nineveh_uk

PD James has written a new novel. It’s a murder mystery. It’s also Pride and Prejudice fanfiction. Courtesy of the Guardian, I give you Death Comes to Pemberley.

As the press release puts it: "The year," runs the press release, "is 1803, and Darcy and Elizabeth have been married for six years. There are now two handsome and healthy sons in the Pemberley nursery, Elizabeth's beloved sister Jane and her husband, Bingley, live within seventeen miles, the ordered and secure life of Pemberley seems unassailable, and Elizabeth's happiness in her marriage is complete. But their peace is threatened and old sins and misunderstandings are rekindled on the eve of the annual autumn ball. The Darcys and their guests are preparing to retire for the night when a chaise appears, rocking down the path from Pemberley's wild woodland, and as it pulls up, Lydia Wickham, an uninvited guest, tumbles out, screaming that her husband has been murdered."

Faber and Faber say, “the brilliance of both the idea and the execution on this occasion is simply breathtaking”. I don’t know about you, but I am dazzled by the originality of the premise, both the genre mix and the plot summary. Who could have thought it? (I’ve never actually read any James - keep meaning to and it keeps not happening – and she is reviewed as a very good writer, but a quick Google has found both Darkness at Pemberley (by TH White!) and The Phantom of Pemberley, and that’s without even looking at non-commercial fanfic.) Or maybe I should stop bitching and finish something myself.


On another note, I observed the Doctor’s comment on last week’s Doctor Who apropos kissing:

“Bit out of practice, but I’ve had some wonderful feedback.”

What with the evening dress complete with top hat and cane with gadget in the top, is Matt Smith/Stephen Moffatt making a bid for a new set of Wimsey adaptions? Excessive height notwithstanding (though he’s only got two inches on Peter*), it would be an intriguing prospect, just as long as they get me to do the script editing.

*That said, I think an argument can be made that Peter’s five foot nine is like my five foot seven, that is, over generous.

‘I’ll do anything you like if you’ll take it off now.’

‘That’s a promise.’

Really, with that as canon (Gaudy Night, chp. 19), how can the universe continue on its course and yet contain no Peter/Harriet dog-collar fics?

Anyway, I see from metafandom that it’s kink_bingo time, and so I went and looked at a card and was scarred for life one of the prompts was “collar”, and while I never, ever intend to do kink_bingo, I am afraid I did have a little idea... PG-ish.

( but rather wishing a more strict restraint )

ETA: And, inspired, if that's the right word, ( the other way round.* )

I am feeling remarkably uninspired today. The weather is not helping; I was just about to go for a walk in the park and it has started raining. I shall give it ten minutes.

I want to read some new Wimseyfic. Why is the world not responding by dropping Wimseyfic into my lap? Come to that, when I want to write something, why does it not spring Athena-like from my brow? It seems that the inspiration that ought to come from having a table again is being swallowed by also having a telephone. And the inevitable tendency of a table to get covered in Stuff. I need more cupboards and a house-elf.

Also, in the absence of Wimseyfic can anyone rec any good Snape/Lily? If that isn't a contradiction in terms.

And, being completly random, and because I must finish the Hilary/Bunter so that I can get back to the Wimsey/Potterverse crossover, have a snippet of the latter:

***

Wimsey strolled briskly down the gravel drive to the Hogwarts gates. Walking up after lunch, the damp air had carried a faint warmth and whiff of spring, but Highland nights were cold. He shoved his hands in his overcoat pockets – he had toyed with purchasing a set of robes before deciding that he was really too old for dressing-up games – and let himself out through the wicket gate onto the Hogsmeade road. He had taken a small house on the far side of the village, not as convenient as it might be for the school, but far more so for everything else and with a slate roof. Wimsey did not claim to know a great deal about Scottish vernacular architecture, but he felt certain there was a good reason that it did not normally include thatch. He recalled that the highly selective guide to the magical world for Muggle parents he had read on the train had described one of the Hogwarts founders as originating in the Fen country. If the moss-covered and probably rat-infested roofs around him were the fault of Salazar Slytherin, Wimsey could quite understand why he was not fondly remembered.

I have a telephone line. I have broadband (once I have set it up). I have a table coming on Saturday. I have done some ironing for the first time in a month (that I have not quite run out of work clothes in three and a half weeks suggests that I possibly also have too many clothes). AND despite the boxes everywhere and no table I have sat down and written four hundred words of WIP, though why on earth I am expending time suddenly giving a minor OC a personality rather than cutting straight to "The English Schoolgirl's Fantasy Valet Lover" I really cannot say. Anyone would think it was art.

Here follows a trailer for The Healing Fountain, 12 rating, contains moderate silliness:

"The Healing Fountain had taken a change of direction. The mother had gone to America and Hilary, having limited knowledge of that country, had sensibly sent her heroine to school. School, even a girls’ school of the duller type, was a familiar world to Wimsey, and Sarah’s success on account of an extensive albeit theoretical knowledge about sex entirely plausible. He paused briefly to admire the new girl’s attitude to team sports and the wisdom of reading the rules of hockey in advance. The summer holidays brought the return of the Mediterranean round, and of Mr Harland, now firmly established as the man, unless his lordship were very much mistaken, to induct the heroine into the pains and passions of physical love, if not without some hiccoughs along the way."

Surely there must be Gavin and Stacey/Torchwood crossover fanfic?

It is, after all, by far the best explanation of what happened on the fishing trip.

Being a short fic attempting to address just one of the many issues handled ham-fistedly by Jill Paton-Walsh in The Attenbury Emeralds.

*

( Gerald was dead )

Fanfiction doesn’t have to be practice for ‘professional’ writing in order to be of worth. On the other hand, thinking of it as such can help justify having spent the evening writing 1200 words of Hilary/Bunter when you really ought to be doing something else.

It is not in fact easier to write badfic, or even spoof-fic, than it is to try to produce something good. It is easier to write short excerpts of almost anything. No doubt if I tried to sustain badfic over a thousand words that would present its own challenges. Fantasy!Bunter is at least proving not too grim so far. Mind you, he still has most of his clothes on.

I have not been managing to write the Wimsey/Potterverse crossover, but I have at least been thinking about it and it is developing reasonably well. I now have the “they meet at a party” scene so beloved of Potterfic (not least me. The percentage of my Potterfic involving parties is embarrassingly high), and a bit of jokey RPF has turned into plot. It is always pleasing when a random idea becomes thematic. I still need to work on the purpose of the Corsican bandits, though.

Courtesy of munditia, Hand-kissing Promptathon on which I may have left some prompts.

Let me quote a short passage from the start of chapter VII of Murder Must Advertise (shortly before Charles gets slugged on the staircase):

“[Chief-Inspector Parker] had had a long day at the Yard — no thrills, no interesting disclosures, no exciting visitors, not so much as a dis-diamonded rajah or a sinister Chinaman — only the reading and summarizing of twenty-one reports of interviews with police narks, five hundred and thirteen letters from the public in response to a broadcast S O S about a wanted man, and a score or so of anonymous letters, all probably written by lunatics.”

My copy of The Attenbury Emeralds has arrived, and I am reading it. That a dis-emeralded Rajah has turned up on page 18 probably says all you need to know about its quality. I shall have much to say, but to spare you will save it until the end. It is a bit slow-going because I keep having to stop to say "WTF?TRY(%HDFNW(HGOAT!"

Jill Paton-Walsh’s The Attenbury Emeralds, announced last year, is published on 16 September 2010. The first thing I’ll note is that whilst I don’t know the stats on novels published in hard back (in this case simultaneously with paperback), that they are bothering at all seems to indicate a fair degree of confidence in the publishers. It’s easy to forget when complaining that the sequels – and now prequel – simply aren’t Sayers, that these are very strongly-selling books, and that an awful lot of people like them. Much as I would like a facsimile of the Thrones, Dominations MS, if we could only have one or the other (which is of course not true), then looked at purely financially the novel was surely the right choice for the Estate.

At this point I owe an apology: I went to a talk by Paton-Walsh at last year’s St Hilda’s crime convention, and completely failed to write it up. The talk was mostly about jewels and crime, but she did talk briefly about the new novel, and read a short extract. I can’t say that it really encouraged me; the scene included Peter’s first-person diary, and I fear, though cannot quite recall, that some of the novel is definitely told from this POV, and Freddy Arbuthnot discoursing intelligently.

Having realised that publication is nearly upon us, I thought I’d have a sniff around for any further details.

( Amazon blurb )

The same page has a short interview with Paton-Walsh – whether or not one likes her Wimsey fanfic, she’s certainly a fan! A good thing, given that she is being paid (handsomely, one assumes) to write fanfic.

There’s a slightly longer version of the same blurb at fantasticfiction.

Apart from the really obvious question of “why has Peter only got round to telling Harriet this story, given that they’ve been married for 16 years?”, I can’t say that JPW’s Peter and Harriet facing a changing world raises my confidence. Does anyone else want to bet whether we have a scene in which Helen rails against the new National Health Service*, and Peter or Harriet politely but firmly defends it? Notwithstanding that both of them would almost certainly have voted for Churchill’s conservatives.**

A much longer review, by a blogger who has actually read the book, is here.

There are some minor spoilers in the text, which I won’t discuss here except to say that once more my hopes are not raised, but I don’t think it’s spoilery to quote this:

The time is now firmly in the 1950s in Festival of Britain time. No more palatial living for most of the Wimseys’ friends and relations, the war has seen to that but Bunter is still here and though he would like to maintain the class distinction he finds it difficult when his son Peter is firm friends with the Wimsey boys.

Because as we know, children are never, ever sensitive to class distinctions and the fact that three of them are going to Eton***, and the other to a London grammar**** (actually, secret jealousy that Peter Bunter gets to stay at home could be interesting, but it won’t happen, nor will “So did he call you after Dad so that he got to say “I love you, too, Peter”?). But then my general policy whenever I hear the words “But I treated her like a daughter” is to assume that the employee thus treated would probably rather have had a decent wage, set hours, and paid holiday. We shall see. If the children are not appallingly cute/precocious, it may be all right. It will be interesting to see how Bunter fits back into domestic service post- the wartime variety, and how Peter copes with perhaps not quite so many housemaids. But the aristocracy were going bust all over the place in the inter-war period and you’d never know it from Sayers’ novels, and the fifties were not the seventies. As DLS put it in 1949: "No doubt the family income from landed estate is considerably reduced; but so long as Harriet can turn out readable fiction they will probably still be paying super-tax."

I await the arrival of my copy with anticipation. I don't anticipate loving it, but Paton-Walsh can at least write, even if I disagree with what she writes. Needless to say, I will not be considering it canon.

*I had not realised how big the Labour victory of 1945 was. They had a majority of 239, and more than twice as many seats as the Conservatives

** I can see Peter as a cross-bencher when he ends up in the Lords, not because he isn’t a Tory, but because he doesn’t strike me as a party political animal (it's hard to see him following a party line or submitting to the whips), and that, plus that whisker of unease at the hereditary principle leads me to think he’d probably be happier feeling he was able to plough his own furrow.

***Where, taught by Bunter, as fags they will all make perfect toast.

****Though my mother has a rather nice 1950s children’s book entitled The Harlands Go Hunting in which the daughters of the main family are at boarding school (considerably down the social scale from Peter – rural professional, I think), but are close friends with a girl in the village who attends the local school and is clearly not in the same social or income bracket (I’m now thinking that her mother may even be a domestic servant, but I’m probably making that up).

(Potential minor spoilers in comments)