2022/105: A Presumption of Death — Jill Paton Walsh / Dorothy L Sayers

...with wry amusement she remembered how appalling to her in prospect had been the wealth and privilege of being Peter’s wife... and how brief in the event had been the enjoyment of wealth and comfort, how swiftly the war was levelling everyone, casting down the mighty so that not even crowns and coronets got you more than four ounces of butter a week, and a large house with space and air meant you got strangers billeted on you, and an end of peace and privacy. [p. 156]

Second of Paton Walsh's continuations of Sayers' Wimsey novels: this one is founded on The Wimsey Papers, a series of letters that appeared in the Spectator during the early years of WWW2. The novel opens with Harriet at Tallboys, the couple's country residence, bravely tending her children and their cousins. (Well, she has the housekeeper, the cook, the house-maid, another maid, and a nursery-maid to help.) Peter is off doing intelligence work somewhere abroad, and Harriet finds life during wartime both boring and frustrating. Then a young woman, one of the Land Girls, is murdered during an air raid practice, and Harriet investigates -- discovering all manner of rural oddities including a pig club, an RAF pilot with a broken ankle, and the mysterious nocturnal ramblings of Miss Agnes Twitterton. Peter's nephew Gerald, here 'plain Jerry Wimsey', is also on the scene, and wows the children (and this reader) with a truly poetic account of what it's like to fly a Spitfire.

This is a perfectly reasonable murder mystery, with the typical historical-fiction flaw of relating events to our own present ('when this war is long over there will be people still alive in the next century who will bear the psychological marks of all this. War damage, so to speak' [p. 108]) and a recognisable facsimile of the characters and relationships created by Dorothy L. Sayers. Harriet felt more convincingly Sayers-esque than Peter or Bunter. Some nice details of rural wartime life, but slightly too much rushing around the countryside at a time when people were asked to consider whether their journey was really necessary. A pleasant read, but ... not Sayers.