It's hard to know precisely how to grade a novel such as The Skull Beneath The Skin. James takes much of what she learned from composing twenty years of crime fiction and transplants these lessons onto Cordelia Gray, who is simply not as robust a creation as Adam Dalgliesh.

What we get is a largely satisfactory composition that never quite gels, because Cordelia feels like more of a bystander than an active participant in the novel; she is on an island when bad things happen on that island, and then worse things happen. The private detective of the era simply isn't as practical a character as an actual policeman, and Cordelia never quite makes her mark on the story.
Still, many of James' strengths come to the fore here, albeit writ small. As always, she provides an excellent sense of most of the important characters, and, given the "locked room" nature of the mystery, a firm sense of space. There are some very keenly realised moments but on the whole I'm not sold on Cordelia; why exactly is she there? How did things work out as they did? James has overcome most of her prudishness by this point but when she suggests carnal motives she's still entirely too coy.

The Skull Beneath The Skin is not exactly an exemplar of James' work, and it's baffling that this is the text that they choose to teach crime fiction in Australian schools. It's more than competent, but it has none of the elevation of spirit that her best work provides.