Plain Jane: Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), by PD James

"But this light-heartedness was not to last."

--Death Comes to Pemberley 

In the final chapter of Pride and Prejudice (1813) author Jane Austen takes time to tell us, like a tantalizing gypsy reader of tea leaves, something of the futures of her novel's many characters.  The neurotic--as we might say now--mother of Elizabeth Bennet (now Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy) "still was occasionally nervous and invariably silly," which surely comes to us as no great surprise about this exasperating lady.  In accord with Mrs. Bennet, most of the characters seem to go on much as before, like Lizzy's would-be profound but in reality entirely commonplace and dull sister Mary, now "obliged to mix more with the world but [moralizing] over every morning visit."  

Fittingly the ones for whom things definitely get worse are that distressing married couple George and Lydia Wickham.  George, a charming rogue who briefly enchanted even sensible Lizzy Bennett herself, and flighty Lydia, Lizzy's youngest sister, clearly were not souls destined for settled lives, whether spent together or apart.  "They were always moving from place to place in quest of a cheap situation, and always spending more than they ought," Austen tells us chidingly.  "His affection for her soon sank into indifference; her's lasted a little longer...."

Naturally Austen's extremely devoted fans--the Janeites as they became known--wanted to know yet more, Pride and Prejudice being Austen's most beloved novel; and Austen continuations since have abounded, including in the mystery field.  Jane Austen herself never wrote a murder mystery, of course.  She died sadly prematurely at the age of forty-one in 1817, when Edgar Allan Poe was but an eight-year-old lad--though she did mock Gothic mysteries in her amusing posthumously published novel Northanger Abbey, which she had actually completed amidst the Gothic novel craze back in 1803, when it seemed as if every other English novel was set in a crumbling European castle inhabited by a beautiful, imperiled ingenue and her scheming guardian or wicked uncle.  

The author of Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Emma and Mansfield Park probably would have deemed Poe's ghastly ghouls and ghosties a pack of fanciful nonsense.  I can't imagine she would have admired Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  A nice cozy manners mystery, however, might just have done for a nice read by the fireside....

Despite not having written an actual detective novel, Austen became a major influence on Golden Age detective fiction, when the English Crime Queens--most prominently Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh--began publishing what became known as manners mysteries, detective tales clearly written in the style of Austen's witty Regency Era novels of manners.  Like Austen, these Crime Queens boldly placed love interest at the center of their books, having their debonair gentleman detectives over the course of their chronicled investigations fall in love with and marry brilliant bluestocking ladies.  Mystery fans ate up every dainty murderous morsel, especially women.  

One of these contemporary women fans was PD James, born in 1920 and arguably the modern crime writer most influenced by the Golden Age Crime Queens.  The late author, who died a little over a decade ago at the venerable age of ninety-four, was also a fervent admirer of Miss Austen, though she made her own name as a novelist with her rather grim Adam Dalgliesh police series, which ran for nearly a half-century, from 1962 until 2008.  

James nearly died from heart failure in 2007 and might never have completed The Private Patient, what proved her final Adam Dalgliesh novel.  But she did live to complete it and in 2009, with publicity for the book over, she was looking ahead, as successful novelists will do, to her next novel, "increasingly aware," as she put it, "that neither years nor creative energy last forever."  She decided with what might be her last book (and it was) to be "self-indulgent" and "combine my two lifelong enthusiasms, namely for writing detective fiction and for the novels of Jane Austen," into a single mystery novel set in the world of Jane Austen.  This novel, published in 2011, she called Death Comes to Pemberley (Pemberley being Mr. Darcy's great country estate).    

Chatsworth House, though to have been the inspiration for Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice
just ignore the line of horseless carriages

James completed the novel at the age of ninety, an impressive achievement. A realist, she herself felt her age keenly, worrying that reviews of the novel might run along the lines of this is an extraordinary book for a nonagenarian, but it's not vintage PD James.  (She seemed not to allow the possibility that critics might not think it was very good for a nonagenarian either.)  

James needn't have worried about the critics, however; by 2011 she, like Jane Austen, actress Judi Dench and the Queen of England, was a veritable institution and certainly no one in the press was going to accuse their reigning  Mistress of Murder of possessing no crown and wearing no clothes.  Pemberley netted the usual praise, rest assured.  Having finally read the novel now myself, however, I have to say I pretty much concur with James' feared imaginary reviewers: I think it's a remarkable novel for a nonagenarian, but it's not vintage James.  

Actually I think the book is better James than Jane, but that is the problem with the novel: it is fundamentally at odds with itself.  James obviously greatly admired Austen, but she herself is a much heavier, gloomier writer than Austen, who is beloved for her wry humor, sprightliness and brightness.  James, it's apparent to me, had a fine sense of humor, but she rarely gave it much play in her novels.  Even in James' Pemberley, wit is only in limited evidence; and once the dead body rolls into the tale, out goes humor for the most part.  

in some (blood) spots James' novel 
owes more to Edgar Allan Poe
than it does to Jane Austen

James herself was aware of the problem, writing amusingly in her author's note: "I owe an apology to the shade of Jane Austen for involving her beloved Elizabeth in the trauma of a murder investigation....No doubt she would have replied to my apology by saying that, had she wished to dwell on such odious subjects, she would have written the story itself, and done it better."  This disarming nature of this candid apologia is somewhat lessened by the fact that it is so clearly true.  Austen and the word "trauma" do not belong in the same sentence, it seems to me.  

On page 54, several pages before Lizzy's sister Lydia Wickham comes shrieking of murder to the very  doors of Pemberley, PD James has Elizabeth morosely thinking, as the wind shrieks too in the trembling trees (our old friend, the pathetic fallacy): 

outside there is another world which wealth and education and privilege can keep from us, a world in which men are as violent and destructive as in the animal world.  Perhaps even the most fortunate of us will not be able to ignore it and keep it at bay forever.

This is the world of the contemporary French Revolution or Edgar Allan Poe ("The Masque of the Red Death") or James' own crime novels, but is it the world of Jane Austen?  I suppose in Austenland implicitly there is always a fear of "marrying poor" and sliding down the social scale into outright privation, but do you ever see it so gloomily expressed?  This is a James sentiment, not an Austen one, or so it strikes me.  

On Goodreads Pemberley received many poor reviews from Austen fans--Janessaries shall we call them--and I can see why.  James had too pronounced an authorial personality and writing style to be a really successful pastichist, which requires an author to subordinate herself to the subject of the pastiche.  If you can't do that don't do it would be my advice.

Where Pemberley succeeds best is as a PD James mystery.  Some critics of the novel have dismissed it as a mystery as well as an Austen pastiche, but I actually thought the mystery plot was pretty good.  Though one point as I far as I can recall is not clued at all--and some inkling should have been given--the construction of the plot is rather admirable, I think.  I particularly like the mystification around the death instrument.  

The problem, however, is that the pace lags.  There's the night of the murder and a brief investigation, followed by mostly tedious recapitulations at an inquest and a trial.  Then there's a letter of confession, followed by a coda of sixty-five pages!  Critics called this a more streamlined James novel, but by my count it's still around 100,000 words.  James hadn't really written a genuinely streamlined mystery novel in over four decades, if that word carries any actual meaning at all to critics.  

Still, I'm glad James lived to write Pemberley.  Like the curate's egg, it's genuinely good in spots and the basic mystery plot would have made a first-rate crime short story.  Now pray allow me to go, like James, into more detail.

*******

Death Comes to Pemberley, like other later James novels, is divided into books, plus a prologue and epilogue.  The prologue, in which James updates us on just what the P&P gang has been up to these last few years, is the most Janeian portion of the book.   As James explains in an afterword, Austen wrote the original draft of the novel in 1796-97 and revised it fifteen years later in 1811-12.  James sets her own novel in 1803, six years after the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy.  

My favorite part of the prologue is when James explains how envious neighbors from Meryton, the market town near the Bennetts home in P&P, deemed that "Miss Elizabeth's triumph was on much too grand a scale," so they conjured in their minds a sinister alternative history, wherein "Miss Lizzy," like a classic scheming adventuress, "had been determined to capture Mr. Darcy from the moment of their first meeting."  James then goes through all the events of the P&P to show how Elizabeth might deliberately have plotted step-by-step to achieve this mercenary objective.  It's all tongue-in-cheek, rest assured, but I can see it appealing to James' skeptical view of human nature.  Austen herself took a sardonic view of the foibles of man and woman kind, but James did her several times better (or worse) in this ill regard.

Oh! Charlotte, you schemer
Charlotte and Mr. Collins in the 2005
big screen version of P&P

Later on James even suggests, seriously this time, that Elizabeth's best youthful friend Charlotte Lucas, who married that sublimely odious vicar, Mr. Collins, deliberately attempted to sabotage Lizzy's marriage to Mr. Darcy by tipping the news of their infatuation to his formidable aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh.  This seems to me too dark a view of Charlotte and Lizzy's relationship (I always put the blame on spiteful Miss Bingley), as does James' pronouncement that Elizabeth's sister Lydia always "disliked" Lizzy.  Really?  I don't sense that all.  Did butterfly Lydia ever trouble herself seriously to dislike anyone?

Like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, James always seems to be looking for fiendish mysteries.  Of course James' own tragic life--both her mother and husband were institutionalized, the latter for most of their two-decade married life, and he ultimately committed suicide--understandably may have soured her view of human nature.  James emphasizes that Lizzy never would have married Darcy had he not been a rich man.  

Certainly we don't see much interaction between the Darcys in Pemberley and what there is of it is not very romantic.  In truth the Darcys come off rather as a dull old married couple.  Particularly disappointing is Elizabeth, who really is never given much of interest actually to do in the novel.  Her only noteworthy scene, as far as the mystery plot goes, is a charity visit she makes upon the denizens of the woodlands cottage in the company of her sister Jane Bingley.  

To be sure, women then were excluded from such unpleasant aspects of the real world as murder investigations, but I have a notion that, had Jane Austen actually written a detective novel, she would have found some way of effectively feminizing it.  Perhaps she would have invented the cozy mystery!  

An old married couple: The Darcys in the 2013 film version of Death Comes to Pemberley

Darcy's younger sister, Georgiana, provides what there is of love interest--both Darcy's cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and a character invented by PD James, a brilliant, handsome lawyer and baronet named Henry Aveling, are courting her--but none of this is really compelling either.  

The plot picks up when the Wickhams arrive on the scene--you can always count on the Wickhams for mayhem!--but the problem there is we don't get to see much at all of them.  They rarely even speak in the novel, even though it's Wickham who is arrested and charged when a murdered body is discovered in the woodland on the grounds of Pemberley.  

It's James' own characters whom the author endows with more life, but because these characters have to share the stage with the pale Austen people, they never get the attention which they merit.  It's the dark and mysterious woodland, though it be on the hallowed grounds of Pemberley, which really belongs in the heart of Jamesland.  We learn that Darcy's eccentric great-grandfather built a cottage there, where he lived as a recluse, ultimately shooting himself!  This seems not at all like Jane Austen, but it is very James.  Indeed, it is very similar to the dark Victorian backstory of the folly in The Black Tower (1975), which I reviewed here on my blog thirteen years ago.  

Living at this very cottage in 1803 is the family of the superannuated Pemberley coachman, now an assiduous polisher of the family silver, Thomas Bidwell: his wife, daughter Louisa, dying son Will and grandson Georgie, by his other daughter Sarah.  There's also, if we believe in the supernatural, a ghost of a woman periodically wandering the woods, whose appearance portends--What else?--death.

All this is interesting, but it sounds nothing like Austen.  Louisa Bidwell in particular sounds like a nod to PD James herself, an intellectually precocious girl in whom the scholarly local minister, Percy Oliphant, has taken a charitable interest, lending her books and including her with a few boys in his small private Latin class.  

Before PD James there 
was ME Braddon

This sinister setting, with its forbidding woods, phantom lady and violent suicide, sounds rather more like one of Austen's mocked Gothic novels, or, as it develops, a Victorian sensation novel by Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Braddon or Mrs. Henry Wood.  I suspect James could have written quite a good Victorian detective novel, something rather better than this neither fish nor fowl affair she gave us in Pemberley.  

The official investigators as well are a promising cast of characters, but they never get to do much. To be sure, Darcy's fellow local magistrate, the officious Sir Selwyn Hardcastle, who once insisted on hanging a man from the Pemberley estate for poaching a deer, is set up by page 100 to serve as a great nemesis for the master of Pemberley, as he assuredly would have been in one of John Dickson Carr's historical mysteries. 

Of his grave suspicion of Wickham in the crime, Sir Selwyn menacingly informs Darcy: "I am a simple man, Darcy.  When a man confesses, one who is not under duress, I tend to believe him."  Oh, what Carr would have done with this sinister man!  Yet this never really goes much of anywhere at all, despite an effective vignette when Darcy visits Sir Selwyn's country mansion.  There is even a butler named Buckle.  

The Darcys needed to get out of their own house more in this novel.  Much of the book is a country house mystery without any mystery, with even a sideboard breakfast spread of domed dishes right out of a Golden Age detective story: "eggs, home-cured bacon, sausages and kidneys."  Then we have the trial sequences which get so repetitive and boring, then the confession and a long explanation after that.  As a whole the narrative too often is inert.  

I can understand why James did it this way though.  Despite her protestations, she loved classic country house mysteries and additionally way back in 1971 she co-wrote The Maul and the Pear Tree, a fine study of a true crime, the Ratcliffe Highway serial murders, which took place in 1811, just eight years after the events detailed in Pemberley (see my 2012 review of the book here).  But all the legal stuff fit better into a study of an actual criminal case.  

Clunkingly anachronistically, James has "radical" Henry Alveston make a speech on the need for appeals courts, concluding presciently: "I can see no reason against such a change, and we are hopeful that it may come before the end of this century."  (Indeed it was 1876.)  With unintentional sad irony near the end of the novel she also has a character predict that the United States will become "a country as powerful, if not more powerful, than [the United Kingdom], and one which will continue to set an example of freedom and liberty to the whole of the world."  Well, at least until 2025, when it became an utter shame and disgrace to the world.

James was a very formal writer by nature and in her writing and her characters' speech she was never able to capture the real inflections of modern-day speech in the 21st century, when she published no fewer than three contemporary Adam Dalgliesh detective novels.  That formality, however, helps her mimic Austen, though she mostly lacks Austen's light touch.  Yet there also are times when her characters' speech sounds too like the later 20th century to me, with such phrases as these: "age difference"; "I was a disaster"; "made a move"; "clear and concise"; "the main facts"; "point out"; "take charge"; "blurted out the news"; "inappropriate"; "got it right"; "make a move"; "out of date"; "rent-free."  

I may be errantly nitpicking here, however.  I just know that it's not James but author Stephanie Barron, who transformed Jane Austen herself her series detective in a fifteen-novel series running from 1996 through 2023, who makes me feel like I am actually in Jane Austen's world.  Naturally British television has left Barron's fine books untouched, while rushing out and filming an adaptation of Pemberley in 2013, a year before James' death.  Jane Austen + PD James: sure winner, right?   

endearing young charmer: the talented Mr. Wickham

The film version has as the Darcys Matthew Rhys and Anna Maxwell Martin, good actors both but to my eye miscast here, especially AMM, who was too old for Elizabeth and rather looked it.  Rhys on the other hand strikes me as a bit too glowering and formidable, even for Darcy.  One reviewer noted amusingly that in handsome, charmingly dimpled Matthew Goode, however, filmmakers had finally cast a sufficiently attractive Wickham.  I can only assume his part was greatly expanded from that in the book, because in the book he hardly does anything except protest his innocence and make a boring explanatory speech near the end. 

But then I can't think of a single character from P&P to whom James really does justice.  Colonel Fitzwilliam plays a large part in the events in Pemberley, but he doesn't resemble the character from Austen's novel to my mind.  Mr. Bennett makes a forgettable cameo appearance (in the Pemberley library naturally), while Mrs. Bennett, Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh merely send letters.  To be sure Lady Catherine's short epistle is amusing. She divulges to the Darcys her certainty that had she been a man she would have made a most estimable attorney.  But all this good character material is essentially wasted for the most part.  

Had I written this novel, which I freely admit I would have had neither the wit nor ability to accomplish,  I would have set it in Longbourne and Meryton and brought in all of Elizabeth's vivid relations.  I think that is what Austen fans would have wanted and then we could have had a true village mystery--perhaps even with a nosy old village biddy who solves the case and turns out to be Miss Marple's great-great grandmother.  

HUGE SPOILER to PEMBERLEY

I also would have had a twist ending, where, after the confession, which proves to be false, Wickham admits to really being the murderer after all, then toddles nonchalantly off to America, leading us to fear that during the trip poor dim Lydia may very well get pushed into the pond, dropped into the drink.  Personally I think it would have been entirely in character for Wickham, who has all the making of a great criminal sociopath; but James in her novels generally could not bring herself actually to allow her murderers to get away with their murders entirely scot-free. 

END SPOILER

This final James novel has a very moral ending, which I suppose both our dear Aunt Janes--Marple and Austen--actually would have approved of.  James even gives us a character I don't recall from Austen: a genuinely good and admirable clergyman!  But then PD James herself remained a pious Anglican churchwoman to the end.