An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is a detective novel by the English writer P. D. James, published in 1972 by Faber and Faber in the United Kingdom and by Charles Scribner's Sons in the United States.

The book introduces Cordelia Gray, a private detective who is twenty-two when it opens and who inherits the Pryde Detective Agency when her partner Bernie Pryde, a former police officer, takes his own life in the office they share. He leaves her everything, including his unlicensed handgun, and she decides to keep the failing agency open out of gratitude rather than close it and look for other work. Her first client arrives almost immediately afterwards: Elizabeth Leaming, assistant to the scientist Sir Ronald Callender, whose son Mark has recently hanged himself. Cordelia travels to Cambridge, where Mark had left the university and taken a job as a gardener despite reasonable grades and the prospect of a considerable inheritance from his maternal grandfather, and she is asked simply to discover the reason for his death. She meets his student friends and finds more to suggest foul play than suicide.

Cordelia Gray appears in two of James's novels, this one and The Skull Beneath the Skin in 1982, and this is the book that introduces her. The novel is noted for introducing a new kind of female detective at the start of the feminist era.