‘The Stuart Larkin Lectures’: text of a series of lectures delivered on three consecutive days by P D James in Toronto in 1986. The text of the first lecture sets out her intentions for all three lectures:
1) to attempt some definitions and then survey the history of the detective novel;
2) to describe how she herself set out on the task of writing the modern mystery;
3) to discuss some of the reasons why the detective continues to exert a hold on the imagination and an attempt to explain some of the moral, ethical, psychological and theological aspects of the genre.
The first page in the file is annotated with the word ‘Incomplete’. The file appears to contain several drafts of each lecture, all typescript with handwritten annotations.