There are few reading pleasures to compare with those of a well-crafted detective story. This means that there are few writers who have offered as much joy to her readers over many years as P. D. James. At the start of this week, in a grand dinner in the Great Hall at Christ Church, in the presence of HRH The Duke of Kent, Baroness James of Holland Park was presented with the first Honorary Fellowship of The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. It is impossible to think of a more appropriate recipient for this accolade.

Not least among her ‘qualifications’ is the fact that she was born in Oxford. She has this in common with a fellow crime writer she greatly admires, Dorothy L. Sayers, whose father was headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral Choir School (where a blue plaque records her birth). Unlike Sayers, who gave us Gaudy Night, P. D. James has not, I think, set any of her 18 novels here. The defining of Oxford in the public mind as a city of murder in modern times has largely been the work of Colin Dexter, who was sitting opposite her and the Dean of Christ Church, Christopher Lewis, at Monday’s dinner.

A generous speech in praise of Baroness James was given by the novelist and cultural commentator Melvyn Bragg. A fellow member of the House of Lords, he is a good friend whose understanding of her life and work was apparent in a South Bank Show programme he devoted to her some years ago..

He reminded us on Monday how she had built a career of enormous distinction, in the Civil Service as well as in literature, despite having lived with and through great distress. “Her mother’s confinement to mental hospital obliged Phyllis as a young girl to cope with running the family and later, after a terrible war and her husband’s mental anguish, once again she was called on to be the force of stability during tragedy. Here is surely the story of a woman who has come through.”

Embarking on her writing career, she had purposely avoided using the traumatic events of her own life in her first book. “These would be buried; deep stirrings, never still,” said Lord Bragg.

Reminding us that Phyllis Dorothy James White had chosen ‘PD’ from a variety of possible pen names because she said it was “the most enigmatic”, he said that in so doing she had joined a “robust and successful clan of the double-initialled”. These included DH, GK, PG, PJ, WH, JK, HG, MR, RK, EM, CS, WB and TS.

The last, T. S. Eliot, had “kyboshed the potential PD title Murder in the Cathedral, but compensated by becoming her first – and so far, after almost 50 years – her only publisher, at Faber&Faber”.

Her books, he said, could be appreciated as “part of a great stratum in literature from Edgar Allan Poe to Charles Dickens, to Wilkie Collins, Chesterton, Conan Doyle and on, and faithful to her predecessors Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and, most loved of all, Dorothy L. Sayers.

Baroness James’s delight in receiving the accolade on Monday was apparent in her beaming smiles during her speech.

She said: “Some moments in life are so joyous and special that one knows they will hold a place in memory as long as memory lasts. This is one of those. It is a tremendous privilege. I thank the board of the festival for instituting this fellowship. No award could be more welcome to me.

‘It tells me that I have succeeded in what 50 years ago I set out to achieve – to use a familiar form to say something about men and women, about the society in which we live and to be regarded as a serious novelist.

“I have tried to give pleasure. That’s what life is about, and that’s what this festival is about – the joy of reading and the joy of books.”