TWO deaths announced on the same day set me thinking about our reactions to the passing of famous people. One death affected me more than the other, although that was far from a universal reaction.

The two who died were polar opposites. One was an elderly writer and member of the House of Lords; the other a young cricketer who was making a name for himself when he was struck on the neck by a wayward bouncer.

It was more tragic that the Australian cricketer Phillip Hughes had died at the age of 25. After all, the crime writer PD James was 94 and had led a long and sometimes hard life. She was reported to have had a difficult childhood and later saw her husband confined to a psychiatric hospital after the war.

In the end she was seemingly content with her measured span, for she had achieved much, including writing some of the most highly regarded crime novels in English literature (and, yes, they definitely do count as literature). So while the death of Lady James was noted with muted sadness, a kind of sorrowful hysteria marked the tragically interrupted life of the young cricketer.

In general is a mystery to me why people give vent to outpourings about those they never knew or met. This emotional incontinence is sometimes traced to the death of Princess Diana, when all restraint was washed away in a blizzard of tears. And that, remember, was in the days before social media.

Nowadays, the ability to comment online and instantly has led to an exponential rise in this sort of thing, and those who rush to express themselves in the digital arena seem either incredibly vicious and petty or mawkishly sentimental – with no middle-ground.

The reaction to the death of Phillip Hughes followed this trend to a degree. One man, Paul Taylor, an IT worker from Sydney, marked the cricketer's death by tweeting a picture of a single cricket bat leaning against the porch of his home. This image caught fire and soon everyone was posing their own leaning-bat tributes to a man who had died so young, killed by a ball bowled by his great friend, Sean Abbott.

So, yes, this was the usual outpouring of grief from those who did not know the man in question; and, yes again, not behaviour I would not indulge in. For all that, the lonely bat did say much.

If life is to be measured in time spent on this earth, it might seem unfair to feel more upset by the death of an elderly woman than a young cricketer. Yet I have long been a fan of PD James and met her last autumn when she was in York to watch the filming of Death Comes To Pemberley, her murderous sequel to Pride And Prejudice.

I took along the hardback copy of the book I had given my wife for Christmas, and Lady James happily added her signature, saying: "You've got a signed first edition there."

She was very interesting during the Q&A session. The questions had to be asked through a BBC press person, as her hearing wasn't sharp, but her answers were sprightly smart.

I asked her why murder was such a popular genre. "I suppose it's because is kind of the ultimate crime," she said. "People talk about a fate worse that death but actually from the victim's point of view, what could be worse than death. There's something about murder that separates people who murder from the rest of us..."

Two years before that, PD James was honoured at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate. She brought the audience to its feet. She seemed tiny on stage, tearful, bewildered and grateful.

I read the books years ago, but now it must be time to return to those fine examples of detective fiction, her moral fables with their multi-layered plots and, in Adam Dalgliesh, one of the more thoughtful of fictional coppers – an acclaimed poet and a detective, an unlikely marriage of crime and rhyme, but a winning one.