something, like a piece of East Anglian coastline, and whammo! That's where the book's going to be set.

'I've been to the place in Dorset where she set The Black Tower. You drive round the headland, see the tower, and think 'Yes, I see what she saw.''

James's 2001 novel Death in Holy Orders was set in Suffolk. In it, the body of a young ordinand is found buried in a sandy bank on the coast near St Anselm's, an isolated High Anglican theological college.

The initial theories are suicide, murder or an accident. Then a few days later a retired nurse is suffocated because she remembers something from 12 years earlier.

Mary James (no relation) credits PD James for helping get Aldeburgh Literary Festival off the ground in 2002. Mary and husband John bought the town's bookshop in 2000 and met the writer at a lunch that November.

'We sat next to her and she was so very easy to talk to. She was very warm and encouraging. We said 'Would you come and do something?' and she said she'd be delighted. She was our first celebrity speaker, with Alan Bennett, in our first year.'

It wasn't the last time the three Jameses would meet.

'After she published her Pride and Prejudice 'sequel', Death Comes to Pemberley, we invited her to give a talk about it at the Jubilee Hall and we gave the proceeds to the Suffolk Foundation. It would have sold three times over and she was marvellous.

'She was very, very good; pitch perfect on the (Jane) Austen 'voice'. She continued the story after Elizabeth and Darcy were married, and then there was a murder. It was a fusion of her two interests. It was a piece of fun for her, because I didn't think she had the energy at her age to write another Adam Dalgliesh novel.'

Mary says the Dalgliesh stories will endure. 'The character himself is completely attractive – a poetry-reading, sensitive policeman. They are very atmospheric stories, usually set in a closed space, like an island community.'

The tales are traditional and compelling, and the characters strong, 'and the resolution is therefore all the more of a relief and satisfactory. Which is why we read detective novels: to make sense of chaos, really. We know the baddie is caught, so we can get on with our lives.

'She is very much of that golden age of British detective writing. Other people have followed on, but there's really nobody quite like her.'

Mary remembers going to a literary lunch at Bungay a few years ago where PD James shared the platform with Melvyn Bragg and Ruth Rendell.

'I asked the question 'Do you mind that you never won the Booker?' (The big prize for original fiction.) People don't take detective fiction seriously enough; it's not termed 'literary fiction'.

'She said she didn't mind at all. I don't know if that was true, but it was a very elegant answer.

'Her books are extremely well written and well-plotted, with strong characterisation and a lot of ideas. There's no reason why they shouldn't have been shortlisted for the Booker.'

Crime writer PD James, who for many years had a cottage at Southwold, died yesterday (Thursday, November 27) at the age of 94.

Born in Oxford, the daughter of an Inland Revenue official, she grew up in Cambridge from the age of 11 and left school at 16. She married a doctor in 1941 and had two daughters, but Ernest returned from the war struggling with his health and unable to work.

James's first novel, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962 when she was in her 40s, though she was not a full-time writer. Widowed in 1964, she began working full-time in 1969 as a civil servant, joining the Home Office in 1968. There she'd learn much about forensics and crime.

James retired only at the end of 1979, devoting herself to fiction. Her best-known character, the poetry-loving detective Adam Dalgliesh, featured in 14 novels and was portrayed by Roy Marsden in a popular TV adaptation.

In 1995 she told The Paris Review she was 'born knowing' she wanted to be a writer and 'had an interest in death from an early age'. She explained: 'When I heard Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought 'Did he fall or was he pushed?''

Asked why many successful crime writers were women, she said: 'This may be because women have an eye for detail, and clue-making demands attention to the minutiae of everyday living.'

Suffolk was dear to her heart and she was involved in the community: opening school halls, fetes and more. James was awarded the OBE in 1983 and was made a life peer by John Major's Government in 1991: Baroness James of Holland Park.