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Jill Paton Walsh explains
" I had three reasons for accepting the commission to complete the book:
First natural piety.
I have just the right degree of admiration for
Dorothy L Sayers.
I like the kind of detection she wrote, and I am a devoted
fan of Lord Peter
Wimsey — the intelligent woman's literary pin-up. Few men in
literature or in
life share his most beguiling characteristic: that he requires
as his consort a
woman who is his intellectual equal. I owe Dorothy Sayers,
because of Gaudy
Night, which I read in my teens, my burning, and eventually
successful, ambition
to get into Oxford. And the opening of Thrones,
Dominations,
rough cut though it is, seemed to me very promising. It has a
wonderful mis-en-scene
— the London glitterati of 1936, and the early days of
the Wimsey marriage.
Seems a shame to waste it.
Second, the pleasure
of rising to a challenge. The project is not only the
project for a mystery
novel, but a mystery in its own right. Could I solve it?
How was the story
intended to go? Who would kill whom? How would they be found
out? Would the materials
available, if worked on intelligently, yield a
successful book?
Would it be possible to invent more, and to write more, in tune
with what already
existed? The craft of authorship has always fascinated me, and
I was eager to try
my hand at this very exacting project.
Third, self-interest.
I have only recently begun to write detective
fiction, and the
yoking of my name on a title page with that of one of the great
exponents of the
genre could not do me any harm. I won't deny that knowing that
there were others
who would give a right arm for the chance I was offered
helped!
There were two stages
to the work. First, I had to assemble anything that
could possibly cast
light on what DLS intended, and collate and edit the
materials. This
entailed a visit to Wheaton, Illinois, where Dorothy Sayers'
papers have ended
up, alongside those of C.S.Lewis, and Tolkien, among others.
The manuscript of
Thrones, Dominations and the unpublished correspondence
are there.
I had to try to discover why the project was abandoned - was there
something wrong
with it, that I would have to diagnose and attempt to cure? I
had to research
1936 in all the usual ways familiar to anyone writing a
historical novel
— read The Times, The London Illustrated News, diaries of the
day; keep a beady
eye, courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM, on
the vocabulary of
the time — I greatly enjoy this kind of work.
The second stage
was actually writing the book. For the result to be
anything other than
a consciously manipulated pastiche a fusion would have to
occur, in which
her vision, her characters, would seem to have become mine, and
I could write something
which was genuinely thought and felt, not just acted
out. I was afraid
this might not happen, and I would merely be impersonating
her.
DLS herself said
that although a detective story might arise from a moment
of inspiration it
needed to be worked out in an atmosphere of almost scholarly
calm. I set out
to take this advice; the best available. And I was being so
determinedly calm
it took me some time to realise what delicious fun I was
having. Thrones,
Dominations, as good detective stories should,
casts moral
shadows and raises
questions about human motivation.
Lord Peter Wimsey
and Harriet Vane
are among the most entertaining people
I have ever known;
they were wonderful
company. Once I got into the swing
the project gave me
some of the happiest
working hours I have ever spent. If
it were entirely my own
work I would have
to be modest about it — as it isn't
I can say that I think it is an
excellent read,
and that I hope and expect it
will please the Sayers fans, and
entice a new generation
to sample the delights
of Lord Peter Wimsey's charmed
circle."
Jill Paton Walsh January 1998
Thrones, Denominations
is published by Hodder & Stoughton ISBN 0340684550
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Thrones,
Dominations