Death Comes to Pemberley is an unusual attempt by P.D. James, a mystery with Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy and their family and friends as characters. P.D. James is, of course, the queen of the mystery novel, but I had to admit to some disappointment with this effort.
On the night before the Darcy’s annual ball, the Darcys, his sister Georgina, the Binghams, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and a suitor of Georgina’s have just finished dinner when a coach careers into the yard containing Lydia Wickham, who says that someone is trying to murder her husband. As you will remember from Pride and Prejudice, Lydia would have been ruined by Wickham had not Darcy paid him to marry her, so the family has been at outs.
The men all go off to find Wickham bending over the body of his friend Major Denny. Although the evidence seems to suggest that Wickham has murdered Denny, he insists that after an argument he left the coach containing the three of them, on their way to crash the Darcy’s ball, and didn’t know what happened to Denny.
Although James is a little more successful at capturing the style and time of an Austen novel than other modern writers who have used the Darcys as characters, she spends no time on character development at all, leaving this to the readers’ knowledge of Pride and Prejudice. Yet, at the same time, she unnecessarily, considering the novel is supposed to take place six years later, has characters rehash the events of the original. Although I cannot recall the details, I also have a note that the novel was repetitive.
I have generally avoided reading the plethora of new books riffing on the reinterest in Austen, but I was looking forward to this one because James is usually so good. Although not at all a bad book, I feel that this was not one of her better efforts.
What? Me Read? 