Death Comes to Pemberly: So, apparently, does boredom (#11)

I don't generally read mysteries or crime novels. There's so much death, destruction and terror in the world that I generally avoid these genres in my reading choices -- and frankly, I've never really understood it as a form of entertainment. So, not surprisingly, I haven't read much by P.D. James, just one book whose name I can't remember. But I was pretty excited when I heard she'd written a mystery incorporating the characters from Pride and Prejudice -- I'm not a raving Jane Austen fan, but there's a reason that book's a classic.

Unfortunately, P.D. James' attempt to recapture the magic of Pride and Prejudice in her mystery Death Comes to Pemberly falls short. While all of the main Pride and Prejudice characters appear -- Darcy and Elizabeth, Georgiana, Wickham and Lydia, Jane and Bingley -- the relationships between them are very wooden. It appears that James was attempting to imitate Austen's style, and in that, I suppose, she succeed -- it's just that she succeeed at imitating the aloof style of Persuasion rather than the sparkling wit of Pride and Prejudice. The tone of Death Comes to Pemberly is pretty lifeless, and there's almost no development of the characters' inner lives -- Darcy and Elizabeth, for example, are happy because the text says so, not because you see any true warmth between them on the page.

Six years after the close of Pride and Prejudice, Dary and Elizabeth are living happily on their estate, Pemberly, with their two young sons. Life is apparently perfect. Elizabeth is preparing to throw a huge ball the next evening when her headstrong younger sister Lydia unexpectedly arrives, absolutely hysterical. She had been traveling with her husband, the ever-disgraced Wickham, and his friend, Captain Denny, preparing to crash the ball. But Wickham and Denny had gotten into an argument, and Denny had exited the carriage and headed into the dark woods. Wickham followed and then...gunshots. When Darcy and the members of his search party locate them, Wickham is standing over his friend's lifeless body, seemingly confessing to the murder. But, of course, it's never that simple in a mystery, and Darcy spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out who the real culprit is.

This quest involves a number of people that weren't in Pride and Prejudice, but James doesn't develop them enough for the reader to care, which makes the mystery pretty dull. We don't learn anything about Captain Denny so there's no emotional attachment to the crime; at the same time, Wickham (along with everyone else) has apparently not changed in the slightest in six years, so it's hard to care all that much about whether an unreformed scoundrel gets saved from the hangman's noose.

If you don't care about a novel's characters or plot, there's really not a lot to hang your hat on. In this case, you're probably just better off re-reading Pride and Prejudice. And then making up your own fan-fiction version about what happened after the happily-ever-after.