The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray

The Murder of Mr. Wickham
By Claudia Gray
Vintage, 2022

The Murder of Mr. Wickham, the new novel from Claudia Gray, trades on two of the oldest and most persistent yearnings of all Jane Austen fans: the desire for all of Austen’s characters to know each other and inhabit the same world, and the desire for that summit of all reading pleasures: a Jane Austen cozy mystery. 

The first is easy enough to accomplish and has been done more or less effectively by hundreds of pastiche-writers in the last two centuries. And the second seems natural: since one of the hallmarks of a cozy mystery is that the murder at the heart of the story, far from being a tragedy, amount to little more than an absorbing topic of conversation, it’s virtually a necessity that the murder victim be somebody all concerned thoroughly disliked. Grief ruins a cozy mystery faster than a tornado at a tea party, and fortunately for all concerned, Jane Austen presented her readers with plenty of characters detestable enough to launch a thousand cozies. 

One of those characters is Pride and Prejudice’s lying cad Mr. Wickham, who initially attracts the attention of the Bennet sisters (not only flighty Kitty and Lydia but also the should-know-better Elizabeth) with his quick tongue and good looks. It’s in defense of Wickham, against the supposed wrongs done to him by his childhood playmate Mr. Darcy, that Elizabeth initially resents Darcy, and it’s Darcy’s refutation of those stories that changes everything. When we last see Wickham in the novel, he’s an unhappily married sponger, his days as a roving Lothario seemingly over forever.

He no sooner arrives in Gray’s novel than he departs it, feet first, and suddenly everybody assembled at scenic Donwell Abbey is a suspect. Leading the informal effort to sleuth out the killer are Juliet Tilney, daughter of Catherine and Henry from Northanger Abbey, and Jonathan Darcy, who knows that some natural suspicion will fall on his own father. 

The whole confection is in good hands. Gray is an experienced hand at crafting entertaining stories. Her “Constellation” series of YA novels is delightful, and she’s also the author of some of the tiny handful of Star Wars novels that a cognitively-healthy person can safely read. Like her exemplar, she gilds the narrative with humor (all the right characters bemoan how rude it is, to murder somebody), but there’s also good character-oriented moments, as when Elizabeth ponders on the inward nature of her son, so similar to that of her husband:

Sometimes Elizabeth wished for something – or someone – to finally change Jonathan in the way she had changed his father. But then she thought of her son, so honest and true and distinctly himself, and hated the thought that he might have to alter his character at all. If only she could change the world for him, so that it saw the Jonathan she knew.

(Since Jonathan’s teamed up with Juliet, Elizabeth need not worry, of course)

Nothing in the actual whodunit mechanics of The Murder of Mr. Wickham will surprise mystery readers in the slightest, and they’ll likely see the fifth-act plot-twist coming a mile away. But the moments of warm human insight are heartwarming (“Trusting providence seemed to lead to trusting people, as well,” a character realizes in one such moment. “How differently the world appeared, when one stopped cringing away from it and faced it in the light”). Jane Austen fans have here a sharply-executed example of the kind of cozy mystery they they wish Austen herself had written.

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.