Jill Paton Walsh, The Wyndham Case

Jill Paton Walsh, The Wyndham Case
St. Martin’s Press
© 1993 Jill Paton Walsh
Available from used booksellers

There’s been a lively discussion on the Lord Peter Wimsey Appreciation Society Facebook page which has touched on the quality of Jill Paton Walsh’s continuation of Dorothy L. Sayers’s series of novels about Wimsey.  Having read one of Paton Walsh’s mystery novels (The Bad Quarto) some years ago, I acquired all four of them to see how well they have held up.[1]  Having finished The Wyndham Case, I can say that at least the first in the series is quite good.

The title is itself interesting, as the death at the center of the book takes place in a rather special library at Cambridge known as the Wyndham Case, and the investigation into that death is, of course, the Wyndham case.  A young student (Philip Skellow) at St. Agatha’s College, from a decidedly working class background (and as a result treated by many of his fellow students as something of a lesser being) is found one morning on the floor of the Wyndham case, with a serious injury to his skull, having bled to death.  Imogen Quy, the College’s resident nurse, is asked to come to the library; she calls the police, as it is obviously a death by violence,  A friend of hers, Mike Parsons, is a detective on the Cambridge police; he is a member of the team that arrives to investigate the death.

As it happens, this library was founded by a (very large) donation some 300 years earlier.  The books are to remain in the library; they can be read or examined only there; no volume may be loaned out or sold.  And once every 100 years a complete audit of the library must be performed.  If anything is missing, the College loses the endowment and all the books are to be sold.  Also, as it happens, Skellow left a party in the suite of rooms he shares with Jack Taverham (who is from a wealthy family) the night before, and was next seen dead.  (Taverham and Skellow got along very badly.)  And none of the people at the party are willing to talk about it.

Meanwhile, one of Quy’s lodgers, Professor Wylie, returns from a trip to Italy and discovers, or at least thinks, that a very valuable book has been taken from his room.  And apparently one of her other lodgers left the rear door unlocked around the same time.  Or someone picked the lock.

One thing leads to another, and a second death—definitely murder—occurs; a third year pre-med student is found in an ornamental fountain late at night, drowned.  And Taverham has disappeared.

The investigations into all of this are handled well, and the resolution is both intellectually and emotionally satisfying (at least I thought so).  For a first mystery (Paton Walsh had written a number of children’s books and “straight” novels prior), this is a very satisfying read.  The setting is well done, the college atmosphere rings true (as well as one who have never been to Cambridge can tell), and the characters—while not uniformly quite so nice as they might originally appear—are sharply drawn.  Both the Master of St. Agatha’s and his wife are especially well done.

And if you think setting a mystery series in a college of Cambridge University named St. Agatha’s is extremely appropriate, well, all I can say is “You are right.”

[1] Her four books with Imogen Quy are The Wyndham Case (1993); A Piece of Justice (1997)’ Debts of Dishonor (2006; and The Bad Quarto (2007).