Innocent Blood, the psychological crime novel by PD James, is one of my firm favourites.
The story concerns some of my deepest interests - the question of nature and nurture and family relationships, and the impact of murder on the families of not just the victims but also the murderer.
It was published in 1980, soon after the introduction of legislation that allowed children who were adopted to obtain - after counselling - a copy of their original birth certificate.
Even thought it was published so long ago, I’m going to avoid spoilers by focusing almost entirely on the first chapter, and then talking in a personal way about why it made such a deep impression in me.
The title, Innocent Blood, resonated with me. I grew up hearing the phrase “Blood is thicker than water”, intended to explain why I didn’t really belong. I was never adopted, but I was very young when my parents separated and divorced. My father fought for custody and I was only just two years old when he married my stepmother.
For some inexplicable reason they thought it best to deny my mother access, and to pretend my stepmother was my ‘real’ mother. All my previous belongings were destroyed. My name was changed. The wedding photographs which featured me, centre stage, were hidden away. And they obtained a short version of my birth certificate, which didn’t mention my parents. When I married, I had to apply for a copy of the real thing - thus finding out my birth mother’s maiden name.
When I read Innocent Blood, in the early 80s, I was transfixed by Philippa’s story. So like my own, and yet so different.
In some ways, the novel had an impact on how I handled my own situation.
Chapter One
The very first chapter of the novel shows Philippa’s interview with the social worker, Miss Henderson. This is supposed to prepare her for the decision to look for her parents - or not. The whole chapter merits a closer reading than I have space for here - it really is a masterclass on what a first chapter should do.
It is written in close third person, so we see everything very much from Philippa’s point of view. Her judgement of Miss Henderson, and the shabby council interview room, reveals Philippa as a confident middle-class girl, who knows what she wants and rather resents having to deal with what she sees as pointless bureaucracy. Or is it just a facade of confidence?
We see how much effort she has put in to prepare for the meeting. There’s an emphasis on how self-conscious she is, which hints at an underlying anxiety. She has thought very deeply about how to dress - with “casual informality, the careful ambiguity about money or social class.” Alongside the smart casual ensemble, she deliberately signifies something entirely different, with her Victorian rings - “topaz, cornelian, peridot” and the “leather Italian bag”.
There’s a lot of backstory necessary, and (with one exception) it is very skilfully woven in to the tense exchange between Philippa and Miss Henderson, in a very natural way. It’s natural that a young woman who is intending to find her birth parents will be thinking very much about the past in these circumstances.
In the following paragraph we can see how she thinks she has come to terms to with her own story. She has made her lemonade from life’s lemons by celebrating a kind of freedom she thinks she has - not constrained by the influence of her birth family, or nature.
And fittingly for a crime novel, there are already some little clues secreted away, which an alert reader may notice in all the onslaught of characterisation and personal history.
"The advantage of remembering virtually nothing before her eighth birthday, the knowledge that she was illegitimate, meant that there was no phalanx of the living dead, no pious ancestor worship, no conditioned reflexes of thought to inhibit the creativity with which she presented herself to the world. What she aimed to achieve was singularity, an impression of intelligence, a look that could be spectacular, even eccentric, but never ordinary."
Philippa goes on to consider her adoptive father, renowned sociologist Maurice Palfrey. This gives us some idea of the nurture part of her story, signalled earlier with her jewellery and bag, and how conscious she is of how she presents herself. She has grown up with a father for whom this kind of analysis is his life’s work, so it is natural that she will imitate his approach - perhaps even suppressing her natural emotions, to impress him with how cool and rational she is.
Perhaps the only passage which might not work today is a long lecture from the social worker, on the Children’s Act.
"The Children Act 1975 made important changes in the law relating to access to birth records. It provides that adopted adults, that is people who are at least eighteen years old, may if they wish apply to the Registrar General for information which will lead them to the original record of their birth. When you were adopted you were given a new birth certificate, and the information which links your present name, Philippa Rose Palfrey, with your original birth certificate is kept by the Registrar General in confidential records. provided in a helpful and appropriate manner.”
Miss Henderson, monologue, in PD James’ Innocent Blood.
[the paragraph quoted above carries on almost forever…]
A personal aside
Reading this even now brings back my own memories. I was around sixteen when the relevant legislation was passed. I was sitting reading on the floor in the living room, leaning back against the sofa, when it was discussed on the TV news.
I was fascinated. I had often thought about finding my mother. Dreamed, even, that she might look for me. But I knew better than to let my family know I was interested. I probably continued to turn the pages of the book I was reading, while listening. I knew this didn’t apply to me : I had not been adopted. I certainly wouldn’t need counselling (I was just as certain as Philippa!). I didn’t plan to do anything soon, I was worried about hurting my father, especially - but the idea was already incubating at the back of mind.
Back to Chapter One, Innocent Blood.
Miss Henderson asks Philippa whether she has talked to her adoptive parents, and then why not. She also asks if Philippa just wants to know something about her birth parents, or if she intends to trace them.
‘I’m hoping to find out who I am. I don’t see the point of stopping at two names on a birth certificate. There may not even be two names. I know I’m illegitimate. The search may all come to nothing. I know that my mother is dead so I can’t trace her, and I may never find my father. But at least if I can find out who my mother was I may get a lead to him. He may be dead too, but I don’t think so. Somehow I’m certain that my father is alive.’
She sounds so certain, doesn’t she? Oh to be young again…
She quickly moves mentally into considering what she calls “her fantasies” and describes in detail one which she thinks of as almost religious. She was born in 1960, but it still has a Victorian setting, complete with her mother as a pretty blonde parlour-maid, with cap and streamers, in the rose garden waiting for her aristocratic father, dressed in full evening dress…
She has a whole series of fantasies about these imaginary creatures and we know with a sad inevitability, that the reality will prove disappointing.
This fantasy contrasts with Philippa’s matter-of-fact approach to questions about her adoptive parents. She doesn’t think they love her - but they suit. It’s comfortable. She seems faintly dismissive of her adoptive mother, in the ways she describes her. “She cooks” - and goes on to describe a woman who builds her life around catering in every way for husband and child.
She talks differently about her adoptive father - she’s not so dismissive. She wants to please him, and imagines he chose her because he wanted an intelligent child.
The ways she talks about the circumstances of her adoption show us that she has somehow woven together pieces of her origin story, as it were, with elements of fantasy. It’s a confection - a confabulation - and we know it’s foreshadowing some terrible revelation.
The chapter ends with these two paragraphs - which give the reader fair warning of how Philippa’s story will develop.
Miss Henderson warns her …
‘We all need our fantasies in order to live. Sometimes relinquishing them can be extraordinarily painful, not a rebirth into something exciting and new, but a kind of death.’
They shook hands, and Philippa, looking into her face for the first time with any real interest, seeing her for the first time as a woman, detected there a fleeting look which, had she not known better, she might have mistaken for pity."
In the following chapter, comes the first, terrible revelation. Everything Philippa thought she knew was wrong…
Her mother is still alive, but in prison.
I will pause there, to avoid more spoilers.
Nature and nurture in life and fiction
After reading Innocent Blood, it was a few years before I found the courage to trace my birth mother. My father died when I was University. I left home and married. And gradually I realised that if I wanted to know, I had to be the one to make contact. #
I’ve always been curious. It’s telling that it took me so long.
I knew my mother’s maiden name and so searched through the phone books in the library. People with that surname in the town I grew up would be likely related - I knew my mother had many siblings. I scribbled a dozen in my notebook. It took days for me to pluck up the courage to ring the first name on the list.
I explained who I was looking for, and a cautious female voice asked, “What for? Does she owe you money?”
I said, “No. She’s my mother.”
The woman, the stranger, burst into tears. “Elisabeth, is that you?” she asked. I said yes, although I’d been called Ann for decades. My auntie Margaret told me that my mother was living in Cyprus, but she took my phone number and said she was sure my mother would call me straight away.
It was a tense wait, and a tearful reunion. Lots of letters and exchanges of photographs followed, and then we went and spent Christmas with my new, old family. My mother, the man she left my father for, and four half siblings I had only vaguely known about.
Of course, like Philippa, I was certain of my ability to handle it. There was no legal requirement for me to have counselling, so I didn’t - not until much later.
In many ways it was a traumatic three weeks, with me in a strange fugue state. My family welcomed me, and there was plenty of warmth. But I didn’t know how to handle it. And I hadn’t the courage to ask my mother the questions I longed to ask. Why didn’t she stay in contact during my childhood. Why didn’t she ever look for me? She was quite fragile, and anyway, it seemed like a betrayal of my dad.
In other ways, there was lots of healing too. I grew up being told I had bad blood, that blood was thicker than water. My stepmother made it clear she had to watch me like a hawk, in case I turned out to be like my birth mother, as if she was some kind of witch crossed with a femme fatale.
I did discover I was very like my mother - warm, hot tempered but not bearing grudges, and simply… human. I had her impulsive temperament - which must have been quite a trial for my stepmother.
I am still amused that only then did I realise my mother’s family were Irish. I had no idea before that the references to my Irish temper were more than metaphorical!
Weirdly, considering I hadn’t seen her between the ages of two and twenty nine - I also shared lots of her body language.
Until this point I had somehow convinced myself that nurture was more important than nature. That any influence from my birth mother on who I was would be slight and superficial.
I am glad I was wrong
It took me a long time to rebalance my ideas and realise how much both contributed, and it has left me with a life long fascination with this theme.
The truth is out there, but it’s more complicated than we imagine
As a crime novel, Innocent Blood is superb. We feel as if the major twist in the story has been revealed at the beginning of the story (do read it!) - and yet by the end of the novel, everything we thought we knew has been turned inside out, upside down.
As in life, we only come to understand some things very gradually. It may feel like a slow uncovering - like an archaeologist with a patient trowel - only to turn into a sudden revelation, as a plough slicing through the layers of soil uncovers in an instant, a hoard which may be trash or treasure.
For me, the deeper truths came much later, when I started writing a memoir at the beginning of 2019.
I discovered that nearly everything I thought I knew about my early life was wrong - the date my mother left me and my father, the reason she agreed to give up access to me, and most of all why she didn’t come to look for me once I was grown up. My own fears that she hadn’t wanted me prevented me from finding out how much she had until years after she died.
I lost a little of the father I adored, and gained - too late - the knowledge that mother had loved me.
What can a writer learn from this novel?
Topical news stories can inspire brilliant fictions - but only if they deal with characters who have layers and depth and who we can come to care about.
The power of this story is that it’s not all about Philippa. We learn a lot about her mother and about the events around Philippa’s adoption. Not only is her mother not the person she imagined, neither is her adoptive father.
The other people affected by her mother’s crime also have a part to play, and the way all these different strands of the story collide makes for a compelling story.
The plot is brilliantly constructed, and the answers to the constant question, “What happens next?” are never simple.
I don’t know if PD James outlined her novels, but I find it hard to believe a story like this could be written any other way - even if the planning took place over several drafts.
For me a novel has often started with a character, but I believe Innocent Blood suggests we can just as well start with an idea, a social problem (or better, two that may collide) and then create a character who will be deeply affected by it.
So next time you are looking for inspiration, a good starting point might be something in the news which triggers your imagination, and see where that leads you.
Ann
If you would like some editorial help with your novel draft. please do get in touch and we can have a chat. Check out my Facebook Page, at The Accomplice and message me there for more details, or get in touch through my substack email.
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LINKS
As a crime writer, I am fascinated by the story of James Fallon - the man who studied psychopaths and then discovered he was one too. One aspect which is interesting is that he was brought up in a very loving family, and clearly his behaviour was mitigated by this - but not entirely, by his own account
The neuroscientist who discovered he was a psychopath
Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath
Nature vs nurture : Do genes influence our morals
So is it nature not nurture after all ? - Guardian piece about Robert Plomin
Ten Books about adopted children - Guardian
Jane Eyre has been a favourite since I was eleven. Jeannette Winterson’s memoir Why be Happy when you could be Normal is brilliant
Articles about PD James
A piece in the Guardian by Ruth Rendell (another favourite) talks about how important character and place were in her fiction
PD James: Any of the events in Phyllis’s books might have happened