Book review: Thrones, Dominations by Dorothy L. Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh

When I read The Nine Tailors and the last stories in Lord Peter, in one sense, I had read all there was to read about Lord Peter Wimsey.  However, I already knew that a contemporary novelist, Jill Paton Walsh, had been given permission by the Sayers estate to write more.  'Authorized sequels' can be a dubious proposition (Scarlett, anyone?), but I thought I'd give them a chance.

As a result, the forty-third book I read in 2015 was Thrones, Dominations, with the double by-line of Sayers and Walsh.  According to Wikipedia, Sayers began work on Thrones, Dominations with a view to comparing Lord Peter's and Harriet's new marriage with that of two other couples but abandoned it in the face of political events in Europe in the latter half of the 1930s after completing approximately the first six chapters.

That's where Jill Paton Walsh comes in.  I'd like to say the transition is seamless, but....  Her command of the language is admirable: Lord Peter and Harriet, in the main, sound like themselves.  I suspect Paton Walsh of being the hand behind the excerpts from the Dowager Duchess's diary, which are distractingly of-the-moment, mentioning then-current events and personalities with a specificity Sayers avoided.  I hope she is the originator of some glaring new characters, including Harriet's lady's maid and Bunter's sudden and distracting love interest, who seem to be introduced with a passion for making things fair: If Lord Peter gets a romance, so must his lower-class right-hand man, and if Lord Peter has a live-in assistant, so must Harriet.

More unforgiveably, both Lord Peter and Harriet are much less intelligent and able in this novel than in the previous Sayers-penned ones.  Harriet convinces a neglected wife to take a weekend in the country; when something unpleasant occurs and everyone is trying to figure out why she was there, it's a whole chapter before Harriet suddenly recalls the fact; later on, Harriet notices a clue as Lord Peter and Inspector Parker discuss the case and begins to raise a question ... but Inspector Parker talks over her, Lord Peter allows him to (out of character), and Harriet doesn't bother bringing the point up again (even more out of character) until the men handle it chapters later and she says oh, yes, I thought that was strange but didn't say anything.

Paton Walsh has produced a serviceable detective novel set in the 1930s, but it is, in the final analysis, not a Lord Peter Wimsey novel.