Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

Let me first say that I wouldn’t normally read a “crime” novel, and that I had never heard about the author P.D. James before this book arrived. I’ll further stipulate that I would never have read a book in this genre had it not been that James based this novel on the characters found in the Jane Austen work “Pride and Prejudice”. With those parameters established, the reader of this review can easily imagine that this book was not my favorite of the novels I have read which are based on the Austen characters Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy. But I was impressed that a writer like James, who has obviously spent her whole writing career working on crime and legal stories, was able to fashion a book about Austen’s beloved characters that somehow also involves the Old Bailey.

In “Death Comes to Pemberley,” James draws a portrait of the Darcy family a few years after their marriage, where Elizabeth is planning “Lady Anne’s Ball” based on the example of Mr. Darcy’s mother. As any reader of Austen knows, Elizabeth has a disreputable sister named Lydia who is married to a wastrel named George Wickham, who has his own connections to the Darcy family. In this book, it is in Pemberley wood that Wickham is found hovering over the dead body of his friend, Captain Denny, and as a result, is drawn into a legal fight for his own life for murder. James is skilled at bringing back the Austen characters, but her language does not even try to mimic that of the 18^th century writer, and even worse, some of the characters seem to have changed so greatly that the only resemblance they bear to the Austen characters is that they have the same name. One example is Colonel Fitzwilliam, who is awkwardly drawn into a conspiracy with Wickham to hide the latter’s illegitimate child. The Colonel fans meet in Austen’s novel “Pride and Prejudice” would never have “polluted the shades of Pemberley” in that way.

The illegitimate son of Wickham’s ends up living with the Robert Martin family, from Austen’s novel “Emma”, and several other Austen characters from other novels are drawn in as this book draws to a close, as if to show the reader that James knows her Austen books. However, much of “Death Comes to Pemberley” is concerned with such dry matter as the inquest into the murder and Wickham’s trial, which may be James bailiwick, but which I’d venture to guess does not interest Austen readers quite as much as clever dialogue and romance. There is a brief romance, as Darcy’s sister Georgianna becomes involved with an attorney, but that coupling holds about as much charms as those chalky Valentine’s candies. In short, I believe the book, while well written, will prove unsatisfactory for true Austen fans.

Submitted by Gerti