Thrones, Dominations

I've recently reread the excellent Thrones, Dominations by Dorothy Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh -- the very last detective novel featuring celebrity sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey.

Sayers is far and away my favourite author of detective fiction -- erudite, humane and (for the era, and given that her central character is the brother of an Earl) surprisingly liberal in her politics. Jill Paton Walsh was nominated for the Booker Prize for her thoroughly excellent novel Knowledge of Angels -- a study in atheism and medieval Christianity which pulls off the surprising trick of remaining deeply sympathetic to both, even while the atheist character is being burnt by the Inquisition.

The last novel which Sayers herself completed was Busman's Honeymoon, published in 1937: after this she turned her attentions to larger projects such as her cycle of radio plays on the life of Christ, The Man Born to Be King, and her mammoth translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. (I have both, of course, and they're fab.) Before this, however, she was working on a twelfth Lord Peter novel, and it is this unfinished fragment (already called Thrones, Dominations) which her son's estate asked Paton Walsh to work up into a fully-fledged book.

The first time I read it was shortly after its publication in 1998, and at that point I was unable to agree with Ruth Rendell that "it is impossible to tell where Dorothy L Sayers ends and Jill Paton Walsh begins". It seemed clear to me then that the boundary came a third of the way through, roughly where the murder is announced and what has been a study of two married couples in 1930s high society turns into a (very fine) detective novel. This would be ironic, of course, given that Sayers was known as a detective writer and Paton Walsh isn't, and indeed on this rereading I wasn't so sure. (Then again, last time I had been reading a lot of Sayers, so I was more intimately familiar with her style.)

There's an interesting short essay where Paton Walsh talks about some of the challenges of completing Thrones, Dominations (or Thrones, Denominations as the webpage calls it at one point). What struck me in reading this was the similarity between Paton Walsh's experience of "a fusion [...] in which [Sayers'] vision, her characters, would seem to have become mine", and the experience of writers who contribute to "shared universe" series fiction. (It's certainly unusual for a mainstream literary novelist like Paton Walsh, though.)

I'm interested in the way modern fandoms, such as the various science fiction communities, have their precursors in the followings attracted in previous generations by the great literary detectives. The Sherlockians showed everybody else the way, of course, but respectable readers of the Lord Peter Wimsey adventures (such as the historian of heraldry, CW Scott-Giles, who went so far as publishing a short history of The Wimsey Family) engaged in activities which -- in a modern science fiction fan -- would be considered the very epitome of nerdishness.

Indeed, Sayers herself was not innocent of this. Lord Peter's beloved, Harriet Vane -- by the time of Busman's Honeymoon and Thrones, Dominations, his wife -- is an independent Oxford-educated detective novelist of unconventional sexual morals, who bears a more than passing resemblance to Sayers herself. The Wimsey novels may thus contain the first instance of the fan-fiction phenomenon known as a "Mary-Sue", whereby the author writes into the story a transparent version of themselves, usually with the clear intention that in so doing they will get to shag the central character.

It's pleasing -- and I mean this quite sincerely -- to know that bookish, scholarly types can have such kinship across generations.