The Attenbury Emeralds

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.