What Jane Austin would have written if she'd written a mystery

Death Comes to Pemberly is an outlier among P.D. James’s murder mysteries. It was published in 2012 after James had published 17 mysteries set in the contemporary era in which she created Adam Dalgliesh, a police commander and poet. James died in 2014 at age 94, so Pemberly is a very late blossom indeed.

It is also as far as I know unique in that recreates Jane Austin’s characters an involves them in a mystery, rather than, say, taking a detective like Sherlock Holmes and involving him in another mystery as Laurie King does in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. James said, “I wanted to combine my two enthusiasms: writing detective fiction and reading Jane Austen. I thought it would be enjoyable to revisit the characters in Pride and Prejudice and to create a really original, exciting, credible detective story at the same time.”

Death Comes to Pemberly opens in 1803, six years after Pride and Prejudice, with Darcy and Elizabeth happily settled in Pemberly House, the great house on the Darcy estate. They are the parents of two young boys and preparing for the annual Lady Ann’s ball. The evening before the ball, a carriage hurtles out of the stormy dark carrying Elizabeth’s flighty sister Lydia who is screaming bloody murder. Lydia’s husband, the despicable if charming, George Wickham, has followed his friend, a Captain Denny, into the woods after Denny stopped the carriage. Lydia screams that Denny has killed Wickham. When a search party finds the two men in the wood, however, Denny is dead and Wickham, cradling the body exclaims, “He was my friend, my only friend, and I’ve killed him! I’ve killed him! It’s my fault.”

Because the death occurred on Darcy’s land and because Wickham, much to Darcy’s disgust, is Darcy’s brother-in-law, Darcy cannot be the investigating magistrate. That has to be Sir Selwyn Hardcastle from a neighboring estate. Complicating matters is some unfortunate history between the Darcy and Hardcastle families. Indeed, that is only one complication and among the pleasures of Permberly are the number of events and characters in which Darcy and Elizabeth are embroiled. 

Another pleasure is James’s ability to reproduce Austin’s style and syntax. Here, taken entirely at random, a sample: “The statement was met by a silence which Elizabeth felt she was expected to break. As she rose she was aware of the sixteen pairs of eyes fixed on her, of worried and troubled people waiting to be told that all in the end would be well, that they personally had nothing to fear and that Pemberly would remain as it had always been, their security and their home.” The passive voice, the long sentences, the record small moments and social relations all reflect Austin’s sensibilities. 

At the same time, James managed to avoid the melodrama and preposterous coincidences of much 19^th century fiction. In my reading, James handles masterfully the ripples caused by Captain Denny’s death, the potential harm to the estate, the family in crisis, and the story of what led up to and actually happened the night before Lady Ann’s Ball. We understand Elizabeth and Darcy, Lydia and Wickham, Elizabeth’s parents and her sister Jane. We understand them better perhaps that we did in Pride and Prejudice.

Readers who enjoy the book may also enjoy the three-part BBC television adaption of the story. It is no longer Jane Austin, and the scriptwriter had to simplify as they always do. I did not see Ann Maxwell Martin as Elizabeth, but that is a quibble. It did help to see Chatsworth House as a stand in for Pemberly House’s exteriors and Castle Howard for its interiors. When the show was broadcast in December 2013, Antonia Frasier called it “a Christmas feast.” I recommend it, but for maximum pleasure, read the book first.