In Which I Channel W.H. Davies

I went to put a deckchair on the patio for Ailz and found myself walking into a misty rain so fine I hadn't seen it was there.. I turned round smartly, deckchair in hand, and re-entered the house.

"It's not supposed to rain," she says

"It's not raining hard," I reply. "It may just be a passing cloud that's stooped too low. Which" I add, rather pleased with myself,"Sounds like a line of Georgian poetry."

Death In Holy Orders: P.D. James

St Anselm's is an Anglican theological college-  its buildings a mish-mash of Medieval, Tudor and High-Victorian- perched on the crumbling Suffolk cliffs- with the cold North Sea coming nearer and nearer and threatening to gobble it up.  Clearly a symbol of the Anglican Church, then.  James has had fun inventing it. I'll bet there are floor-plans and elevations pinned to the cork board in her study. Maybe someone close to her has made a model- as Dodie Smith's husband did of Cassandra Mortmain's Castle.

James is very old-fashioned. Characters use mobile phones (as little as possible) and some of them have brazen private lives, but really they exist in a simulacrum of the golden age of Dorothy L Sayers- a world in which police inspectors come armed with a knowledge of the Oxford Movement and the working classes are stalwart but risibly ignorant.  The characters are mostly well-drawn, though the chief detective, Adam Dalgleish, is virtuous and wooden. The plot is silly, with an unmemorable killer murdering a memorably unpleasant Archdeacon and various other people for reasons that make little human sense. There is the matter of a will- and everything turns on a change to the law on legitimacy. Did I say Dorothy L. Sayers? Perhaps Wilkie Collins would have been nearer the mark.