Jill Paton Walsh and Imogen Quy

Jill Paton Walsh was born in 1937 and is an English novelist.  She has written children’s fiction and adult fiction.  She is most famous for writing 4 novels based on Dorothy Sayers’ characters Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.  She first wrote a completion of Sayers’ last Wimsey novel Thrones, Dominations.  
Sayers started writing this story  in the late 1930s but abandoned it, and never returned to it, preferring to concentrate on writing plays that were mainly on religious themes.  Walsh wrote the novel, using Sayers’ chapters and plot in 1998 and followed up by another mystery novel in 2004, using excerpts from the “Wimsey papers”, a few pieces written by Sayers in wartime, about Peter… Paton Walsh then wrote 2 more original Wimsey novels...one based on Peter’s first case the Attenbury Emeralds, and another called the Late Scholar, set in an Oxford college.

She was born Gillian Bliss and educated at Oxford.  She married Antony Paton Walsh and later married another children’s writer and scholar, John Rowe Townsend... who died in 2014.   She lives in Cambridge...

My favourite of her works are the Imogen Quy Novels.  They are light detective fiction set in a Cambridge college.  Imogen is the college nurse of a fictional college, who finds herself involved in mysteries.   They cover something of the same ground as Sayers’ Gaudy Night, crimes committed for reasons peculiar to academic life, such as falsifying data or stealing other people’s research.  But Paton Walsh writes with a light touch. 
Her heroine is an independent and attractive young woman, who had a love affair which went wrong...  This led to her giving up her training as a doctor and qualifying as a nurse.   She has light romances, and shares her house with a variety of student lodgers, who get involved in problems.  There is enough science in them to seem realistic without being too heavy…

Imogen has a friend, Mike who is  a police detective in Cambridge.. as is usual for an amateur detective.  (Peter Wimsey has his friend Charles Parker).   She sometimes helps him by persuading students to talk to the police, and he tries to look out for her safety. 

Her novel “A Piece of Justice” is about a mathematician who has died.  Imogen’s lodger Frances,   a hard up graduate student, gets a job helping to write a biography of the man, Gideon Summerfield.   She finds that the dead man’s widow Janet is very odd woman, and she loses her temper with the young student so that Imogen and Frances become suspicious.  They find that other people who were engaged to write the man’s biography have disappeared or died and it seems there is a mystery.   
They also learn that Gideon was considered an oddity in that he was a fairly average scientist, as a young man, but in middle age produced  a piece of exceptional work which made him famous in the academic world.  Frances learns that the dead man had a mistress... and that he visited her once a week…- on the orders of his wife.  She then learns that often the weekly meeting was just a friendly chat, or a cover for another assignation with another woman...  

Imogen tries to find out what has happened to May Swann, who was one of those writers who had been engaged to write the biography before it went to Frances... 
She follows the trail to Wales, where she used to spend summer holidays as a child.  In the village, she is shot by a local farmer... and finds that he and his family had a beautiful quilt, a piece of craftwork...and that a strange woman had been harassing and threatening them, to persuade them to let her buy it.    He shoots at Imogen, thinking that she is the woman come back again and wounds her.   Imogen recovers from the shooting, and then finds that May Swann is dead...

 On her return to Cambridge, she speaks to Janet Summerfield -who is plainly a very unstable woman. And Janet confesses that she murdered her husband… because he was going to confess that he had stolen his mathematical work from someone…  Janet has lived her life as the “wife of a great scholar” and based all her self-esteem on the fact that her husband was a genius and that she had devoted herself to supporting him... like Dorothea Brooke with Casaubon…So when she learned that he had not done the work that he was famous for and wanted to tell the world, she killed him rather than let him confess.  Imogen learns that Janet had an accomplice who helped her to kill Summerfield and also his would be  biographers who might have ferreted out his secret. 

On her trip to Wales, having found out about the quilt, she finds that the mathematical pattern on the quilt was what Summerfield copied and based his maths work on, and that it was the work of the farmer’s wife... now a very old lady.   Janet’s accomplice tries to kill Frances and is arrested… and then Imogen meets the lady who made the quilt and the pattern.  It emerges that she was a scholar at Cambridge but left after she was attacked in a riot over the issue of granting women degrees… She married a farmer and moved to Wales and used her skills to make the quilt. Imogen arranges for her to receive her degree, many years later….

I hope to review another of Walsh’s books later….