A Bit Too Whimsical...

 For years I have loved the Lord Peter Wimsey stories of Dorothy L Sayers. DLS died in 1957, leaving one novel unfinished and various bits of writing and sketches which she may have turned into further books. Forty years later, the executors of her estate approached Jill Paton Walsh and asked her to finish "Thrones, Dominations" which she did in 1998. I quite enjoyed it, and felt JPW's writing had got the right "feel", and particularly handled the dynamics of the relationship's between key characters [Wimsey, his wife Harriet, manservant Butler, and the rest of the family - minor aristocracy in Norfolk, and a Scotland Yard detective] I never got round to reading any more of JPW's Wimsey stories. She died during lockdown. Two weeks ago, I was in Norwich Library and spotted the three remaining books on the shelf. I borrowed them all!

To be honest, I was a teensy bit disappointed. Maybe I'd hoped for too much. T,D was mostly DLS and a little JPW, but Presumption of Death was JPW's story written using DLS ideas and snatches of stories. The other two I think were almost all JPW. 

And I think she just tried too hard - there was far too much reference to the earlier Wimsey stories. And whilst I love Peter and Harriet's "piffling" conversations, I think they overdid it a bit. Particularly the literary references - I don't mind occasionally having to stop and look something up so I can understand, but when it is every other paragraph...
As Sue found with Jim Eldridge's wartime book, the references to Bletchley Park seemed wrong - it was the same in Presumption of Death. Yes I know Peter is supposed to be working with British Intelligence, so might conceivably know about BP, but I think he would also have been wise enough to recognise that having signed the Official Secrets Act, he was not supposed to discuss BP "Until 30 years after the cessation of hostilities".

The Late Scholar is set in 1953, so their discussion of "A Ploughman's Lunch" would not have happened! Cheese rationing did not end till 1954, and a small group called the Cheese Bureau started promoting bread-and-cheese lunches in London pubs in 1956, but it was not till the 1960s that the Milk Marketing Board, led by Richard Trehane [from Dorset] made this a national campaign. 
This is poor research I think - to get two things so wrong - and I was disappointed both that JPW made the errors and her editors did not pick up on them, 
So I am rating these whodunits as just ***