The Attenbury Emeralds

The Attenbury Emeralds

File:The Attenbury Emeralds.jpg 1st Edition front cover
Author	Jill Paton Walsh
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	Lord Peter Wimsey
Genre	crime novel
Publisher	Hodder & Stoughton
Publication date	16 September 2010
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	978-0-340-99572-3
Preceded by	A Presumption of Death
Followed by	The Late Scholar

The Attenbury Emeralds is the third Lord Peter Wimsey detective novel to be written by Jill Paton Walsh. It was published by Hodder & Stoughton in September 2010.

The Attenbury Emeralds recounts how Lord Peter begins his hobby of amateur sleuthing in 1921 by becoming involved in the recovery of the Attenbury Emeralds. Lord Peter’s "first case" is a mystery mentioned by Lord Peter's creator Dorothy L. Sayers in a number of novels, but never fully told.

The novel is set after World War II, but in its first chapters this seems like a mere frame story with Wimsey recounting to his wife Harriet the reminiscences of the start of his career in 1921. As a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War the young Wimsey had been invited to an engagement party at the house of the Attenburys, a fellow aristocratic family, was present when an emerald family heirloom disappeared, and discovered in himself a talent for detection - leading to discovery of the missing stone (and incidentally, saving his friends' daughter from marrying a rogue).

In 1951, however, the story is still not over. There are several other nearly identical emeralds, linked by inscribed verses from the Persian poet Hafez; an Indian Maharaja to whose ancestors all of them once belonged and who seeks to reunite them; and a patient killer, who over decades committed several murders for the sake of these emeralds.

Simultaneously with at last resolving this decades-old mystery, a drastic change happens in Wimsey's life. To his chagrin, he is forced to take up the title and duties of the Duke of Denver following the death of his brother Gerald by a heart attack during a fire at Duke’s Denver. In the fire, much of the historic building, with its imposing Elizabethan and Jacobean façade, has been destroyed. However, the fire is stopped when reaching a sturdy, thick-walled Norman building. This was the Wimsey family’s original medieval residence which had been subsequently covered up, incorporated into the later structure, and forgotten for centuries, but which at the critical moment has saved the house’s east wing from the fire, including the library with its priceless old books. At Harriet’s suggestion, the new Duke of Denver decides not to try to reconstruct the house as it was before the fire but to live in the remaining part — an “odd but charming, asymmetrical structure” which is quite big enough for the present-day family — and to plant a garden where the destroyed part of the house had stood.

External links

• .