The novels of Jane Austen have much in common with traditional detective fiction. It is an affinity that P. D. James has herself explored, notably in her essay ‘Emma Considered as a Detective Story’, which she included as an appendix to her memoir, Time to Be in Earnest. Both types of fiction operate within enclosed and carefully structured worlds; both depend for their plots on a threat to the established order; and both conclude with tidy resolutions that contain an implicit promise that a happy, orderly existence now lies ahead.
Death Comes to Pemberley combines these two traditions in a whodunnit set mainly at Mr Darcy’s stately home in Derbyshire, six years after his marriage to Elizabeth Bennet at the end of Pride and Prejudice. The year is 1803. The Darcys are now the proud parents of two strapping boys. Elizabeth’s favourite sister, Jane, lives nearby with their children. Even Mary, the studious sister, has found a suitable husband in Mr Bingley’s parson. Colonel Fitzwilliam, now the heir presumptive to his father’s earldom and grown rather serious, hankers after Darcy’s sister, the lovely Georgiana. But she shows unmistakable signs of interest in Mr Alveston, a poor but promising young lawyer who will one day inherit a barony.
There’s trouble in paradise. On the evening before Pemberley’s annual ball, Lydia Wickham, Elizabeth’s flighty younger sister, rattles up the drive in a hired chaise. She tumbles out in a state of collapse, shrieking that her husband has been murdered. A murder has indeed been committed in the grounds. Wickham, far from being the victim, appears to be the perpetrator.
This provides the starting point for a leisurely narrative that mimics the conventions of the traditional detective story. A local magistrate, no friend to the Darcys, leads the murder investigation and plays bad cop.
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