Lord Peter Wimsey, married and a Visitor to Oxford

 

Jill Paton Walsh. The Late Scholar (2013) This is Walsh’s fourth excursion into emulating Dorothy Sayers. The first was a completion of Sayers’s last novel from her notes. This is a new and pretty good fabrication.
     Lord Peter Wimsey is now the Duke of Denver (not having read #2 and #3, I missed that translation). He is called on to settle a dispute at St Severin’s College, Oxford, in accordance with an ancient rule that the Duke of Denver must be the Visitor that resolves a stalemated dispute among the Fellows. There follows a nicely done pastiche of Sayers’s style and substance. Walsh, herself a Cambridge scholar, knows how universities function, and how disputes among Fellows can lead to murderous hatred, although not nearly as often to murderous action in real life as in fiction.
     I enjoyed Walsh’s version of Wimsey. The plot is fair, the characters are believable, the ambience is Oxford, and Peter and Harriet are comfortably married and parents as we perhaps have come to expect them to be. Recommended. ***