“Death Comes to Pemberley”, by P.D. James

 

304 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-0307959850

I first watched “Death Comes to Pemberley” the miniseries when it came to PBS in 2013 before I assigned Death Comes to Pemberley the book by P.D. James for the Fraser Public Library’s Mysteries & Munchies book club – but that’s okay ‘cause I forget who did it. Upon reading this book I was immediately taken back to Pride & Prejudice (reviewed on May 24^th, 2021), and all of the characters I had come to know came to life once more. I must also admit that the miniseries from 1995 made a return, as well, and as I read Death Comes to Pemberley the actors from Andrew Davies’ adaptation came forth and inhabited their characters once again. And so there is Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Darcy, Colin Firth as Fitzwilliam Darcy, Susannah Harker as Jane Bingley, Crispin Bonham-Carter as Charles Bingley, Adrian Lukis as George Wickham and Julia Sawalha as Lydia Wickham, along with Emilia Fox as Georgiana Darcy, Anthony Calf as Colonel Fitzwilliam and David Bark-Jones as Martin Denny – hell, I even thought of Benjamin Whitrow as Mr. Bennet and Lucy Briers as Mary Bennet (er, Hopkins).

Death Comes to Pemberley begins in October 1803 – six years after the events in Pride and Prejudice – with Elizabeth and Darcy happily married with two young sons as they are preparing for the annual Lady Anne’s Ball that they host at Pemberley, the Darcy’s grand manor house in Derbyshire, England. This is when Lydia – Elizabeth’s sister and now Mrs. Wickham – arrives hysterically upset and claims that Wickham was murdered en route. Fitzwilliam Darcy, his cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam and others, including Henry Alveston, leave Pemberley to search for Wickham’s body (since it seems to have happened on Darcy’s land, he is responsible for getting to the bottom of the matter). However, when they reach the spot where Lydia said Wickham was murdered, they instead find Wickham alive and learn that it is in fact Martin Denny, Wickham’s boon companion, who is dead. Furthermore, Wickham tearfully confesses that he is responsible for Denny’s demise, thus evidently confessing to murder. And so, once again, Wickham has made a nuisance of himself and so, once again, Darcy must bail him out.

I won’t spoil any more of the plot for you, only to say that I think that James, naturally, wrote an admirable mystery, although with a rather convenient denouement, if I may be so bold. Her style is to be commended as throughout most of the book I believe that I heard echoes of Austen in the writing (although of course nobody can ever recreate that long-silenced voice). I also give James props for mentioning other Austen characters, such as the Elliot’s – that would be Anne and Admiral Wentworth, and the useless Sir Walter Elliot, Baronet – along with the Knightley’s and Smith’s of Highbury. What I found surprising about the book was that it was more of a 19^th Century English procedural than it was a mystery: we have the crime, the almost non-existent investigation, the inquest and then the trial, throughout all of which the same facts and theories are repeated. This is all rather interesting, to be sure, but not what I was expecting; if Georgian court proceedings are your thing then James has obliged you, but I, for one, was hoping for the crime-fighting duo of Elizabeth and Darcy to investigate the malfeasance at Pemberley and solve the case.

So there it is: with Death Comes to Pemberley some of our favorite Austen characters come to life once more, if only briefly, and engage us with their trials and travails just as they did before. Not exactly a Jane Austen tale, but a reasonable facsimile all the same.