Dorothy and Jill
Sep. 28th, 2014 06:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceSo I have been reading Jill Paton Walsh's Wimsey/Vane novels, which continue as it were where Dorothy L Sayers left off. And in general I have felt alternately pandered to (more Peter! more Harriet! more Dowager Duchess! - which is of course what was wanted, and why she was allowed to do it) and dissatisfied to the point of discomfort because she really isn't DLS and she doesn't quite get it right, or else I don't quite buy it, or else she just doesn't do what I would have done: any and all of those at various points in the narrative(s). [And hereafter there will be spoilers, so stop reading if that bothers you.]
I would not, f'rexample, have killed Gerald and had Peter inherit the dukedom. We don't need to see Peter burdened with more responsibility, he has plenty enough on his own account, and dim old Gerald made a useful counterweight, besides being delightful in his own way.
But anyway, that's not the point of this. I'm reading the latest book, The Late Scholar, and I'm finding it not so much meta as muddled. The villain of the piece has been killing people according to various methods from a writer's works, which as a trope I find tedious, but it is a trope, so okay; except that the writer in question is allegedly Harriet Vane, but the methods in question are all DLS', which requires - indeed, it is textual here - that Harriet has made direct use of her own and Peter's real-life (and, of course, real-death) cases in her fiction. Which I think she would consider tacky and he disreputable, which are two good reasons why I do not believe she would have done that. But wait, there's more: because the book makes frequent mention of other mystery writers, most frequently Agatha Christie but at least once Dorothy L Sayers. And if we are in Peter and Harriet's world, and Harriet has written an approximation of DLS' books, then what in the world has DLS written...?
I would not, f'rexample, have killed Gerald and had Peter inherit the dukedom. We don't need to see Peter burdened with more responsibility, he has plenty enough on his own account, and dim old Gerald made a useful counterweight, besides being delightful in his own way.
But anyway, that's not the point of this. I'm reading the latest book, The Late Scholar, and I'm finding it not so much meta as muddled. The villain of the piece has been killing people according to various methods from a writer's works, which as a trope I find tedious, but it is a trope, so okay; except that the writer in question is allegedly Harriet Vane, but the methods in question are all DLS', which requires - indeed, it is textual here - that Harriet has made direct use of her own and Peter's real-life (and, of course, real-death) cases in her fiction. Which I think she would consider tacky and he disreputable, which are two good reasons why I do not believe she would have done that. But wait, there's more: because the book makes frequent mention of other mystery writers, most frequently Agatha Christie but at least once Dorothy L Sayers. And if we are in Peter and Harriet's world, and Harriet has written an approximation of DLS' books, then what in the world has DLS written...?