The Late Scholar by Jill Paton Walsh

A Lord Peter Wimsey book based on the characters created by Dorothy L Sayers

published 2013

‘Let’s get some air,’ he said when they stepped out

into the quadrangle. It was a clear, moonlit night. Arm-in-arm, they walked out into Parks Road, and turned right. Up past Keble College, towards the University Parks…

They walked on as far as the footbridge, and leaned over the rail watching the multiplied moon dancing in the rocking surface of the river. 

‘I like you in a gown,’ said Peter, ‘as 

well as I like you in anything you wear.’ 

‘I have a slight unease about wearing one, just the same,’ said Harriet, as their return path offered them a prospect of Keble, its Fair Isle jersey of patterned brickwork softened to near invisibility, and its fine proportions clearer than in daylight.

‘Why so, Domina?’ he asked.

‘It’s an MA gown and I only took one degree,’ she said.

observations: This is a complex business. Between 1923 and 1937 Dorothy L Sayers wrote 11 murder stories with Lord Peter Wimsey as her sleuth. After that she did various other things – wrote, studied theology, translated Dante - ignoring Wimsey except for a few short stories and the beginnings of one more book. She died in 1957. In 1998, Jill Paton Walsh, a noted author in her own right, took Sayers’ beginning of the book Thrones, Dominations and completed it. She followed this up with A Presumption of Death – which takes as a starting-point some pieces Sayers wrote about the Wimsey family during the war. The Attenbury Emeralds was the next one: based on mention of this case in various Sayers books. The Late Scholar, the fourth in the series, is the first to have been produced out of nothing. But it takes Peter and Harriet to Oxford, to the imaginary St Severin’s College, and contains many nods to the original Gaudy Night, also set in the city.

There is also a strange conceit (slight spoiler): 

Any keen reader will notice as various attacks and deaths happen that the methods used are all reflected in Sayers’ earlier books. Of course Wimsey notices this, and describes them as coming from his old cases, then used by Harriet in her detective stories. This seems a bit convoluted and weird.

I love the original Wimsey books (despite having all kinds of unreasonable complaints about them – see entries here and here), and I was happy to go along with the new creations – JPW is a writer whose own books I very much liked. And a murder story set in an Oxford college, Peter and Harriet living into the 1950s – well, it’s hard to go wrong. But these books are giving diminishing returns. The dialogue and sex scenes with the happy couple (who are now the Duke and Duchess of Denver, for goodness sake) are excruciating, there isn’t the slightest questioning of the social order – surely even DLS would have baulked at Bunter’s uncomfortable role in the new world? Miss Hillyard’s name is mis-spelt, and bizarrely there are several references to a traditional ploughman’s lunch – surely JPW knows that this was not something being sold in British pubs in the early 1950s? But she keeps drawing attention to it.

Two characters have the names Oundle and Outlander: I thought it would be significant that you could make one of these (very uncommon) names out of some of the letters of the other, but no.

It is also true that usually when another author takes over, there was an untimely death of someone who had been writing the books up to the last minute. This is very far from the case with LPW, and much as I always wished DLS had written more, it might be time to put this whole business to rest. And yet…. Wimsey completists will read it, as I did, just because.

The first picture shows Keble College’s brickwork, and is from Cornell University library: the second is a Fair Isle jersey from the free vintage knitting site I like so much.

Even more Sayers entries on the blog here and here. And here. And here.