November 2009 Guest Editor Geraldine McCaughrean on Thrones, Dominions by JILL PATON WALSH
When I set about the sequel to Peter Pan, countless people wailed, “But what sequels have ever been a patch on the original?” I comforted myself with Thrones and Dominions and A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh. Dorothy L Sayers’s world of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane is the place I go to play in my imagination. I’ve no idea why: Sayer’s intellectual snobbery really grates. Every time a character spouts 30 lines of abstruse poetry you can almost see her stubbing out her cigarette in the upturned faces of the ignorant readership. “Look how clever I am.” But I love the characters and the milieu. Paton Walsh manages to conjure them, add to them, age them (as WWII arrives) even redeem them from their creator’s snobbery. The whole delightful world revs into life as she launches the Lagonda all over again and chauffeurs the reader away to happiness.
This is the unfinished crime novel started by Dorothy L. Sayers and uncompleted at her death. Using the original lost fragment and Sayers' own notes, Jill Paton Walsh has completed this story of a society murder, set in London in 1936, and the efforts of Lord Peter Wimsey to unmask the killer.
'Jill Paton Walsh has...given us a Lord Peter story in the true Sayers' style and tradition' - Norma Major - The Week
'An engrossing, intelligent and provocative novel in the guise of a conventional mystery.' - Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review
'Could this be the best book Dorothy L. Sayers never wrote? She has done a splendid job - certain to please the legions of Sayers loyalists as well as readers new to the Wimsey canon... Lord Peter has been made much more human and interesting by marriage... and the story is full of twists and connivance.' - The Chicago Tribune
