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, 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. 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 various student lodgers. 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. She 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 a very odd woman, and she loses her temper with the young student so that Imogen and Frances become suspicious.