Death Comes to Pemberley: What If Jane Austen Wrote Mysteries?

After reading every Agatha Christie novel I could find in my teens, someone suggested I try P.D. James, another female British novelist who was renowned for her mystery novels. I enjoyed her books but wasn't as rabid about them as I was about Christie novels. However, last month a friend told me that P.D. James had written a murder mystery set in the fictional world of Pemberley, Mr. Darcy's abode in Pride & Prejudice. As someone who loves Jane Austen and loves mysteries, clearly I had to read this.

Obviously, this book is just Jane Austen fan fiction. But it's written by a celebrated author, which lends it an air of respectability that is usually missing in most fanfic. Also, it is a completely different genre from Pride & Prejudice, so despite the use of the same characters and settings, it still feels fresh and unexpected. This is no Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, where the text is identical to the original with only a few zombie battles thrown in. Instead, James has a wholly original story about a man being murdered in the woodlands surrounding Pemberley, and the subsequent arrest and trial of Mr. Wickham for the murder, despite his protestations of innocence.

Now this is not a perfect novel by any means. I wholly recommend it if you're a Jane Austen fan, but not if you're just looking for a good murder mystery. The story concerns itself more with the characters and looking at what they've been up to since Pride & Prejudice ended, and it's only in the last 90 pages that the mystery really kicks into high gear. The plot is fairly rushed and barely sustains any suspense. But if you know your Austen, you will derive a great deal of amusement from this novel.

There is a great deal of exposition in the opening chapters to explain the events that took place in Pride & Prejudice. Frankly this seems unnecessary because the only people who will want to read this book have already read Pride & Prejudice a dozen times. But once these formalities are dispensed with, James gleefully takes us into her imagined world of Pemberley. There are some sly digs at the original novel as Elizabeth ruminates on her tempestuous courtship with Mr. Darcy and thinks, "If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?" It's readily apparent that James does think Austen was brilliant enough to make the Elizabeth-Darcy romance credible, but nonetheless the entire novel is filled with amusing remarks like these that serve as a critique of Pride & Prejudice. 

What I loved most were the casual references to characters out of other Austen novels. I've always viewed Austen's six novels as existing in separate worlds, but it is rather delightful to acknowledge that all the characters lived in the same Victorian England and could be interconnected. So if you (like me) have always regretted that Austen didn't write more novels, Death Comes to Pemberley is an agreeable way to pass the time and re-visit characters who have become familiar friends.