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Summary
Summary
Sixty years after Dorothy L. Sayers began her unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey novel, "Thrones Dominations," Booker Prize finalist Jill Paton Walsh took on the challenge of completing the manuscript---with extraordinary success. "The transition is seamless," said the "San Francisco Chronicle"; "you cannot tell where Sayers leaves off and Walsh begins."
"Will Paton Walsh do it again?" wondered Ruth Rendell in London's "Sunday Times." "We must hope so."
Jill Paton Walsh fulfills those hopes in "A Presumption of Death." Although Sayers never began another Wimsey novel, she did leave clues. Drawing on "The Wimsey Papers," in which Sayers showed various members of the family coping with wartime conditions, Walsh has devised an irresistible story set in 1940, at the start of the Blitz in London.
Lord Peter is abroad on secret business for the Foreign Office, while Harriet Vane, now Lady Peter Wimsey, has taken their children to safety in the country. But war has followed them there---glamorous RAF pilots and even more glamorous land-girls scandalize the villagers, and the blackout makes the nighttime lanes as sinister as the back alleys of London. Daily life reminds them of the war so constantly that, when the village's first air-raid practice ends with a real body on the ground, it's almost a shock to hear the doctor declare that it was not enemy action, but plain, old-fashioned murder. Or was it?
At the request of the overstretched local police, Harriet reluctantly agrees to investigate. The mystery that unfolds is every bit as literate, ingenious, and compelling as the best of original Lord Peter Wimsey novels.
Author Notes
Dorothy Sayers's impressive reputation as a contemporary master of the classic detective story is eclipsed only by Agatha Christie's. Sayers was born in Oxford and attended Somerville College, where she received a B.A. in 1915 and an M.A. in 1920. During that period, Sayers worked as an instructor of modern languages at Hull High School for Girls in Yorkshire and as a reader for a publisher in Oxford. Her early literary work was in poetry; she published several volumes and served as an editor for the journal Oxford Poetry from 1917 to 1919. Sayers also worked as a copywriter for a major advertising firm in London. She was president of the Modern Language Association from 1939 to 1945 and of the Detection Club in the 1950s.
Around 1920 Sayers developed the idea for her detective hero Lord Peter Wimsey, and she soon published her first mystery, Whose Body? (1923), in which Lord Peter is introduced. For the next dozen or so years, Sayers wrote prolifically about Wimsey, creating in the process what many critics of the genre consider to be the finest detective novels in the English language. Perhaps her most famous Wimsey mystery was The Nine Tailors (1934). Although Sayers essentially followed the classic form in her detective fiction---a formula in which the plot assumes a greater importance than do the characters---Sayers maintained that a detective hero's greatness depended on how effectively the character was portrayed. All but one of Sayers's mysteries feature Lord Peter Wimsey. By the late 1930s, Sayers had apparently tired of writing detective fiction. She stated in 1947 that she would write no more mysteries, that she wrote detective fiction only when she was young and in need of money. Thus saying, Sayers turned her attention to her early loves, medieval and religious literature, spending her remaining years lecturing on and translating Dante (see Vol. 2).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her second Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane whodunit, Booker Prize finalist Walsh (Knowledge of Angels) does a far better job of honoring Sayers than she did in their first posthumous collaboration, Thrones, Dominations (1998). Walsh's starting point here is "The Wimsey Papers," a series of letters on home front conditions, ostensibly written by various members of the Wimsey family, which ran in the Spectator at the outset of WWII. Lord Peter himself is offstage for most of the novel, involved in some covert mission in Europe, leaving his wife to take care of their household. When a young Land Girl is found murdered during an air raid, the local superintendent enlists Harriet's aid. Harriet's traditional line of inquiry into possible spurned suitors is diverted when an eccentric and seemingly paranoid dentist discloses that the quiet, ordinary village of Paggleham is actually a nest of German spies. Despite Peter's diminished role, he remains a vital presence throughout, thanks to his place at the center of Harriet's thoughts. Should Walsh have no further original Sayers material to draw on, she seems perfectly suited to continue the series entirely on her own. (Mar. 27) Forecast: Though praised by the likes of Ruth Rendell and Joyce Carol Oates, Thrones, Dominations received mixed notices from Sayers purists. The favorable buzz on this one from the U.K.'s Dorothy L. Sayers Society augurs well for strong sales. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In 1939-40, a series of letters, ostensibly written by Dorothy L. Sayers' beloved characters, were published in The Spectator. Walsh has taken these letters and transformed them into an absolutely top-notch tale of what Lord Peter, Lady Harriet, and their extended families were doing at that time. Walsh captures voice and spirit and locale with vividness and pathos: Harriet is at Talboys with her two boys and three nieces and nephews; Peter and his gentleman's gentleman Bunter are abroad on a secret mission; war work, rationing, and billeting of children and soldiers mingle with the quotidian countryside life. How Harriet handles the incredible task of managing life, children, and estate in wartime is gracefully portrayed and fascinating. How much she misses Peter catches the heart, especially when a cipher is brought to her, upon which his safety depends, that only she can unravel. There is a murder during a practice air raid. Bunter returns, exhausted and alone. The older children struggle with a crystal radio set. Harriet focuses her fierce intelligence on writing up, for Peter, the myriad clues about the murdered woman, and when he returns, they find resolution in a most unexpected series of ways. The details about life in wartime Britain are fascinating and rich with the warmth of reality. Longtime Sayers devotees will find references to many earlier cases expertly woven through the text.--DeCandido, GraceAnne A. Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
In a series of letters to the Spectator over the winter of 1940, Sayers presented members of Lord Peter Wimsey's family discussing such morale-building issues as rationing and leadership. Taking her cue (and a little of her prose) from these hints of how the peerless peer and his connections were spending the months of the phony war, Paton Walsh shows how, while her husband is off fighting the good fight somewhere on the continent, Lady Peter, nÉe Harriet Vane, is so preoccupied down in Hertfordshire with the conduct of the war and her own depleted yet crowded household that she has no interest in writing mysteries. Even so, she's still keeping company with corpses. The latest is promiscuous land-girl Wendy Percival, who failed to emerge from an air-raid shelter during a drill because she was lying dead in the street above, dispatched by someone's bare hands. Harriet's preliminary questioning of the three young men Wicked Wendy kept on a string--bumpkin Jake Datchett, handyman Archie Lugg, and RAF officer John Birdlap--indicates no likely candidate for her killer. But who can the murderer be when practically the entire population of the village was huddled in the shelter beneath the Crown Inn and Archie's father, undertaker Fred Lugg, was watching the street from a tower above? Though the mystery is gossamer-thin, Paton Walsh (Thrones, Dominations, 1998, etc.) provides another Greatest Hits of Wimseydom, complete with family news, an allusive cipher, a dozen deathless village types, and, eventually, the return of Lord Peter to hearth, home, and homicide. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This successor to Thrones, Dominations, the novel Walsh completed from a manuscript left behind by fabled mystery writer Sayers, features Harriet Vane (now Lady Wimsey). After the village of Paggleham stages its first air-raid drill, in 1940, villagers discover the dead body of a "land-girl." The local police superintendent, citing staff shortages due to the war-and cognizant of Lord Peter Wimsey's absence abroad-asks for Harriet's assistance. Despite being short-staffed herself and caring for five children, Harriet begins investigating, interrogating village characters, gossips, and suspects with equal success. A charmingly traditional British cozy, filled with rustic domesticity and equable prose, this is strongly recommended, especially for Sayers fans. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
