Marjorie Orr

Author: Marjorie. Date: 24 Jul 2010

PD James, the crime thriller writer par excellence, does at first glance have an odd chart for a writer - with no Air and a sparsely aspected retrograde Mercury.
She hasn't had an easy life with her mother in a mental hospital by her mid-teens so she had to care for her two younger siblings. Then she married a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps, who suffered a mental breakdown after WW11 and ended up in a psychiatric hospital. So she had to support him and her two daughters. He died at 44, it is thought, by suicide though she's never said. Her writing had to fit round her civil service administration job which she kept up long after her books became successful.

Born on 3 August 1920 in Oxford she's a Sun Neptune Venus Jupiter in Leo. Leo is the entertainment planet and Neptune is creative. She does seem to have an almost visionary sense of writing her books. She says: 'I usually begin with a setting, which sparks off my imagination. I have a very strong response to what I think of as the spirit of a place.'

She also has a striking and rather ferocious Water Grand Trine of Mars in Scorpio trine Pluto trine Uranus which forms a Kite from the Uranus opposition Saturn in Virgo, making Saturn the driving planet. You can see where she gets her fascination with murdered bodies and evil from. Though all presented in such a refined upper-class Leonine way.
Guessing birth times is a mug's game but on a mid afternoon time, she'd have Mercury and all her Leo planets in the publishing 9th, a well organised, disciplined Saturn in the 10th - and those truly difficult Water planets in the 12th, 8th, 4th which makes sense.
She talks of her sense of detachment from life, always observing - ' With some of the most difficult things that have happened in my life, part of me stands aside and watches me deal with it. In that sense my life has been a continual narrative.' She seems to dislike psychological probing of any variety, never seeming to question why she has 'visions' of bloody corpses which often spark off her next book plot. That would fit with heavily populated 4/8/12th houses which she doesn't want to address at a personal level.
Mars Pluto Uranus plus Saturn is a difficult combination and it's as well she has acted it out through her novels. Had she been a man she could have been a killer. But clearly she carries an ever present sense of danger with her, always double locking doors, having grilles on windows in her home.
One interviewer commented that it was perhaps not a coincidence of timing that Commander Adam Dalgliesh, hero of her novels, entered her life shortly before her husband left it. And added, it is telling that she has found consolation in crime fiction, a genre that always offers resolution and creates moral order. Which would be a strongly emphasised Saturn (maybe in the 10th).
But it is odd that her Mercury is so unaspected except perhaps for a trine to her Pisces Moon.
Her Mercury is more prominent via quintile and septile aspects. Her workmanlike creative 5th Harmonic has an inspired Mercury Uranus conjunction with Mercury in a confident trine to Jupiter and in a creative sextile to Neptune Sun. Her 5th Harmonic is also marked by two Yods - of Mars sextile Saturn inconjunct Uranus (conj Mercury) and Sun (Neptune) sextile Uranus (Mercury) inconjunct Saturn. This gives a sense of the strain in her life which has found an outlet through her writing.
In her other creative 7th Harmonic Mercury is opposition Jupiter and sextile Uranus.
Not sure if I've anything cogent to say on Mercury retrograde - I never pay much attention to them to be honest, having one myself.
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