Wimsey is a story fragment from the Lord Peter Wimsey novel King worked on in late 1977. The piece is a double-spaced, typewritten manuscript, containing the first chapter, of fourteen pages, and only the first page of a second chapter. Although it has never been published copies of this fragment circulate in the King community.
In the chapter (and a bit) that King wrote Peter is described this way:
a dreary ghost-Wimsey, distracted and vague, a Wimsey who did too much solitary
drinking, a Wimsey whose wit had soured
In King's story Harriet is dead, the Duke is dead, Sally is dead and Miss Climpson is dying. Hmmm, I wonder why King couldn't find a publisher for that? Sounds like loads of fun!
Of course, King wasn't the shiny happy guy in 1977 that he is today. If he gave it another go now it might not turn out half bad. There would be no way, though, that he could outdo Jill Paton Walsh's go at Wimsey. (She captured not just the Wimsey that the world loves [the man who finds it so easy to become on words that he is seldom perfectly sober] but also provided a measure of the keen, Austen-worthy social and psychological insights that made Sayers one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century.)
2 comments:
that is super bazar! But not quite as bazar as your affection for Peter Whimsy.
hmph, and dad criticizes my spelling!
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