Certainly, James never “took less trouble” with the literary aspects of her work: this is one of the things that makes her fiction so engaging. Her 1967 novel Unnatural Causes begins with a sentence practically guaranteed to hook its readers (and one I can recall vividly some 25 years or more after my first encounter with the book): “The corpse without hands lay in the bottom of a small sailing dinghy drifting just within sight of the Suffolk coast.” Yet that same novel, cheekily about the murder of a crime writer, contains plentiful metafictional commentary on the practice of writing and the nature of fiction: “I resent the way in which fictional detectives can arrest their man and get a full confession gratis on evidence which wouldn’t justify me in applying for a warrant,” says Adam Dalgliesh, James’s fictional policeman, and most enduring literary creation. “I wish real-life murderers panicked that easily.”

Nor was James afraid to indulge in philosophical – some might say spiritual – rumination in the course of her mysteries. Dalgliesh’s meditation on mortality from 1989’s Devices and Desires would sit comfortably in the context of a more straightforward, self-consciously “literary” novel:

In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life. And the fear of death, however irrational, was surely natural, whether one thought of it as annihilation or as a rite of passage. Every cell in the body was programmed for life; all healthy creatures clung to life until their last breath. How hard to accept, and yet how comforting, was the gradual realization that the universal enemy might come at last as a friend.

Most impressive about passages like this is that they do not appear intrusive, as though some authorial sensibility is forcing her way into the minds and mouths of the characters. Rather, James’s skill as a writer allowed her to combine plot and character, incident and theme in ways that made the transitions appear seamless.

Nor did she confine her talents exclusively to the detective genre. Her great 1992 work of dystopian speculative fiction, The Children of Men, was turned into an equally impressive film by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón in 2006. And her 2011 book, Death Comes to Pemberley, currently sitting on international bestseller lists as the result of a well-received television serial adaptation, is a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (albeit with a murder mystery attached).

But it is her Inspector Adam Dalgliesh series of mysteries that she will be most remembered for. Moody, thoughtful, and impeccably plotted, these novels have earned their author her place at the pinnacle of English detective fiction. Her passing marks the end of a long and extraordinary career that transcended the boundaries of the genre she chose as her métier.

“We do not expect popular literature to be great literature,” James wrote at the end of Talking About Detective Fiction, “but fiction which provides excitement, mystery, and humour also ministers to essential human needs. We can honour and celebrate the genius which produced Middlemarch, War and Peace, and Ulysses without devaluing Treasure Island, The Moonstone, and The Inimitable Jeeves.” Amen, Ms. James, and safe travels.