- Walsh, Jill Paton and Dorothy L. Sayers. A Presumption of Death. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 2002. ISBN 0-312-29100-0.
- This is an entirely new Lord Peter Wimsey mystery written
by Jill Paton Walsh, based upon the “Wimsey Papers”—mock wartime
letters among members of the Wimsey family by Dorothy L. Sayers,
published in the London Spectator in 1939 and 1940. Although
the hardcover edition is 378 pages long, the type is so large that
this is almost a novella in length, and the plot is less intricate,
it seems to me, than the genuine article. Walsh, who was three years
old at the period in which the story is set, did her research well:
I thought I'd found half a dozen anachronisms, but on each occasion
investigation revealed the error to be mine. But please, RAF pilots do
not “bale” out of their Spitfires—they bail out!
April 2004 