Murder, times 3

Knopf, 415 pp., $25.95

Implicit from the beginning of a P. D. James mystery is the promise of escape into a self-contained universe of eccentric villains, described in literate prose, sprinkled with enough deliciously British details to satisfy even the most diehard Anglophile, and presided over by an aloof yet sensitive poet-detective. James's latest, "The Murder Room," is a promise kept.

The contained universe this time out is the Dupayne, a London museum dedicated to the interwar years of 1919 to 1938. Small but comprehensive, the museum has some good pictures, first editions, holographs and an eponymous Murder Room, set up to prove the founder's theory that murder is a paradigm of its age. Visiting the museum for the first time, Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard is intrigued by the theory as well as by the room itself as he examines the exhibits of several notorious crimes. (James tells us in an author's note that while the museum is fictitious, the crimes are not.) There are photographs of Edith Thompson, who is said to have put ground electric light bulbs in her husband Percy's porridge. There are reports of Julia Wallace, battered to death in a frenzied attack and left for dead under her bloodied mackintosh. And there's the actual trunk, of the Brighton Trunk Murder of 1934, into which Tony Mancini, a 26-year-old waiter and convicted thief, stuffed the body of his prostitute mistress, Violette Kaye.

After this macabre yet genial visit, Dalgliesh is called back to the museum within weeks when it becomes the scene of a contemporary yet no less grisly murder. One of the trustees of the museum has been set alight and burned to death in his beloved Jaguar in a garage on museum grounds.

Peculiar suspects abound. At first glance, the victim, easily as cool and aloof as Dalgliesh, appears to be unloved and loveless, distant from his ne'er-do-well daughter, Sarah, and his siblings, Max and Caroline, both of whom are desperate to keep the museum running against their brother's wishes. Shutting down the museum would eject Caroline, a part-time headmistress of a tony girls' school, from her flat and would eliminate any kind of meaningful life for Max, who has just been retired from a disappointing career in the civil service. It would as well be the last nail in the coffin of James Calder-Hale, curator of the museum, who has just been told that his cancer is terminal, and it would put the earnestly unattractive if administratively efficient Muriel Godby (a.k.a. "Ghastly Godby") out of work. Tally Clutton, housekeeper at the Dupayne, would also suffer: Her cottage, perched at the edge of Hampstead Heath, is a perk of the job.

While James generally sticks to the mystery rule book, we can count on her to avoid presenting the usual suspects as stereotypical bits of cardboard. They have lives, mostly sad, and believable motivations: Each has a fiefdom to protect. And while the museum might provide the setting so necessary to cozy British detective fiction, the crimes themselves are appalling. There is nothing charming about the victim of the petrol-induced fire in the garage ("The charred face, the features obliterated, was turned towards him and the whole head, black as a spent match, looked unnaturally small.") nor of the second murder victim, a young woman and former student at Swathlings, the girls' school of which Caroline Dupayne is headmistress. The young woman is found strangled and stuffed into the very same trunk on exhibit in the Murder Room into which the body of the prostitute, Violette Kaye, was once packed. Though the former student's body is strewn with violets, suggesting a copycat murder, "the stench rose into the room, overpowering as a gas. Kate, at the back of the group, had only a glimpse of a hunched torso and a spread of yellow hair before Muriel's hands fell from the lid and it dropped back with a low clang." Only the attack on the third victim suggests a sanitized crime in the Agatha Christie mode. "She had half turned when the iron bar crashed down and she fell onto the carpet, her head within a foot of the gas fire, the mackintosh still round her shoulders." James reminds us, however, that we are very much in the less-sanitized present when we discover that Caroline's flat in the museum doubled as a sex club, a detail that rattles.

James's books largely succeed as a bridge between the murder mystery genre and literature. Petty jealousies, great love, and the desire to leave one's mark on history -- the stuff of Shakespeare, actually -- are brought to light under Dalgliesh's sharp eye; and the prose often rises above the merely competent ("Nellie was at least three inches taller [than her husband], pale-skinned and flat-chested, and wore her fading blonde hair curled in plaits on each side of her head like earphones"). Perhaps only the sensitive nature of the detective wearies this time around. When Dalgliesh first appeared in the series, the detective-as-poet was intriguing. Now, however, the conceit seems stale, particularly when Dalgliesh exhibits symptoms of a wimpish nature in regards to Emma Lavenham, the love of his life and a lecturer in English literature at Cambridge. The career-crossed lovers have difficulty in effecting their trysts: He is too often called away to a crime; she has responsibilities at the university. As a result, the affair lacks spark ("They phoned each other as seldom as possible. . . . He found it both too frustrating and anxiety-producing. . . . There was always the worry that the timing of his call might be inconvenient."). One wishes that James would give her leading man a bit more bite, a tad more muscle, an admittedly minor request of this enormously appealing novelist.

Anita Shreve's most recent novel is "All He Ever Wanted."