The Late Scholar

Let's be clear from the beginning: Jill Paton Walsh is no Dorothy Sayers. But, with the approval of Sayers' estate, she has done not merely a credible job of continuing the partnership of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, but a delightful one, as well. In this latest installment, it's 1953, and Peter and Harriet are called back to Oxford when Peter discovers that as the Duke of Denver, he's the official "Visitor" for St. Severin's College (the "visitor" seems to function sort of like the head trustee). St. Severin's is locked in an apparently intractable dispute about whether to sell an ancient manuscript that may have been glossed by none other than King Alfred the Great. Of course, there's more behind the conflict than meets the eye, but that isn't discovered until several fellows are killed in one way or another. What charmed me about the book, though, was Paton Walsh's depiction of Peter and Harriet's relationship. Their sons are almost ready to go to university, so their marriage has matured and mellowed, but there's still a notable spark between the two of them. Paton Walsh does a lovely job of creating dialogue between the two that is entirely in character with Sayers' conception of the two characters. And of course, they're back in Oxford, the place where (in the wonderful _Gaudy Night_) they finally acknowledged their feelings for each other, so there are lots of allusions to the events and scenes in Gaudy Night. In fact, the murders themselves take Harriet all the way back to the case that first introduced her to Peter: her own murder trial, when she was falsely accused of having poisoned her former lover. Paton Walsh uses this to demonstrate how far Harriet has come from the hostile, wounded position she was in at the start of her connection with Peter.But this isn't to say the mystery here isn't important or well constructed: it is. And Harriet even gets a few digs in at her fellow Golden Age writers. Of Agatha Christie, she rightly says, "Mrs. Christie [is] an admirable technician, in many ways, but not perhaps brilliant at conveying subtleties or depths of character. Her work [is] not likely to engage one's sympathy." I could not agree more...which is why I wish more fans of Christie's would discover the work of Sayers (and also of their other contemporaries, Patricia Wentworth, Josephine Tey, Georgette Heyer, Margery Allingham, and Clara Benson)!Quotable quotes:"Non-intellectual people overestimate the power of reason among intellectuals, I find.""Am I alone," asked Peter, "in feeling a certain sympathy for someone who has to sit through badly written and ill-prepared essays for hours a week?""To learn from someone who is still alive above the neck, and still learning themselves, is like drinking from a fresh spring, someone said, but 'he that learneth from one who learneth not drinketh the foul mantle of the green and standing pond.'"The gloss written by King Alfred in the contentious manuscript: "I hope to do good deeds in my lifetime, and to be remembered for them after my death." Peter comments, "his hope was just to do good and be remembered. At the same time not much to ask, and a lot to ask. I'd gladly settle for that myself."

3.5*

While the mystery was very good, Walsh doesn't quite seem to hit the mark with Sayers' characters, especially that of Lord Peter Wimsey. No regrets about reading this book (particularly as I already had a copy via my Mom's kindle) but I doubt that I will reread it...

I was so excited to read this newest book in the series, especially since I have enjoyed what Jill Paton Walsh brings to these well loved characters.

Unfortunately,

1: I didn't love the audiobook reader -- the past ones were tremendous, and this guy just wasn't. Also, gave Bunter an accent that I found highly irritating.

2: If you're going to write an original piece, write an original piece. Basing the murders off Peter's previous cases (now described as Harriet Vane's books) turns this book into a greatest hits of Sayer's murders. I'm reading these books because I already know Sayer's work, so this just felt like it was leaning on previous work too heavily.

3: Boy howdy did this need editing! Constant repetitions of phrases, rehashing things over and over again -- the reader is reading this book, you don't need to constantly revisit the things we have already read. Also, retire the phrase "When you know how, you know who" -- yes, it's famous Wimsey phrase. It's used in every book. In this book, it becomes a touchstone and is used at minimum 5 times. Enough, already!

4: Extremely disappointed at the ethnic slurs against the Japanese. Just because Sayers used bigoted language as a product of her times, doesn't mean that tradition needs to continue. I understand that this book is set within close memory of WWII, but especially given that the vignette where this occurs is talking about how the professor wanted to move past the war and find peace with wartime enemies, it felt unnecessary.

I loved spending time with Peter and Harriet again, I loved seeing them in Oxford and learning about obscure customs like the Visitor. I loved seeing the way their family is continuing to grow -- all of that was a delight. I wish Walsh would stand on her own feet -- keep the characters, tell us a new story. I think she's picked up the mantle really well, but there comes a time to build new rather than reconstruct the old. Honestly, I'd love it if future books move around in the timeline-- even if uncomfortable with setting mysteries in times where Sayers has already been, it was a pretty big time leap between A Presumption of Death and The Attenbury Emeralds. There's space to tell us more stories set in the prime of their married life, and there's space to show more of the Bunters as well. I suppose I shouldn't let my disappointments overwhelm my gratitude -- I am grateful that this series continues. I am grateful for Walsh's careful and beautiful writing setting scenes and working through complicated puzzles. That part is wonderful.

A bit convoluted.

Where I got the book: my local library. The fact that I didn’t buy it is indicative of my uneasy relationship with Jill Paton Walsh’s last Wimsey-Vane book, The Attenbury Emeralds. **SPOILER WARNING** somewhat spoilerish, where I needed to discuss a point and couldn’t do it without giving away what the book’s about. But not very much.Has anyone else noticed that Paton Walsh has a tendency to make a weak start with these books? There’s an irritating throat-clearing quality to the first half a dozen pages of this one. Exhibit 1, the beginning:“Great snakes alive!” said the Duke of Denver, sometime Lord Peter Wimsey, famous amateur sleuth.“What is it, Peter?” asked his Duchess, sitting across from him at the breakfast table.The Duchess was sometime Lady Peter Wimsey, and before that had been Harriet Vane, detective-story writer, a persion that she still was as often as life allowed her.YES WE KNOW.Seriously, Ms. Paton Walsh, do you think anyone but a Wimsey fan is going to read this novel? And even if, perchance, someone were to browse into this book by mistake and decide it’s worth reading, the info about Peter and Harriet could be far more elegantly dropped into the first couple of chapters. Never start a novel with backstory. Of course this is a frequent first-draft tic—I’ve just done it myself, but I took the pages to my writer’s group and confirmed what a Bad Idea they were, and will start the novel with the second chapter instead. We all sort of need to write ourselves back into the story when we’re re-using characters, but these chapters need to be discarded or re-written, and she didn’t. Not nearly as bad a backstory dump as with The Attenbury Emeralds, but still. Sayers would NEVER have done this.The other thing Sayers never did was dumb things down. She threw in French, Latin, Greek and classical references without any explanation, assuming that the intelligent and educated reader would either know them as a matter of course or look them up in a dictionary. And that was long before the days of the internet. And yet Paton Walsh, whose readers generally have Wikipedia no farther away than their phones, are treated to Exhibit 2:“I don’t think you mentioned what the codex is a manuscript of?” said Peter.“Some Dark Ages martyr called Boethius,” said Troutbeck [who is an Oxford don].Am I the only reader to feel insulted at the assumption that I would never have heard of the Consolation of Philosophy? If anything, it was reading Sayers as a teenager that made me realize the depth and wonder of ancient and not-so-ancient literature. How could Paton Walsh, who I vaguely remember going on record about how reading Sayers made her want to study Eng. Lit. at Oxford, so undervalue the fandom?Eventually, we wander into a plot where the murders are based on Harriet’s novels, which are in turned based on Peter’s cases, which are of course the stuff of Sayers’ novels. And let’s stop right there. I have a real problem with the implication that Harriet needed Peter to supply her with plots, useful as that might be for Paton Walsh’s storyline. This is a major weakness of the novel in my opinion, particularly since everyone seems to deal with this pattern in a very offhand way at times. Harriet actually spots a massive clue—directly related to the point under discussion—at one juncture and then completely fails to mention it in the next chapter.And besides, where you have a string of murders like this, the plot needs to be a whole lot more incisive. Paton Walsh sort of pre-empts this criticism, Exhibit 3:“Whoever he is, he is getting increasingly efficient, and increasingly violent,” said Peter. “Whereas we, I’m afraid, are getting increasingly bogged down and ineffectual.”And at some point she has Peter and Harriet talk about how in real life, crimes are far more muddled and less clean-cut than in detective fiction. But this IS detective fiction, dammit, and failing to make the effort to come up with a properly delineated plot makes a mockery of the Sayers canon to which Paton Walsh is presumably paying homage. This seems like an appropriate moment to go off on a tangent about something that’s been bugging me. The copyright to the Sayers characters is held by the Sayers estate, and Paton Walsh, who has some serious literary cred, is the only writer who’s been granted license to use them. Copyright owners, in these cases, usually seem to claim that they restrict the use of characters in order not to let them be twisted and bent into shapes never dreamed of by the original writer, even though you can’t keep a fanfic writer down, if I understand rightly (I’m not a fanfic reader) so it happens anyway, just that nobody makes money out of it. Except E.L. James. But let’s look at the other great fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, who suffers from far fewer restrictions. Granted, this has resulted in some cringeworthy movies and books, but it’s also given us Mary Russell and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, to name but two of the more inventive reinterpretations of the character. I argue that by allowing Ms. Paton Walsh to play in the Wimsey-Vane sandbox all by herself (and leaving aside all discussion of the two TV series), the DLS estate isn’t doing readers any favors. I would have been OK with them deciding NEVER to let anybody reproduce the Wimseys in written form, leaving them (as I said in my Attenbury review) to exist forever in the eternal sunshine of a lost world in readers’ minds. But since they’ve decided to sanction some fan fiction, why not open up the field for more contenders? The only reason I’m giving this book three stars is that there were times I really enjoyed hanging out with Peter and Harriet again. I’m simply that much of a fan. And there were moments when they sounded right, but these moments were constantly interrupted by un-Sayers-like bits that made me wince. It was a bit like listening to someone playing Mozart really well . . . 85 percent of the time. Or maybe 70 percent. There were more jarring notes than I cared to record: Exhibits 4 and 5 are a character called Stella Manciple turning into Ellen Manciple later in the book, and another character talking about “making emends”—small things, but they point to the lack of the right kind of editor. There were problems with pacing—we spend an excrutiating amount of time on the taking and developing of photographs, for example, but gallop over what should have been one of the best pieces of action in a few briefly sketched paragraphs. There were strange, rambly bits of action that had absolutely nothing to do with the story, but seemed to be mini-research dumps. There was a sort of sex scene, right in the middle of the book, which was frankly more embarrassing than erotic, like walking in on your parents.I don’t seem able to be brief about this book, so I’m just going to come to a grinding halt right here. Which is kind of what I’d like to happen with this series. Reading these books is becoming a masochistic exercise—pleasurable enough that I find it impossible to keep away, but ultimately painful and humiliating.

The year is 1953 and, due to the death of his older brother, aristocrat and sleuth Peter Wimsey, now middle-aged and married, has been forced to don the mantle of Duke of Denver. Among the many unanticipated duties of his new title is that of Visitor to St Severin’s College at Oxford. When an impasse arises at the college over the question of selling a valuable book to purchase a piece of land, he is called upon to settle the dispute. When he arrives, he discovers that the warden of the college has disappeared, two of the fellows involved in the vote have met with accidents that seem to be copied from his wife Harriet’s mystery novels, and another has died in a fall. All of this seems to be linked not only to the sale of the book but to an anonymous and vicious review of it’s pedigree from five years previous that may have led to a suicide and a spot of blackmail. Things are clearly not as they should be in the hallowed halls of academia and, if Peter and Helen can’t discover the culprit quickly, the question of the book may be solved by attrition.Author Jill Paton Walsh’s has received the blessing of the Sayers estate to revive Peter Wimsey, perhaps the most erudite, witty, and intelligent sleuth in all literature and The Late Scholar is the fourth in the series. This is the first I have read but it worked quite well as a stand-alone. Although she has moved him forward in time to the ‘50s using cultural markers like books and movies to show the change, she has done a fine job of recreating Dorothy Sayers’ style including both Peter’s and Helen’s use of literary quotes to express thoughts and emotions. As in the original series, deaths tend to happen offstage so-to-speak and, although there is some running around looking for clues, most of the solution comes from working their ‘little grey cells’ to use the words of that other Grande Dame of Mystery. The Late Scholar is a wonderful example of the British cozy set in academia and, as such, it is less a wild ride and more a relaxing stroll through the cobbled streets of Oxford. It won’t get your heart a-thumping or your nerves a-jangling but it will make you think while entertaining you with the eccentricities and often petty grievances of those who reside too long in Ivory Towers. It also provides a pretty good puzzle or two to keep the reader guessing. For fans of Dorothy L. Sayers, of cozies, or of mysteries set in academia, The Late Scholar is the perfect book to get lost in.

Jill Paton Walsh may not be Dorothy L. Sayers, but this is still a witty, entertaining story and it’s wonderful to have more Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet. This story takes place later than Sayer’s books, after the WWII, but fortunately Bunter is still around serving as Lord Peter’s devoted valet. Like Gaudy Night, my favorite Sayers book, the setting is the world of Oxford in all its insular arcane academic glory. St. Severin's College must decide whether it should sell a moldering but valuable ancient manuscript to acquire more land, and it turns out it’s Lord Peter who, through a hereditary appointment, is supposed to cast the deciding vote. This won’t be an easy matter because passions are quite heated and though he will only be dealing with the highly educated Lord Peter is forewarned that people overestimate the power of reason among intellectuals. As Peter certainly knows well already.It’s been a while since I read Dorothy Sayers, which maybe was an advantage for enjoying this novel, but one difference did stand out to me though I didn’t mind it--I don’t believe Sayers would have let us know that Peter and Harriet spent an afternoon dallying in bed. Rest assured, it’s just a brief, tasteful mention. My only (mild) complaint has to do with an excess of riches. There were so many Oxford fellows who had a vote in the to sell or not to sell the manuscript decision that it was difficult to keep track of who was who and what side they were on. I should have made myself a cheat sheet, but even without it the novel was a delight.

I have always been a fan of Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series. My only regret is that she didn't write even more books in the series. So needless to say, this new mystery series based on Sayers' characters peaked my interest. This is the first of the Jill Paton Walsh series that I have read, and I enjoyed it immensely.In this novel, Peter and Harriet are getting up in age, with grown children off at school. They still have the valuable assistance of Bunter, thank goodness. Peter is called to Oxford University because the Fellows at St. Severin's college are hopelessly at odds over the potential sale of a valuable manuscript and the purchase of land. Lord Peter is the "Visitor" of the college who can cast the deciding vote - but Peter and Harriet quickly discover that much more is going on. The Warden has been missing for several months, and there have been a number of accidents and suspicious deaths. In order to get to the bottom of the mystery and settle the dispute, they have to find the missing Warden and find a murderer as well.In the midst of all of this excitement, there are many references to past events and people from Sayers' books. It was nice to learn how some of the other characters are faring, or what happened to them. Being back at Oxford takes Peter and Harriet back to their youth and they reminisce about how they met and eventually became a couple.I'm not exactly sure if I liked this book as much as I liked the original series - it is very close, but it doesn't really matter. I liked this book so much I would read the Jill Paton Walsh books even if I hadn't read the Sayers series! They are both good on their own merits. This book is exactly the kind of mystery I enjoy reading - no explicit language, sex, or gore, and it was witty, suspenseful, and a good exercise for the brain as I tried to solve the mystery along with them. I will definitely read the others in this series!(I received this book through Amazon's Vine Program.)