The house where DCI Dalgliesh solved his first murder: Crime novelist PD James' west London home is on the market for £2.5million

Mail on sunday 22 october 2016

Anyone who has dreams of becoming a bestselling crime novelist might take inspiration from the house where author P. D. James wrote her early Adam Dalgliesh novels.

The poetry-writing New Scotland Yard detective – who was played by Roy Marsden on ITV in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently by Martin Shaw for the BBC – was dreamt up by the writer while she was living in this three-bedroom house in Kensington, West London, in the early 1960s.

The current owner, Donald Cameron, 70, a retired telecommunications executive, bought the house from James – who died two years ago – in 1983, and they became friends. Donald says that he got to know James and her working practices fairly well.

She wrote in the study here. There was a lino floor and a little walnut desk which she took with her because she said it brought her luck.’

When James, whose real name was Phyllis White, started writing the Adam Dalgliesh novels, she was working as a civil servant and lived in the house with her two daughters. ‘Her husband never really recovered from the war,’ Donald says. 

Ernest White was in a psychiatric institution and the family relied on Phyllis’s income as a civil servant before her writing took off.

‘She typed on a Remington typewriter and she used to write her novels for two hours before work and two hours after work,’ Donald says. 

She used an alias because she would have been breaking her contract with the Civil Service if she had used her own name. Phyllis Dorothy James was in fact her maiden name.

‘Phyllis was here when I came to see the house,’ Donald says. ‘I didn’t know who she was but we hit it off, just like that. I made an offer on the house, which fell through, but six months later she rang me. She was very direct, and she said, “I liked you, and I’d love you to have the house if you would still like to buy it.” 

'She had sold film rights to her books by that stage and her advisers told her to invest in property, so she bought a house on Holland Park Avenue.

‘She gave me her key fob, which said “Phyllis” on it, and she said that had brought her luck too,’ says Donald. Having lived in the property for more than 30 years, Donald says: ‘This house has worked perfectly for me, and I like the area, Hillgate Village. 

'The lifestyle is what I’d call cafe society – the cinemas and restaurants and that whole infrastructure has remained the same.’

However, he adds: ‘At the moment, the area is going through a churn, where older people are dying or moving on and new people are moving in. It’s become a lot less, let’s say, raffish than it used to be.

‘Miss Whiplash used to live round here and now Lily Allen has bought the house opposite me, so we’ve got that sort of change.’

The area has long had changing fortunes. When the house was built, in 1837, it had links with nearby Kensington Palace and the palace’s chief bricklayer lived there. 

Then the area took a downturn. In James’s 1986 novel A Taste For Death, she quoted a character as saying: ‘His folk used to live in Hillgate Village in the old days. Proper little slum it was, when his grandad was alive. A hundred and sixty thousand they’re asking for the houses now.’

Thirty years on and they’re asking £2.5 million for them – the price put on Donald’s home by estate agents Marsh & Parsons.

Donald is downsizing. ‘I have a house in Cape Town where I want to spend winter, and you can’t leave these houses for months at a time,’ he explains.

Rose Holden from Marsh & Parsons says: ‘Hillgate Village has a lovely feel with a variety of restaurants and pubs along with very good schools.’