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Dorothy Sayers got six chapters into Thrones, Dominations (the title comes from a Milton quote, which already indicates Sayers' general frame of mind at the time) sometime in the midst of the abdication crisis and putting on "Busman's Honeymoon" and never went back to it; the trustees of her son's estate eventually contracted with Jill Paton Walsh to finish it sixty years later. Somewhat to my surprise, Paton Walsh does a very credible job.
I spent a lot of time talking about Peter's character development throughout the series in my posts on these books, and Paton Walsh managed not to make him regress at all, which I appreciated--there was perhaps a touch more of the old banter than I thought strictly called for, but it was by no means unbearable or wholly OOC, and I was pleased for that. I do think that if Sayers had continued the book it would have been rather more full of prose than dialogue, but all in all I quite liked it. The background politics are brought in a little more obviously than before, but not in a way that seems too horribly obtrusive, either; but then, I can't read anything from the 1930s without thinking of the war, so I would have been thinking about it no matter what.
Anyway, if you like Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, I would recommend picking this one up. I don't have any desire to read Paton Walsh's other Wimsey books--I think her writing up The Attenbury Emeralds misses the entire point by a shockingly large margin, and I am no fan of what she did to St. George--but this one is a fun coda to the actual series of eleven. (In some ways, I have to admit that I consider Busman's Honeymoon a coda to the series of ten.)
( Spoilers about the killer )
I spent a lot of time talking about Peter's character development throughout the series in my posts on these books, and Paton Walsh managed not to make him regress at all, which I appreciated--there was perhaps a touch more of the old banter than I thought strictly called for, but it was by no means unbearable or wholly OOC, and I was pleased for that. I do think that if Sayers had continued the book it would have been rather more full of prose than dialogue, but all in all I quite liked it. The background politics are brought in a little more obviously than before, but not in a way that seems too horribly obtrusive, either; but then, I can't read anything from the 1930s without thinking of the war, so I would have been thinking about it no matter what.
Anyway, if you like Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, I would recommend picking this one up. I don't have any desire to read Paton Walsh's other Wimsey books--I think her writing up The Attenbury Emeralds misses the entire point by a shockingly large margin, and I am no fan of what she did to St. George--but this one is a fun coda to the actual series of eleven. (In some ways, I have to admit that I consider Busman's Honeymoon a coda to the series of ten.)
( Spoilers about the killer )