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Thrones, Dominations

THRONES, DOMINATIONS
By Dorothy L. Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh
New English Library Paperbacks. 363 pages. £5.99
ISBN 0 340 68456 9

This last Lord Peter Wimsey story was begun by Sayers in 1936 and then abandoned.
The fragment formed part of her estate when she died in 1957, and for many years its existence was ignored or forgotten. When it was rediscovered, the novelist Jill Paton Walsh was invited by the trustees of the Sayers estate to complete it.
The resultant work is a bit more than detective fiction. Its theme is the use that people make of power, wealth and status and it is a story of two marriages: that of Lord Peter himself and the crime writer Harriet Vane, and that of theatre impresario Laurence Darwell and his beautiful wife Rosamund. The backdrop is London in the year preceding the abdication of Edward VIII. The reader has to wait a long time for any kind of crime, but in the meantime, Wimsey devotees will enjoy this glimpse into the early married life of Peter and Harriet as they begin that work of accommodation, coming as they do from different social classes and sub-cultures. Harriet has her work cut out with all those snobbish Wimsey relations. And finally, there is a body and the unravelling of clues. It would take a Wimsey himself to discover where Sayers left off and Paton Walsh took over. This is a light read which nevertheless engages both the intellect and the emotions.
Some Christians may wonder about the ethics of writing or reading crime novels and they will be interested in Lord Peter's discussion of the genre with his wife:

'You seem not to appreciate the importance of your special form,' he said. 'Detective stories contain a dream of justice. They protect a vision of the world in which wrongs are righted, and villains are betrayed by clues they did not know they were leaving. A world in which murderers are caught and hanged, and innocent victims are avenged, and future murder is deterred.'
'But it is just a vision, Peter. The world we live in is not like that.'
'It sometimes is,' he said. 'Besides, hasn't it occurred to you that to be beneficent, a vision does not have to be true?'
'What benefits could be conferred by falsehood?' she asked.
'Not falsehood, Harriet, idealism. Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun, for diversion, as they do crossword puzzles. But underneath, they feed a hunger for justice, and heaven help us if ordinary people cease to feel that.'

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