Review: The Attenbury Emeralds

The Attenbury Emeralds by Jill Paton Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are a couple of mentions early in the Wimsey canon of his first case having to do with the Attenbury Emeralds, and in this book we finally get that story. Suffering from shell shock (what we now call PTSD), Lord Peter in 1921 was just starting to take his first tentative step back into society, a country house party with people he had known for a long time. There's a theft involving the emeralds of the title - or, rather, one emerald in particular, the "king stone," which turns out to be one of a set, sold off by an Indian maharajah to save his people from famine in the 19th century.

The whole business is rather reminiscent of a similar mystery in one of the Wimsey short stories, down to the host not wanting his guests treated like criminals and even how the stone is to be smuggled out, though in this case the plan is both less clever and yet more successful. The inept police inspector that Lord Peter later clashes with in Whose Body? is in charge of the investigation, and his sergeant, Charles Parker, is the same man who becomes Peter's friend, collaborator and eventually brother-in-law.

There are one or two very minor inconsistencies I noticed between this book and the Dorothy Sayers portion of the series. The one is that several people, in Peter's flashbacks, call him "Lord Wimsey" and he doesn't correct them, as he did in one of the early books. The possible second is that Bunter's son (now revealed to be named Peter) seems closer in age to Peter and Harriet's eldest, Bredon, than he did in A Presumption of Death, where he was referred to as a "baby" while Bredon was three years old; it's not completely out of the question to refer to a toddler as a baby, of course, and it's never actually stated that they are the same age or close to it in this book, just that they are both at Eton and Bredon is 16, which means that Peter Bunter could be 14 or so. I'm overthinking it, aren't I?

The actual mystery involves multiple similar emeralds and multiple occasions when they could have been switched in a plan that stretches over decades and requires at least three murders. In the end I felt it was improbable - the plan, that is. (view spoiler)[A woman living in poverty is so outraged by her late husband's family's rejection of their marriage that she holds on to a valuable stone that she legitimately owns and that could make her and her daughter comfortable if she sells it, because by complete coincidence she could also use it to get a weird sort of revenge against different members of the family entirely, and she picks the revenge option and kills three people to keep the very long-term plan on track? And also the two stones were both at the same party during World War II, again by coincidence, and someone present doesn't recognize her sister's close friend, and it's all a red herring, because they could have been switched then but, as it turns out, weren't? It's all a bit thin.

Not, then, as strong as the earlier Jill Paton Walsh books in the series, both of which built on much more foundation of Dorothy Sayers (the first an unfinished manuscript, the second a series of epistolary pieces published during World War II). Peter and Harriet are still mutually supportive without question or deviation, which was endearing in the earlier books, but here seems less real somehow, as if they really should argue about something, at least, given the strain they're both under. I'll still read the last book in the series, but now with reduced expectations.

That's not to say it's a bad book; it just doesn't reach the heights of the earlier ones, for me at least (and apparently for others, based on the average ratings by other Goodreads reviewers). It goes on my annual recommendation list, but in the lowest tier. (hide spoiler)]

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