Featured Author:
Jill Paton Walsh
Jill Paton Walsh was born Gillian Bliss in 1937 in London, England. After attending Oxford University she worked as a teacher until she married Antony Paton Walsh, and began writing children and young adult novels while at home with their first child. She ended with a couple of dozen books to her credit, and won the Whitbread Prize for Children’s Fiction in 1974, before turning her attention to adult fiction.
In the 1980s she left her husband for John Townsend, although they didn’t marry until after her husband’s death in 2003. Townsend was an author and editor, and when one of her books was declined by publishers, he encouraged her to self-publish it. The book, Knowledge of Angels, brought her fame and attention as the first self-published book to be short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize.
Writing Mysteries
After writing the first two books of the Imogen Quy mysteries, about a nurse at Cambridge University, Paton Walsh was approached by the estate of Dorothy L. Sayers to complete a partially-written manuscript in Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey series. Paton Walsh completed the book to good reviews, and went on to write another three books in the series, developing the characters following themes from some short stories Sayers had written.
Townsend died in 2014, and Paton Walsh married once more, shortly before her death in 2020.
This is an imagined interview between CozyMystery.com (CM) and Jill Paton Walsh (JPW). It has been synthesized from various interviews with Jill Paton Walsh over the years. All quotes from Jill Paton Walsh are her own words. Items in square brackets are where we have altered her words for clarity or to avoid spoilers. Please see the end of the article for source credits.
Early Days
CM: Your father pushed you in everything you did as a child.
JPW: He expected great things of me, which was very unusual in his generation, and it was a great empowerment.
CM: And you read a lot from a young age?
JPW: My grandfather had a proper bookcase of egghead books, and he gave them to me in alphabetical order. So we moved from Aeschylus to the Brontes, and I can still remember the great relief of going from the Oedipus cycle to Jane Eyre.
CM: You even read Peter Wimsey, who would play such a big role in your later life.
JPW: I was about 14, I think, and voraciously reading everything I could lay my hands on. I loved the elegance and wit of both the detection and the characters, and fell hopelessly in love with Lord Peter. I still am.
CM: And when did you start writing?
JPW: When I began to write, I was living at home with a baby, and missing the children I had been teaching. I didn’t feel very grown-up, and I realised I knew a lot about what my second formers had liked to read, and what they had not liked. I thought I might manage a story to please them.
Early Publication
CM: You wrote a number of books for children and young adults.
JPW: It’s much harder to write for children, and also more interesting. When one writes for children there are more people in the room. Writing for children involves the adult writer, and the child that writer once was; the present child reader, and the ultimate audience – the adult that child will become. Between those four one can with luck contrive to say something worth saying to the present and to the future world.
CM: What are you trying to say to them?
JPW: I hope to show them how difficult it is to make judgments, how often the bad person turns out to be good, that life is unexpected.
CM: At Oxford your professors were the likes of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. What did they teach you about writing?
JPW: The subject of the lectures and tutorials was always literature or philology — we wouldn’t have dared ask those great men about their own work! — but the example they set by being both great and serious scholars, and writers of fantasy and books for children, was not lost on me.
Writing Dorothy L. Sayers
CM: Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the great mystery writers. How did you get involved in bringing her characters back to life?
JPW: Dorothy L. Sayers left an unfinished manuscript which her trustees wished to have finished, and they had an agent who happened to know I was a passionate Dorothy L. Sayers aficionado. I got asked, therefore, whether I thought it could be done, I answered I thought it could and they asked if I would do it.
CM: Is it difficult to take someone else’s characters and make them your own?
JPW: The point of the job was not to write a book which was what I would have written with her materials – I have plenty of ideas of my own. The point of the challenge was to write something which she might have written.
CM: I presume you start with what she’s written and go from there?
JPW: Anything that Dorothy said is absolutely set in concrete. It is, so to speak, The Truth.
CM: You do a very good job of keeping to her voice and style.
JPW: I am trying to write as Sayers, I’m not trying to write as Jill Paton Walsh. There’s no point in using someone else’s characters if you’re going to turn them into your own vision. You have to be loyal to that person’s worldview and sensitive to what they would and wouldn’t have done with their characters, and how explicit or inexplicit they would’ve been. It’s adopting a different persona, rather the way I imagine an actor does when they step onto the stage.
Being Dorothy
CM: Is that easy to do? To put yourself in her shoes and write her characters?
JPW: Because the characters have so much reality in other people’s minds, they’re immensely popular characters, that gives them a realism as though they are people I have met rather than people I have made up in my head. And when they talk to me in my head, they don’t talk to me in the same way as they would if I had other resources. I find working with them, therefore very interesting technically. It’s different and difficult. I like the difficulty because it rather challenges me a bit. I find it enjoyable and fruitful, it might help me when I return to making characters of my own.
CM: And also the challenge of creating something the fans of Sayers can still believe came from her style?
JPW: Challenging, certainly. In some ways much easier because I could design the plot and episodes freely. But the task is not to write a novel of my own, using Sayers characters, the task is to write as Sayers would have done, or perhaps might have done.
Wimsey and Vane
CM: Lord Peter Wimsey is the star of Sayers’s most famous series of detective stories, which you of course took over writing. What do you think of him?
JPW: He is complex and modest; he doesn’t take himself seriously, but he does take love and duty, good and evil seriously. And he is endlessly witty.
CM: In later Sayers books he meets and eventually marries Harriet Vane.
JPW: I honestly don’t think Peter is that interesting without Harriet.
CM: But their early relationship is quite rocky?
JPW: Peter proposes to Harriet and Harriet said no! So Dorothy was stuck with four more books before she could get her head around the idea that one day Harriet might say yes. I love that story because it tells you how living the characters were in her mind. They were disobedient. She created them, and then they wouldn’t play ball!
CM: She eventually gets them together and they become a sleuthing team, which is unusual for the time.
JPW: In the course of doing this she invented something really interesting and new, which is detection carried out by the means of a conversation between equals. That’s not the great detective and his sidekick, not the policeman and his sergeant but two people who are equal with each other and who can talk as equals and they discuss the problems, and the possibilities and the clues together in a way which no other detective story writer had hit upon.
Researching History
CM: How important is research to getting the series to feel correct?
JPW: That is the sort of task a historical novelist has to get right, and I have written a number of historical novels. It involves research, and a kind of synthesis of what you have learned about the period you are writing about, and what you know about human nature now, and then.
CM: Do you feel pressure to be as accurate as you can be?
JPW: There are many readers who read precisely because of stuff – they like to read historical novels, and feel that they learn from them.
CM: The setting for several of the books is World War Two. There’s a lot going on to keep track of.
JPW: And things changed every day. I had to do quite a lot of historical research to make sure things happened in the right order, and at least roughly the right time.
CM: Are any of your characters based on real people?
JPW: I hope the people in my books are real to you. They are real to me. Sometimes I seem to be able to hear them talking in my head. I don’t make up what they say; I just listen and write it down. But they aren’t portraits of people that I know in real life. You can’t put actual people into books, because you don’t know enough about them.
CM: How do you balance between reality and the things you make up?
JPW: Facts in fiction are fiction, not fact; perhaps I should say they become imaginary facts. All the stuff in a novel is fiction. Fiction is an immensely powerful solvent which dissolves into its own substance anything you put into it. It has its own quite different way of being true.
The Writing Life
CM: What’s it like being a full-time writer?
JPW: Being a writer usually entails a fairly quiet life. The job entails solitude: long hours in libraries, long hours at a desk.
CM: How long does it take you to write a book?
JPW: It varies a lot, depending on what the book is about. Some stories only need thinking about, some need travel to far off places, or lots of work in libraries. The longest time I’ve ever taken was three years. The shortest time I have ever taken was for the picture book, Babylon; I had been thinking about that for some time, but it got written down one Sunday afternoon. The average time is about one year.
CM: And where do your ideas come from?
JPW: All over the place! But I don’t try to think up books starting from nothing. I keep a notebook, that I take with me everywhere, and I scribble things down in it – observations, and descriptions and conversations and thoughts. If ever I need an idea I can go lucky-dipping in my notebook.
Plotting or Pantsing
CM: When you’re writing do you stick to a plan or make it up as you go along?
JPW: There is a secret to authorship which many of us do not wish to reveal – but I am shameless in my old age; and that is that the process is not completely under control. Sometimes it seems almost fraudulent to claim credit for it. There is the input – a ream or so of white typewriting paper, and then there is a finished draft. Who wrote it? I feel simultaneously that it must have been me, and that it cannot have been me. I often feel that it must have been written by someone who is a better novelist than I am.
CM: That sounds a little disturbing!
JPW: Weird though it sounds it is a state I love to be in. I cannot decide to be in it; I can hopefully fool around with some thoughts and see if they catch fire. When a subject does catch fire it feels like being grabbed by the scruff of the mind, by the scruff of the heart, and not put down until one has written the novel.
CM: Do you ever talk about what you’re currently writing?
JPW: I don’t like talking about a work in prospect, since somehow talking about it takes the kettle off the boil.
The Philosophy of Books
CM: You know a great deal about philosophy, presumably based on your time at Oxford. How does that translate to your books?
JPW: What gets me is a story or an anecdote that has a moral shape. I think that novels are tools of thought. They are moral philosophy with the theory left out, with just the examples of the moral situations left standing.
CM: That flows into your characters?
JPW: I think an author should treat a character with some degree of the kindness, fairness, justice which one would hope to afford a real person. The author has absolute power over the characters in a work in progress; but the only morally acceptable thing to do with absolute power is to refrain from exerting it.
CM: And your mysteries too?
JPW: I write crime fiction in very much the spirit in which people read crime fiction – largely for fun. But one can make quiet points about the real world on the way.
CM: The whodunit is still the important thing though?
JPW: Playing with whodunit, howdunit and whydunit, this is the central game of detection. I think I am more interested than I should be in the why. I can’t help it. I try to write the kind of things [Sayers] wrote but I am always very deeply engaged in why.
And Finally…
CM: We always ask for a parting thought about writing?
JPW: By the time I found out how hard it is to write a good story simply and well enough, I had grown very interested. I’m still trying to do it well, and I’m still interested…
Do you have anything to say about this article? Agree or disagree with what we have to say? Let us know in the comments below.
Credits
“Once upon a life: Jill Paton Walsh,” The Guardian, October 23, 2010
“Jill Paton Walsh: Knowledge of Angels author dies at 83,” 19 October 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-54600916
“Philosophy and Fiction,” text of the Plenary Lecture given at the 5th International Iris Murdoch Conference at Kingston University, 11th September 2010, in The Iris Murdoch Review, Volume 1 Number 3, 2011
Nathalie Atkinson, “Jill Paton Walsh: Writing Peter Wimsey novels is like acting on the page,” National Post, March 20, 2014
Neil Genzlinger, “Jill Paton Walsh, Multigenerational Writer, Dies at 83,” New York Times, November 18, 2020
Yvonne Nolan, “Jill Paton Walsh: Novel Ideas Along the Cam,” Publishers Weekly, November 27, 2000
Trisha Ping, “A successful series reboot,” BookPage, July 2014
Mike Stotter, “Wimsey, Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh,” Shots, http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/interview_view.aspx?interview_id=123
Jennifer Vido, “Interview with Jill Paton Walsh,” Fresh Fiction, January 15, 2011, https://freshfiction.com/page.php?id=3102
Jill Paton Walsh website, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20160314164759/http://greenbay.co.uk/qanda.html
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