author : Dorothy L. Sayers

Harriet Vane is on trial for poisoning her lover with arsenic. Lord Peter decides she is innocent, and sets out to prove it by finding the real murderer. He also decides he wants to marry Harriet, but has less success.

Harriet Vane discovers a fresh corpse in the middle of a deserted beach.

Harriet Vane retreats to her Oxford college to do some research, but the dons and students are being plagued by a Poison Pen. She calls in Lord Peter when things start to get violent.

Harriet and Lord Peter finally get married, but discover a corpse in their honeymoon cottage.

Contents

• Striding Folly. 1939

Of chess, murder, and a strange dream

• The Haunted Policeman. 1939

The birth of Peter and Harriet's first child, and a distressed policeman

• Talboys. 1972

(written in 1942) A story of stolen peaches, set around 1942

Dorothy Sayers started on her fifth Wimsey/Vane novel in the late 1930s, but never finished it. When the partial manuscript and notes came to light recently -- precisely how much material there was is not clear -- detective novelist Jill Paton Walsh was given the opportunity to finish it off.

This must have been a rather daunting opportunity: she ran the risk of having all the good bits attributed to Sayers, and any bad bits to herself. As an avid Wimsey/Vane fan who would give her eye teeth for the chance to read a new Sayers original, I did start reading this with some trepidation. But my fears were allayed: there are no obvious joins, the 1930s tone is just right, the well-known characters keep in character, and no new characters obtrude. Although the story gets off to a slow start establishing the background, once the body turns up, about a third of the way through, things soon settle down into the combination of detection and relationships that we know and love. There are various threads twining through the story: the detection itself, Harriet adapting to her new married life and status, the contrast of the Wimseys' and the Harwells' marriages, Harriet's own new detective novel, and the death of the old King (hence setting it firmly in 1936). Harriet and Peter discussing her new book and the differences between such fiction and the 'real' detection in which they are engaged gives opportunity for some interesting meta-commentary on detective fiction.

I don't think it is quite as good a detective novel as the others: I spotted the killer very early on, and I never spotted the culprit so soon in the previous books. (Then again, it is over twenty years since I have read a Sayers for the first time, so maybe the change is in me?) Also, it doesn't seem to me to have quite the depth or originality as the other Wimsey/Vane books -- but if Jill Paton Walsh doesn't exhibit her literary erudition as much as Sayers did, that's okay by me, as most if it went over my non-literary head anyway. There are a lot of references to incidents in those earlier books as well, as if to emphasise the legitimacy of this work. But despite these minor carpings, this is a good book: these are continuations of the same characters, and we get to see more of their lives, to see Peter and Harriet adapting to married life without compromising their integrity.

So I can say this book isn't quite as good as the originals, and yet still say without contradiction that it is definitely worth reading. Jill Paton Walsh should be congratulated for doing such a fine job.

During the early years of WWII, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote The Wimsey Papers, which appeared in the Spectator. Jill Paton Walsh has used these as the springboard for this new Wimsey/Vane novel: extracts of some appear in the book, and details in others are used to set the scene.

This is set in 1940, with Peter off on some dangerous secret intelligence mission, and Harriet at Talboys, with her own children, and their cousins. Inevitably, a murder occurs, and Superintendent Kirk enlists Harriet's help to solve it. Much of the book is about the day-to-day problems caused by the war, and the more serious horrors of people being killed, and of waiting for news about loved ones. The murder mystery is almost incidental.

This doesn't work so well for me as the previous "joint" effort. The detective plot is again a bit shaky (the clues are laid on with a trowel in places), and there are again those rather heavy-handed references to the earlier works. This time, though, it's not compensated for by sufficient character interaction: Peter doesn't turn up until about two thirds through. Partly that's due to the theme of the book: loved ones separated by circumstances of war -- yet as the complex relationship between Peter and Harriet is the main reason I read these books, it loses something for me. There are some interesting moments, however. (A particularly good piece is where Harriet is musing that one reason she wouldn't marry Peter was because of his money, but that she didn't get long to enjoy its benefits.) And it does quite well evoke the feeling of the early war years. Certainly the snippets of Sayers' own writing, in the form of those Spectator letters, work well.

1. November 17, 1939, p. 672.
2. November 24, 1939, p. 736.
3. December 1, 1939, p. 770.
4. December 8, 1939, p. 809.
5. December 15, 1939, p. 859.
6. December 22, 1939, p. 894.
7. December 29, 1939, p. 925. (About the Graf Spee)
8. January 5, 1940, p. 8.
9. January 12, 1940, p. 38.
10. January 19, 1940, p. 70.
11. January 26, 1940, p. 104.