Pity the poor novelist whom commercial pressures trap within a series, doomed with each volume to diminish the stock of options for the next one. It’s even harder when the series is not yours to begin with.
Jill Paton Walsh has now written her fourth instalment of the Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane detective novels, created by Dorothy L. Sayers. The Late Scholar (Hodder & Stoughton, £19.99, Spectator Bookshop, £15.39) is set mainly in Oxford, the location of Sayers’ own Gaudy Night. Wimsey is asked to adjudicate a bitter dispute among the fellowship of St Severin’s College, of which he is the Visitor. The Warden has vanished. The fellows have been plagued by a series of accidents and fatalities, which are oddly similar to those in Harriet’s detective novels. Can this have something to do with the controversial proposal to sell a college treasure, an edition of Boethius that may have belonged to Alfred the Great?
‘This is Oxford,’ remarks a percipient scout.
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