The Further Adventures of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane

I've loved Dorothy Sayers' mysteries right back to the days of Ian Carmichael playing Lord Peter on TV. Harriet Vane has been one of my heroines for nearly as long - Harriet Walter played her just as I'd imagined in the TV series dramatising the stories Strong Poison, Gaudy Night and Have His Carcase which also starred Edward Petherbridge (a wonderful Wimsey).
The trouble with such a good series, with such memorable characters, is that there are never enough of them. Dorothy Sayers moved on to other work, such as the radio play about the life of Christ, The Man Born to be King, and her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, though she did leave clues to later stories she might have been planning.
The first of these clues was turned into the story Thrones, Dominions by Jill Paton Walsh - and she did it well enough that it was quite hard to see where Dorothy Sayers ended and Jill Paton Walsh began. It helped, I think, that Jill Paton Walsh had already written crime novels of her own. She's also a very good children's writer.
Thrones, Dominions was set in 1936, at the beginning of Peter and Harriet's married life, and was popular enough for Jill Paton Walsh to be asked to do another.
In A Presumption of Death, the time is 1940, and Peter and Harriet are living at Talboys with their small children. Talboys and the children appeared in the last Lord Peter story that Dorothy Sayers ever wrote, which was collected in the volume Striding Folly, and was set in 1942. Here, there are a couple of murders, one very grisly, unlicensed pigs, and a lot of detail about rationing and daily life in the "phony war" before the Blitz.
For this book, Jill Paton Walsh had a lot less to go on - Dorothy Sayers had written a series of letters from various members of the Wimsey family and familiar cast of her books, discussing aspects of the War, for the Spectator magazine, and some of these are included in the book. I must say I couldn't tell the difference between the letters and the rest of the story, though one or two of the details did make me think that the author was showing off her research a bit. The letters placed Lady Helen at the Ministry of Instruction and Morale, and Lord Peter and Bunter off on a secret mission somewhere, where they remain for the first part of the book. So it's Harriet who starts to investigate the mysterious murder of a land girl while the rest of the village were having an air raid practice down the cellars of the local pub (apart from the Methodists, who would rather use a nearby cave than be in close proximity to alcohol, whatever the reason for it).
There are two more books in the series after this, and I'll be tracking them down eventually. Even pastiche Wimsey is worth reading, and it's nice to see where the characters get to after the original books run out.

Rabbi Small and the Absence of Guns

When I read crime fiction, I'm usually not reading it for the puzzle of who-dun-it, but for the background details of different ways of life. That's why I like the Harry Kemelman series about Rabbi Small. He's the rabbi of a Conservative Jewish temple in a small town somewhere near Boston in the 1960s and 70s, and the books go into some detail about the inner workings of the temple and the Jewish religion. With added murders, which Rabbi Small solves by applying rabbinical scholarship to the problems.
I've just finished reading Thursday the Rabbi Walked Out (all the titles include days of the week), which brings Rabbi Small to his twelfth year as rabbi of the congregation of Barnard's Crossing, and somewhere in the early 1970s. Women's lib and sexism form part of the plot - women in the congregation want to take a full part in the synagogue services, while at the murder scene the police think a woman must have done the shooting because of the erratic nature of the shots fired.
And that's where I started pondering. It's not long ago that there was a massacre at the school in the town of Sandy Hook - a town that I imagine to be similar to Barnard's Crossing. I remember it being described by residents as a nice place to live, friendly, with a low crime rate - and yet the first woman to be killed (by her son) thought it necessary to keep assault rifles in her home.
Back in the 1970s, the murder weapon is brought from the local bank to the scene of the crime by one of the tellers - the guns were bought to make the tellers feel safer because the bank did not employ an armed guard. The old chap who lives in the semi-derelict old house on the hill does not have any weapons in his house. Nor does the ex-Captain of Marines who is president of the temple, it seems, or any of the other characters. Only one character is described as being keen on shooting - he spends a lot of time at the pistol range at the local yacht club - but he deliberately doesn't have a gun licence so that he isn't tempted to use his skill with a pistol to solve his arguments for him. Oh, and the janitor at the temple goes deer hunting occasionally - but that's it.
So how did small town America get from there to a situation where an ordinary woman thinks she needs an assault rifle?

Reading Crime Novels

I had a chat today with a chap who was buying one of Tony Hillerman's novels about the Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, and he told me that there had been films made of some of the stories. IMDb website confirms this, listing four made for TV movies. The first was The Dark Wind in 1991, followed by Skinwalkers in 2002, Coyote Waits in 2003 and A Thief of Time in 2004. They look quite interesting - but not interesting enough to send off to the States for, so I think I'll continue to rely on my imagination for the settings, fed by old copies of National Geographic.
It was the setting that attracted me to the series. I'm never particularly bothered by who did the murder - what I'm interested in is life on the Navajo reservation and around the Four Quarters. And I now know that the film Cheyenne Autumn doesn't actually have any Cheyenne in it at all, thanks to a hilarious scene in one of the books where the film is screened at a local drive in movie.
It was the same with the Mma Ramotswe stories by Alexander McCall Smith, too - I wanted to know what it was like to live in Botswana. What particularly impressed me in the first book, the Number One Ladies' Detective Agency, was a comment by one of the characters that nobody wrote books about people like him - and the next chapter was entirely about him and his life.
That's why I read the Faye Kellerman novels about Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, too - it's the details about Orthodox Jewish life in modern Los Angeles - and of course, that's the attraction of Harry Kemelman's Rabbi Small series (titled with the days of the week). My memories of the murders are hazy, but the synagogue politics of the 1960s small American town remain vivid, as does Rabbi Small's impressions of Israel when he takes a sabbatical there.
Perhaps the most exotic location for a crime novel that I've read is Tibet. I came across Water Touching Stone, by Eliot Pattison, the second in a series featuring a Chinese detective in Tibet. This was more than just an interesting setting - it was an entirely different world. Occasionally there are trucks and Communist officials and cheap plastic shoes, but surrounded by villagers who believe in demons, remote lamaseries, a reincarnated lama, smugglers and an exiled White Russian with his favourite camel (surely a role for John Rhys-Davies, who played Gimli and Indiana Jones' sidekick Sallah, if anyone ever attempted to film it). I've recently found a copy of the first book in the series, The Skull Mantra, so I'll be revisiting that strange and wonderful world soon.