I have been making my way through all of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey series over the last year. Originally published from the 1920s through the 1930s, Sayers' estate commissioned Jill Paton Walsh to use Sayers, notes, letters, and articles written during World War II to continue the series for an additional four novels to the original.
A Presumption of Death is the second of those co-written novels.
From the jacket: 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.
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 of 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.
Post a Comment