A Presumption of Death (Mystery Masters Series)

Rating:
Summary: St. Martin's-Minotaur should be ashamed.
Review: And the Trustees of Anthony Fleming should be suing to demand a retraction and reissue.

Jill Paton Walsh does quite a competent job with character and setting, which is why I'm giving four stars to something whose final manifestation appalled me.

Her plot is less complex than the genuine Sayers article, and I felt the relative absence of introspective musing common to Sayers' later work, but given the shortness of the book I think both were in proportion.

I disagree with the reviewer who says Lady Peter would not have cared for the exhausted Bunter's physical needs; Lady Mary might have hesitated but it was entirely in keeping with Harriet's impatience with convention. I do agree that she would not have invited people to call her "Harriet"; she faced the fact that she would have to put up with being "Lady Peter" (socially -- continuing professionally as "Miss Vane" is quite appropriate) in "Busman's Honeymoon."

However.

SMM went to all the expense of paying for the rights, the author, the production, the publicity and the distribution. Anybody could have explained that the market for this book comprises people likely to read carefully. It is unconscionable that the budget did not offer a good copy editor enough time to read the text, in context.

I'll overlook the sentence fragments, although I'm convinced Sayers would not have permitted them.

There are errors of spelling: Fighters "bale" out of airplanes in practically every chapter.

There are errors of idiom: Harriet says, "Well, I have done," when Sayers' Harriet would have stopped at "Well, I have." Anachronistically, characters begin statements with "Only," sounding like visitors from Harry Potter.

There are errors of continuity: We establish that the Ruddles are Chapel (as Sayers told us in Busman's Honeymoon), not Church, and unwilling to shelter under the Crown. Come the air-raid drill, we find Mrs. Ruddle and her son Bert under the Crown -- and, what's more, cracking wise about the Chapel folk.

Although Jerry Wimsey appears in the shelter scene, Fred Lugg later says he saw Jerry turn away instead of entering the Crown.

Roger Birdlap becomes, suddenly, John Birdlap.

Paul, who is Peter and Harriet's third son in Sayers' story "Talboys," and who was born in 1941 according to "Thrones, Dominations," appears in 1939 with only one elder brother.

That's just a casual look at the first 80 pages; I got too discouraged to continue the catalog.

But the most frustrating error, also repeated endlessly, is one no copy editor with time to do more than run a spell-check would let through, even without reviewing the other books: Jerry Wimsey of the RAF is Charlie Parker's mother's brother's son. Charlie calls him "Uncle Jerry." Paul Wimsey is Jerry Wimsey's father's brother's son. Jerry takes "his nephew Paul into his arms."

If the Fleming trustees don't sue for a reissue, perhaps Paton Walsh should. She did her job, and with perhaps another thousand or two spent on editing might have found a demand to continue the franchise, instead of looking, before a critical public, like a fool.

Rating:
Summary: Sadly lame
Review: I agree with much of the criticism in previous reviews. As a mystery, ignoring for a moment the Wimsey-Vane series, the fundamental problem is that the book is too short. The print is large so that fewer words can be stretched to a standard number of pages. Because the book is short, it is easy to catch all the hints about the case. There is not enough extra action and text to hide them. The author very heavy-handedly adds comments like, "Harriet forgot what was troubling her." By way of "explaining" Harriet's failure to follow up and thereby prolong the mystery, this tactic highlights the clue, which is not what a mystery-writer would want to do.
As a volume in the Wimsey-Vane series, the book is very weak. The personal material is entirely dependent on previous, authentic Sayers' works. Harriet is constantly thinking back to the events of Busman's Honeymoon, and Gaudy Night is also referred to. Interestingly, she seems to have forgotten about the Thrones, Dominations case. It doesn't figure in her recollections at all. The parts that are new are more wish-fulfillment (popular characters get happy endings) than authentic development.
Finally, to the person who complained that Jerry Winsey appears as uncle to his cousins Charlie Parker and Paul Wimsey, give me a break. Jerry is considerably older than the boys. It's a courtesy title.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful continuation of a treasured tradition
Review: I have been avidly reading and rereading Dorothy L
Sayers for for over 15 years after having been introduced to her writing by my mother just before I went off to college at Oxford. I thus approached Jill Paton Walsh's continuation of the Peter Wimsey series with a certain skepticism. In fact even after enjoying her first book "Thrones and Dominations" I tended to give all of the credit for the quality of that book to the notes Sayers had apparently left for the story. Having now finished Walsh's second book in the series, "A Presumption of Death", I have to give credit where credit is due. The book is wonderful and I really enjoyed reading it. Walsh is not Sayers and there are differences,(I think Walsh is a bit softer on people) but the original characters shine through and "A Presumption of Death" is well written with a well crafted mystery. In particular I enjoyed the way that this book, like Sayers' original mysteries, explores the moral questions of what drives a person to kill, and how society should best respond to that act, and the way the act affects all of the people connected to it, the people connected both to the victim and to the perpetrator. In addition, there is much delight to be found in the setting for this mystery. I found myself immersed in a believable English village coming to terms with the realities of being on the homefront during the early part of the Second World War.

Rating:
Summary: More detail needed
Review: I have been reading and re-reading the entire Sayers/Wimsey body of work for more than 35 years. Jill Walsh has done all the Wimsey fans a great service in continuing the Wimsey chronicles. Even if there is no further material available from the collected Sayers papers, Jill Walsh appears to have excellent credentials to continue on her own recognizance. I bought this one in hardcover and will order the next one gleefully.

Rating:
Summary: Less than stellar as a sequel...
Review: I have to admit that I was hoping Walsh would get better at doing Sayers, & instead she seems to have strayed further from her writing than in the previous attempt (which I enjoyed very much). Walsh is a fine mystery writer in her own right, but her straightforward style of writing is greatly at odds with Sayers' lovely verbal curlicues. The best part about using Sayers' characters is that it really helps make clear the magnitude of the social upheaval that took place in WWII. However, I think, on the whole, the story would have been better served if Walsh had told it as her own with her own characters.

That said, it is a fun story, well told. Despite the irritating errors of continuity mentioned by previous reviewers, it has a captivating mix of humor, suspense and social history. The character development is fun, if not authoritative. Sayers made it clear that she was, in many ways, quite sick of Lord Peter and wanted him to "grow up," though those are not the words she used to describe the process. Walsh's cautious exploration of that theme is quite interesting, but does have rather a "fan fiction" feel to it. Still, given Sayers' own short story, "Tallboys," all her choices are well within the bounds of probability.

I rather hope that Walsh will abandon the pale-imitation-of-Sayers routine, and go back to her own Imogen Quy series. Walsh is a strong and graceful writer in her own voice.

Rating:
Summary: Two Thumbs Up!
Review: I'm a big fan of Sayers and have sometimes found "continuations" by other authors to be a disappointment. Luckily, however, Jill Walsh does a *wonderful* job capturing the language and characters of those wonderful fictional friends, Lord Peter and Harriet. A satisfying read and well worth adding to your classic Brit mystery collection.

Rating:
Summary: Sadly lame
Review: I'm a big fan of Sayers and have sometimes found "continuations" by other authors to be a disappointment. Luckily, however, Jill Walsh does a *wonderful* job capturing the language and characters of those wonderful fictional friends, Lord Peter and Harriet. A satisfying read and well worth adding to your classic Brit mystery collection.

Rating:
Summary: What happened to Roger?
Review: One specific criticism: Walsh seems to have mixed up the Wimsey children Roger and Paul: in Sayers' story Talboys, set after this book, Bredon is six, Roger is four, and Paul is only briefly mentioned and strongly implied to be the youngest. Then somehow in Presumption of Death, Harriet has a three-year-old Bredon and . . . Paul. Harriet introduces him as "her second son" and Roger seems to have been completely skipped. I really don't understand how Walsh could clearly have done so much research and mimicked Sayers style so skillfully, yet overlooked something as basic as keeping her characters straight.

Rating:
Summary: Not quite up to the original but.....
Review: still an enjoyable visit with old friends.

It is the early days of WWII, Harriet Vane has evacuated her London household, plus her niece and nephew to Talboys, her country house. Lord Peter and Bunter are away on an assignment for the foreign office. Harriet is busy coping with the war time rationing of food and clothing as well as learning the subtle nuances of village life when she is asked to assist the village constable with a murder investigation.

Many of the characters introduced in Sayers original novels return, including the Wimsey clan and several of the villagers. Walsh has stayed true to the original characters but she is not Sayers. There are inconsistencies in the details of the family, (a 'missing' child, the wrong age for another) and the village residents no longer speak in dialects. There are also editing errors (the Ruddles are chapel one minute and church the next, names are changed, people are two places at once etc). Also Walsh's style is different than Sayers, not as detailed or as witty. The mystery is not quite as intricrately plotted as Sayers.

Despite these shortcomings it is still a worthly successor to the original series and a throughly enjoyable read.