The Attenbury Emeralds by Jill Paton Walsh

In 1936, Dorothy L. Sayers abandoned the last Lord Peter Wimsey detective story. Sixty years later, a brown paper parcel containing a copy of the manuscript was discovered in her agent's safe in London, and award-winning novelist Jill Paton Walsh was commissioned to complete it. The result of the pairing of Dorothy L. Sayers with Walsh was the international bestseller Thrones, Dominations. Now, following A Presumption of Death, set during World War II, comes a new Sayers-inspired mystery featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, revisiting his very first case. . . . It was 1921 when Lord Peter Wimsey first encountered the Attenbury Emeralds. The recovery of the gems in Lord Attenbury's dazzling heirloom collection made headlines—and launched a shell-shocked young aristocrat on his career as a detective. Thirty years later, a happily married Lord Peter has just shared the secrets of that mystery with his wife, the detective novelist Harriet Vane. Suddenly, the new Lord Attenbury—grandson of Lord Peter's first client—seeks his help to prove who owns the emeralds. As Harriet and Peter contemplate the changes that the war has wrought on English society—and Peter, who always cherished the liberties of a younger son, faces the unwanted prospect of ending up the Duke of Denver after all—Jill Paton Walsh brings us a masterful new chapter in the annals of one of the greatest detectives of all time.

Summary: After the war, Lord Peter starts telling Harriet about his first case, and that telling leads to a new case.

One of the ongoing themes of this set of four books is that there is a play between what is real as a mystery and how mysteries can be written about to be believable. As a setup for the rest of the book, Lord Peter describes to Harriet his first case and how he started as a detective. Throughout this early section, Harriet and Lord Peter talk about whether something would be believable if it were in one of Harriet's novels vs in one of Peter's cases. This is a running gag in the series because Peter is often asking Harriet what he should do or if she were writing the story what the perpetrator would do at that point. It is both a running gag, but also a serious discussion about the nature of reality and how the nature of writing works. You can't just write a story, you have to fall within the set of conventions that seem believable unless you are intentionally subverting the conventions to suggest that the conventions themselves are not believable.

Part of the thread of the book is that the Attenbury Emeralds, which is what his initial case was about, has continued to come up again and again over the years. That is improbable, but it is improbable because there is more to the story than what it initially seems.

There are definitely different types of thriller/mystery stories. Some stories invite the reader to figure out what the story is as the clues are dropped. Some stories do not really give clues as much as narrate the story so that the mystery is slowly revealed. And some stories are thrillers where the point is the thrill, not the mystery. (And there are other types as well.) The reader doesn't know what the reader doesn't know, so as Walsh is playing with the conventions here, the improbable becomes the only option as time goes on.

Personally, I tend to like mystery series more for the character development than the specific mystery. The end of the book brings about something that was hinted at in the previous book and is more fully developed in the fourth book of the series.

This was originally published on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-attenbury-emeralds/

Having read all of Dorothy Sayers's detective fiction, as well as the previous two posthumous sequels by Jill Paton Walsh, I entered into this expecting mild, easy entertainment. If nothing else, I keep reading these because I like the story and the characters already, though I wasn't overly impressed by either of the first two sequels. I'm glad to say I was pleasantly surprised by this one. I think it is the best one so far written by Jill Paton Walsh. The mystery was cohesive and the personal lives of the characters were mixed in well. I do wonder what Dorothy Sayers would say about some of her choices, but I like the license she took.

An interesting enough mystery (which as usual kind of lost me in those crucial moments of revelation before the whole thing is explained to the reader, because I'm not a reader of mysteries for the mystery's sake) and it was fun to read fan fiction about the later years of the Wimseys, but the writing was far from what one could expect from an imitation of Sayers. It's been a few years since I read Paton Walsh's other two Wimsey follow-up novels, but I seemed to recall they fit in more neatly with Sayers's four Wimsey-Vane novels, which I should explain are amongst my favourite books.

The explanation of Peter's experience in the Great War and his shell-shock in the years following seemed to be a simple re-hash of the beginning of Busman's Honeymoon. The scene wherein Peter and Harriet explain to their sons about Harriet's murder trial twenty years previous was well-intended but poorly executed. The initiative the boys took in the stable block was overly cute. Both Peter's and Harriet's characters were kept fairly true to Sayers's, although some of the dialogue was wide of the mark. I'll dip into it again for the parts relevant to Wimsey history (Paton Walsh did consult Sayers's work on the Wimsey's outside the books), but I'm not planning a re-read.