It was on another blog that I wrote about novels being finished or continued after the original authors' deaths. In particular I discussed other hands producing stories about Sherlock Holmes (and other characters in the canon) or Nero Wolfe. On the whole I was not positive about the development for several reasons, carefully enumerated.
The one exception was the Lord Peter Wimsey saga with Jill Paton Walsh completing Thrones, Dominations, which Dorothy L. Sayers had abandoned after six chapters. This is what I wrote at the time:
Ms Paton Walsh is a writer of detective novels herself (as well as other literature) and her plots are usually infuriatingly sloppy. They work well until one realizes that the ages of characters do not correspond to the time that has elapsed or that certain developments are inherently unlikely in the social and geographic settings given.That needs some correcting. With one or two exceptions, the plots of the Sayers novels work quite well, indeed, considerably better than those of Jill Paton Walsh's about the likeable Cambridge nurse Imogen Quy.
Her Lord Peter is not only credible in Sayers’s terms but is actually a more appealing person as she cannot quite recreate the snobbery of the original novels and has not fallen in love with the character. Her Harriet is also more likeable than the original, who steadily becomes more infuriating through the novels till one feels like throwing the book, specifically “Gaudy Night” out of the window. (But I didn’t.)
The plot of “Thrones, Dominations”, on the other hand, is silly even by the Wimsey saga standards.
Subsequently we had A Presumption of Death, the story of Lord and Lady Peter Wimsey and many others, including people we had first met in Busman's Honeymoon, during the Battle of Britain. The novel's starting point was a series of letters, supposedly from members of the Wimsey-Delagardie family and their various connections, that Sayers had published in The Spectator through late 1939 and early 1940.
While the main theme of the novel is the way the various people learn to cope during the war with all its social and economic stresses, there is a good plot as well. It involves murder, wartime sexual mores, espionage and disinformation.
On the whole it works well. People develop naturally though there is the usual infuriating lack of information why some characters, such as Harriet's invaluable lady's maid, Mango, have disappeared. Perhaps she joined the WRENs. Perhaps she has been killed in the bombing. Perhaps she is in London, driving an ambulance. Why don't we know?
Now Ms Paton Walsh has gone one further and written a completely new novel about Dorothy L. Sayers's characters though she does refer very cleverly back to hints and comments in the original novels as well as the less well known short stories. The Attenbury Emeralds starts with the news that old Lord Attenbury has died and this prompts Harriet's question about her husband's first case. He proceeds to tell her all about it with Bunter's help and, in the process, elucidates why people refer sometimes to the Attenbury emeralds and sometimes to the Attenbury diamonds. There were really two cases and the second one involved him questioning what exactly is in the Woolsack, which in turn prompted the Lord Chancellor to explore and to find the Marchioness of Writtle's diamonds as mentioned in the second of the collection of short stories in Lord Peter Views The Body, entitled The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question.
Now Ms Paton Walsh has gone one further and written a completely new novel about Dorothy L. Sayers's characters though she does refer very cleverly back to hints and comments in the original novels as well as the less well known short stories. The Attenbury Emeralds starts with the news that old Lord Attenbury has died and this prompts Harriet's question about her husband's first case. He proceeds to tell her all about it with Bunter's help and, in the process, elucidates why people refer sometimes to the Attenbury emeralds and sometimes to the Attenbury diamonds. There were really two cases and the second one involved him questioning what exactly is in the Woolsack, which in turn prompted the Lord Chancellor to explore and to find the Marchioness of Writtle's diamonds as mentioned in the second of the collection of short stories in Lord Peter Views The Body, entitled The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question.
We also find out when and how Lord Peter met and first clashed with Inspector Sugg, how he and the then Detective Sergeant Charles Parker took to each other immediately and the unsurprising fact that Salcombe Hardy was permanently neither drunk nor sober even in 1921.
It can now be said with some justification that Lord Peter, Harriet, Bunter et al are as much Jill Paton Walsh's characters as they are Dorothy L. Sayers's. One cannot help wondering whether that is a good thing. After all, the Wimsey saga was not like the Sexton Blake saga, which was written by many hands from the very beginning. It was created by one author with her own talents and interests. Would she have liked somebody else imposing their own ideas on her characters?
It can now be said with some justification that Lord Peter, Harriet, Bunter et al are as much Jill Paton Walsh's characters as they are Dorothy L. Sayers's. One cannot help wondering whether that is a good thing. After all, the Wimsey saga was not like the Sexton Blake saga, which was written by many hands from the very beginning. It was created by one author with her own talents and interests. Would she have liked somebody else imposing their own ideas on her characters?
On the whole the characters develop well and adjust to the post-war situation credibly though one would like to know how that big house in Audley Square is run in the conditions of 1951 with, apparently, just two live-in servants. In a way Ms Paton Walsh has it easier than most of those who write about others' characters in that Sayers had made them change and grow as well. Lord Peter, Harriet, Lady Mary and, to some extent, Charles Parker, are very different towards the end of the original saga from what they were at the beginning. Bunter does not exactly develop but we constantly find out new things about him, so the idea that by 1951 he has decided to spend his afternoons off teaching photography in a WEA college is not really surprising. In any case, he had acquired a wife, Hope, a professional photographer, in Thrones, Dominations and is the proud father of a son, Peter, in A Presumption of Death.
Unfortunately, the Duke does not really appear, despite the fact that he had become quite an interesting personality in the previous novel but there are other good things. That tedious old roué, uncle Paul Delagardie, seems to have been discarded completely and the Dowager Duchess, whose boring, silly, nasty and snobbish ramblings I find completely dull, now produces fewer of them, partly because of her age and partly because there are people around who will intimate to her that she is not the most enchanting person in the world.
There is a good deal of entertainment to be had from the slight tension between the more egalitarian post-war ideas evinced by the Wimseys and the younger generation of the four boys and Bunter's determination to keep to the old standards with only the slightest of relaxations. He envisages his son going to university (and one must admit, young PB, as he is called, seems to be a chip off the old block) but deplores it when the lad becomes socially presumptious. On the other hand, he does not seem to mind his son being at Eton, whose not inconsiderable fees are, presumably, paid by Wimsey. Or has young Peter Bunter a full scholarship? One cannot help feeling that Sayers, who was very well aware of the importance of money, would have enlightened the reader.
Lord Peter has completely lost his silly-ass mannerisms in speech though that had happened to a great extent in the late Sayers and, certainly, in Thrones, Dominations. He is sixty by the time of the latest novel so Woosterisms would sit ill even if they might have hidden a far deeper nature. As against that, I rather miss his and Harriet's habit of parrying quotations. This could be a sign of the two of them becoming tediously middle-aged or it could be a sign of different generations of detective story writers' attitude to the casual display of literary knowledge. Of course, many readers found that rather tedious.
This brings me to the whole question of language. Some reviewers praised Jill Paton Walsh's language either because it was worthy of Dorothy L. Sayers or because it was so much of the right period or both. I think it is neither, though it is actually good enough. Ms Paton Walsh is an excellent writer but she is no Ms Sayers despite the latter's irritating habits. Apart from the literary quotations and references, what is missing is irony. Some of Sayers's descriptions even of Lord Peter at times are very funny. I do not recall a single amusing or witty moment in the three Paton Walsh novels though my memory of the first one may not be as good as it ought to be.
Nor do I consider the slang and colloquialism of The Attenbury Emeralds to be accurate. Both belong to the early twenty-first rather than the mid-twentieth century. The idea of a well brought up young boy like Bredon Wimsey exploding with "Christ!" in front of his parents on learning that he will now be Viscount Saint-George in 1951 is unthinkable. It is equally unthinkable that unimportant matters like the war and the Labour government, which is, in fact, a matter of history (or near enough) by the time the main action of the book takes place, could have resulted in either of the Wimseys forgetting the difference between 'who' and 'whom' or using 'okay' quite as often as they seem to.
Then there is the usual Paton Walsh sloppiness about dates and ages. Bredon Wimsey is described as being sixteen (an important age for a young boy), which he cannot be. As Bernard Palmer points out in his highly entertaining collection of essays, Blue Blood on the Trail, Bredon Delagardie Peter Wimsey, was born on October 15, 1936, so in the autumn of 1951 he was only just 15, if that, whereas he had been calling Bunter Mervyn (which, in itself, would be highly unlikely in 1951 unless the lad was self-consciously Red, for which there is no evidence) for some time. Peter Bunter is even younger, having been born in December 1937. On the other hand, the second son, Roger, was born in 1938, so by the time of The Attenbury Emeralds he ought to have followed his elder brother to Eton. In fact, Jill Paton Walsh not only gets muddled with ages (though only by a year or so), she also transposes the two younger sons. In the short story Talboys, written in 1942 but not published for another thirty years, it is quite clear that Paul is the baby, hardly a year old, obviously the offspring of the Wimseys' reunion when Peter returns from his mission somewhere in Europe in 1940. In The Attenbury Emeralds Paul is the middle son and Roger is the youngest.
There is also a problem with Freddy Arbuthnot, an amiable ass in the canon with a splendid grasp of financial matters. In The Attenbury Emeralds he is shown to be rather smart and intelligent. One could argue that being good at finance, getting through the war and, above all, being married to Rachel Levy as was would have made the silliest man smart but Freddy is shown to be smart back in the dear old days of the Attenbury jewel theft, which clashes with descriptions in Whose Body? and Clouds of Witness.
Details, details, I hear readers cry. Stop harping on details. Well, maybe, but details matter, especially, as I said above, in the Wimsey saga that Ms Paton Walsh has taken over and made her own.
The plot, on the other hand, is not a mere detail. It is truly silly. The fleshing out of the "original" case or cases by Ms Paton Walsh is very good and stands beside anything that Ms Sayers had written. But there is not enough there so many developments have to be added to turn the crime into a continuous thirty year one, dotted about with various murders, with no rational aim in sight.
At the end, Lord Peter inherits the dukedom. Clearly, though there is some disagreement on the matter, as Bernard Palmer discusses in chapter 1 of his book, Ms Paton Walsh accepts that Sayers's intention was that Viscount Saint-George, so prominent in Gaudy Night, would be killed during the Battle of Britain. There does seem to be something of an inevitability about that. (The shadowy younger sister, Lady Winifred, continues to be just that, not appearing even for her father's funeral.)
So Peter is now the Duke of Denver, Harriet is the Duchess (and she means to be a good duchess), Bredon Hall is being rebuilt on the basis of the Elizabethan original, uncovered after a fire, and the saga is completed. Or is it? There is a discussion between Peter and Harriet in which they agree that they will remain Lord Peter and Harriet Vane for the purposes of detection and novel writing even though they are now the Duke and Duchess of Denver. I can't be sure but I think there will be other cases. Perhaps, something threatens to go horribly wrong just before the coronation of Elizabeth II and ..... Well, we shall see.
0 comments