The Late Scholar - Jill Paton Walsh

Jill Paton Walsh has written several novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey & Harriet Vane, the characters created & made famous by Dorothy L Sayers. The Late Scholar is the latest of these & it's a real treat for anyone whose favourite Sayers novel is Gaudy Night (as mine is).

It's the 1950s & Peter is now Duke of Denver, inheriting the title from his brother, Gerald. Among his many duties, Peter discovers that he is the Visitor of St Severin's College, Oxford. The Visitor of an Oxford college has mainly ceremonial duties - installing the Warden, for example. However, the Visitor can also be called upon to resolve disputes &, in this capacity, Peter has been asked to resolve a dispute which has turned very nasty indeed.

The College is in debt & the fellows are split on the course to pursue to pay off the debt & put the College on a better financial footing. The College owns a valuable Anglo-Saxon manuscript that may have been annotated by Alfred the Great. The fellows have an opportunity to purchase some farmland that has opportunities for development but to buy the land, they must sell the manuscript. The college is locked in a bitter dispute with the votes on either side evenly divided. The casting vote belongs to the warden of the College, who has disappeared. Then, the murders begin. Peter & Harriet are dismayed to realise that the methods used by the murderer have been suggested by the murders in Harriet's books which were, in turn, based upon some of Peter's cases. Harriet & Peter go to Oxford hoping to relive happier times but find themselves hunting a murderer.

I enjoyed The Late Scholar very much. Dorothy L Sayers is my favourite novelist of the Golden Age & I have reread her books many times. I've also enjoyed all of Jill Paton Walsh's continuations & new novels as she obviously admires Sayers & has an immense fondness for the characters. There are many echoes of Gaudy Night in this book & Miss Lydgate & the Warden of Shrewsbury have cameos as well as favourite characters from the Wimsey novels - Bunter, of course, Uncle Matthew & the Dowager Duchess, a little frailer but still as loquacious as ever.

The novel isn't just a wallow in nostalgia, though. The plot is satisfyingly full of clues & possible suspects as well as the obligatory red herrings. I especially enjoyed the discussions about the authenticity of the manuscript & its annotations (Bunter's photographic skills come in handy, here) & the young scholar Jackson whose enthusiasm for the manuscript is based on his hopes of basing his career on studying it. The dons are a mixture of the noble & the venal & the atmosphere of Oxford is as seductive as ever. I'm not usually a fan of authors adapting or continuing the series of others but I think this is the exception. Jill Paton Walsh has done a fine job & fans of Peter & Harriet are in for a treat.

The Attenbury Emeralds - Jill Paton Walsh

A new Lord Peter Wimsey novel, what a treat! Jill Paton Walsh has successfully completed a couple of manuscripts left by Dorothy L Sayers & now she has created a completely new story using Sayers’s familiar characters. The previous Wimsey story, A Presumption of Death, was set during WWII. Now, in The Attenbury Emeralds, it’s 1951. Peter Wimsey is 60, still blissfully happy with Harriet, his detective writing wife. They have three sons, live in London & still own the country house, Talboys, that Peter bought for Harriet as a wedding present & where they spent their honeymoon in Busman’s Honeymoon. Peter’s mother, the Dowager Duchess, is still her inimitable self at 85. Bunter hasn’t changed a bit or grown a day older & lives in with his wife, Hope, & son Peter, known as PB.

Peter is reminded of his first case, the disappearance of the Attenbury emeralds, by the obituary of Lord Attenbury. It was 1921, Wimsey had returned from the trenches in a nervous mental state & the house party at the Attenburys was to be his first foray into Society. The Attenburys were family friends & it seemed to be the perfect opportunity to test the extent of Wimsey’s recovery. The occasion for the house party was the announcement of the engagement of the eldest daughter, Charlotte, to Reggie Northerby. At dinner on the first evening, Charlotte was to wear the family jewels, a suite of emeralds with an enormous square-cut emerald as the centrepiece. The emerald could be worn as part of a necklace or as a tiara & had a Persian inscription on the back. The Attenburys are surprised to receive a visit from Mr Nandine Osmanthus, an envoy from an Indian Maharaja wanting to buy the emerald. The Maharaja owned the pair of this one & Wimsey sees the jewel, almost identical to the Attenbury’s emerald except for the inscription on the back. Lord Attenbury refuses to sell & sends Osmanthus off pretty smartly.

That night, when Charlotte goes to her room to dress for dinner, she discovers the emerald is missing. She appears at dinner wearing the paste replica of the jewels that was kept in the house as the real emeralds were kept at the bank & only brought out on special occasions. But, the theft can’t be kept secret & Wimsey begins investigating, hindered by heavy-footed Inspector Sugg & helped by Charles Parker, later an Inspector at Scotland Yard & brother-in-law of Peter. Peter eventually tracks the jewel down to a pawnbroker & discovers that Reggie Northerby had pawned it. Charlotte breaks her engagement but Northerby isn’t prosecuted for the theft & everything seems to have been successfully hushed up.

A few days after Wimsey & Bunter have told Harriet the story, the present Lord Attenbury, grandson of the old Lord, appears asking for Peter’s help. The authenticity of the emerald in the bank has been questioned. Attenbury is desperate to sell the emerald to save the family home but nothing can be done until the disputed provenance is settled. Peter agrees to investigate as someone has turned up claiming that the emerald in the Attenbury’s bank is not their emerald & can prove it. The emerald is certainly authentic but how could it have been swapped for another? Is this the Maharaja’s emerald that Peter saw all those years ago? There was no opportunity for Mr Osmanthus to have swapped the stones & the emerald has only been out of the vault a few times since.

Peter follows the trail back over the years, talking to the family & anyone else who had access to the jewel. He discovers some accidental deaths that now seem less accidental & more sinister. Then he discovers that there were originally three emeralds & the Maharaja will do anything to reunite them.

This is a wonderful mystery story. I loved meeting up with Peter, Harriet, Bunter, Charles Parker, the Duke of Denver & his snobbish Duchess. Jill Paton Walsh has immersed herself in Dorothy L Sayers’s work & doesn’t strike a wrong note throughout. Peter & Harriet trade quotations & sleuth as energetically as they ever did. This is a real treat for fans of the Wimsey stories who have read the series over & over again (as I have) & are thrilled to have a new story to enjoy.

This is my last post for 2010. Happy New Year to everyone who visits the blog. I'll be back tomorrow with some reflections on my first year as a blogger & some reading resolutions for 2011.

Death of an Expert Witness - P D James

P D James has just celebrated her 90th birthday and, as she is one of my favourite mystery writers, I thought I should celebrate too. I’ve reread Death of an Expert Witness and, as it’s been many years since I read it, it was just like reading a new book as I’d forgotten all the details. Death of an Expert Witness was published in 1977. P D James was a well-established writer by this time. Her first novel, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962 & her latest novel, The Private Patient, was published in 2008. I hope it won’t be the last, although there was certainly an elegiac feel about it. Lots of loose ends in the personal & professional life of her detective, Adam Dalgliesh, were tied up & it was a fitting end to the series if it is the end.

Adam Dalgliesh is one of the most enigmatic detectives in crime fiction. Like all the best detectives – Wexford, Poirot, Jane Marple – he arrived on the scene fully formed & has aged so slowly that he seems scarcely older in the latest book than he did in Death of an Expert Witness, published over 30 years before. Dalgliesh grew up in a Norfolk rectory; lost his wife & only child in childbirth just before the first book was written; has had several unsatisfactory relationships since but has only recently met the right woman, Emma Lavenham, proposed to her & been accepted. He is also a poet & this only adds to his air of mystery & detachment.

P D James is the heir of the great Golden Age writers, especially Dorothy L Sayers, who she greatly admires. I have a BBC audio production of Gaudy Night & at the end of the story, there’s an interview with P D James & Jill Paton Walsh, a novelist who has written continuations of some of the Wimsey novels. She has a new book coming out very soon, The Attenbury Emeralds, that I’m looking forward to reading. The interviewer was quite out of her depth, obviously knew very little about Sayers, but James & Paton Walsh were marvellous in their depth of knowledge & their enthusiasm for Sayers as a woman & for her work. That knowledge & enthusiasm for the Golden Age conventions of mystery fiction is obvious in her work.

P D James works within the conventions of the traditional murder mystery. Her books often have a closed circle of suspects like the stately home mysteries of the 30s. The locations are closed communities such as religious institutions, schools, hospitals, legal chambers or a publishing house. In Death of an Expert Witness, it’s a forensic laboratory in the fens of Norfolk. Place is very important to James. She has said that her books often begin with a place, a landscape. She builds up a picture of a group of people. Murder shockingly intrudes on the lives of the characters & Dalgliesh & his team must bring order out of chaos. In Death of an Expert Witness the first 50pp introduce the reader to the scientists, pathologists, police officers & clerical staff of the Hoggatt’s Forensic Science lab. Edwin Lorrimer, the Senior Biologist, is a stern, secretive man. He was overlooked for the post of Director of the lab, he’s tormented by the end of a love affair & he is unforgiving in his treatment of any of his staff who can’t meet his high professional standards. When he is murdered in his laboratory there are many suspects & Dalgliesh needs all his skill to discover which of these people was driven to murder.

Much as I enjoy a good murder, I think my favourite book by P D James isn’t a murder mystery at all. In 1999, she published Time to be in Earnest, a diary of her 77th year. I found this book fascinating. I love diaries & letters but this was more than just a diary. It’s the closest thing to a memoir or autobiography we’re likely to get from P D James. She knew she was writing for publication & so she uses the diary to look back over her life. She talks about her childhood, her marriage, her work in various government jobs, all of which gave her valuable material for her books & her thoughts about life in Britain in the 1990s. She talks about her favourite writers, how & why she writes, her long relationship with her publishers & agents, all the minutiae of a writer’s life. She is also an incredibly busy woman, attending meetings & events connected with her work for the Society of Authors, the BBC, House of Lords & the Church of England.

I love reading about detective fiction as much as I enjoy reading the novels themselves. P D James wrote a wonderful book last year called Talking About Detective Fiction. It was written to raise funds for Oxford’s Bodleian Library. This little book, only 150pp, is a history of the detective novel with special emphasis on the writers James most admires. The core of the book for me was her discussion of the four great women writers of the Golden Age – Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham & Ngaio Marsh. She feels an obvious affinity with these writers & has an appreciation of their strengths & the appeal they had in their own time & analyses the influence they’ve had on the writers who came after them. If you want a concise history of the best detective fiction of the last century, there could be no better guide than P D James.