I picked up A Presumption of Death on the cheap recently. It's a Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane novel by Jill Paton Walsh, who desecrated finished Dorothy Sayers' incomplete novel Thrones, Dominations a few years ago. I thought that perhaps this one, being made more or less out of whole cloth, might be a little bit better.
It had some interesting stuff in it, although it gave the impression that the author had done a hell of a lot of research on WWII England and was determined to get every tidbit in. It was also one of those poorly-thought-out mysteries in which the detective needs to be stupid not to catch the obvious clues early on, and what's especially irritating is that Harriet is detecting alone in those chapters; by the time Peter comes along things have moved along somewhat, so it winds up looking as if the Superior Man solves the mystery that the Clueless Woman couldn't manage.
But what *really* kept bothering me throughout the novel was the thought that no fanfic author could have gotten away with a novel like this in organized fandom. No decent beta reader would have let a fanfic author confuse the birth order of the children, or identify their cousin as their uncle, or twist distinctive minor characters (e.g. Miss Twitterton) out of recognizability. And if I'd written a story in which Harriet began a sentence, "Golly, Peter," I would be covered in shame, not laurels. But this woman gets published, and even praised, for this travesty.
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