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DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY By PD James Faber €19   SHE WAS a sly minx, was Jane Austen. Outwardly conforming, a properly constrained woman of her time, the vicar's daughter who died a spinster in genteel poverty aged 41 must have had an inner life of a richness that would astonish the facebook generation. How else to account for the enduring passion for her stories of sex and society in her own small world at the dawn of the 19th century? Austen's sharp eye for the tragedies and absurdities of life, her insight, wit and soft-voiced irony have enshrined her as a social commentator par excellence, defying time and place, frequently imitated, rarely bettered. In Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, Darcy, owner of the great estate of Pemberley in Derbyshire, falls for Elizabeth between the covers of the author's most-loved novel. Elizabeth is the second daughter, attractive but not quite beautiful, of the respectable but financially hard-pressed Mr Bennet and the vulgar, social climbing Mrs Bennet. The arrogant Darcy, proud of his own standing in society, and reluctant to diminish it by marrying beneath him, finds a ready opponent in the combative and prejudiced Elizabeth, who is all too quick to judge and condemn a man she believes to be callous and unfeeling. Love, though tried and tested, eventually conquers all. But, as George Eliot asked at the end of Middlemarch: 'Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years?' â€â€ not PD James, the 91-year-old grande dame of British crime fiction, and a lifelong fan of Jane Austen, whose latest novel Death comes to Pemberley picks up the story of Darcy and Elizabeth six years after Pride and Prejudice put them to bed. The gods have smiled on the loved-up pair in the intervening years, with a beautiful house (supposedly modelled on Chatsworth) that they both adore, the heir and the spare in the nursery and, it turns out, one on the way. Elizabeth's sainted sister Jane is married within convenient carriage-driving distance of Pemberley to the estimable Mr Bingley, her darling Papa is on hand to savour the treasures of his son-in-law's immense library and her surplus-to-requirements Mama thankfully prefers to be ministered to at home by her one cheerfully unmarried daughter. It's all very afternoon tea and calling cards despite the dark clouds of war on the Napoleonic front. But what if murder most foul were to intrude into that cloistered world of the landed gentry, exploding like a hand grenade of shocking and terrifying power beneath the grand dining-room table, polluting all that is safe, serene and routine with the squalid debris of a world best kept firmly at bay? What would happen then to the manners and mores of the refined inhabitants of the 'Big House'? Well then we would have Pride and Prejudice re-imagined by the crime writer best able to gently mimic the style of its author, while putting her own stamp on the soon to be tastefully disordered proceedings. James starts her tale with the most perfect homage to the most quoted line in the book ('It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in need of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.') James counters in pitch-perfect fashion: 'It was generally agreed by the female residents of Meryton that Mr and Mrs Bennet of Longbourn had been fortunate in the disposal in marriage of four of their five daughters.' No cod-Regency prose here. The book kicks off on a night of banshee winds in Derbyshire as the owners and guests of Pemberley have their civilised dinner interrupted by a barely controlled carriage tearing up the drive to the house. Out of the carriage tumbles Lydia, Elizabeth's youngest and most frivolous sister, married in Pride & Prejudice to George Wickham, an army officer and the stereotypical cad, cheat and bounder. Wickham, a reluctant groom, wed to Lydia only after Darcy paid to him to do so, has had a long and mutually disagreeable relationship with Darcy, to the extent that he is permanently barred from Pemberley. Lydia, whose brains are in her bloomers, is on this occasion even more hysterical than usual, screaming that her beloved Wickham has disappeared into the vast woods of Pemberley and is dead â€â€ murdered. A search party is mounted and finds Wickham rather inconveniently alive, it's his friend and fellow officer Denny who has been done in, bludgeoned, inconveniently, most definitely, on Pemberley land. And so begins the investigation, carried out of course by the landed gentry themselves, or at least the local magistrates, Darcy among their number, in the absence of any real police force â€â€ Darcy, however, must step back from the investigation since the murder took place on his estate. All the evidence (such as it is, no CSI back then) points to Wickham as the murderer and he is duly arrested but, scoundrel though he is, did he do it? James's book is a tour de force of style, characterisation and atmosphere â€â€ the plot is its weakest link, inevitably, perhaps, given the looming presence of Austen's book. Darcy's personality has progressed in James's account; he's less uncompromising, more introspective, but Elizabeth has become a shadow of her former self; her time-consuming flower arrangements leaving no time for verbal jousts â€â€ is that what 19th-century marriage did to women? Some characters remain deliciously true to form however â€â€ among them, Darcy's aunt, the viperous Lady Catherine de Bourgh, a dedicated would-be saboteur of her nephew's budding relationship in <I>Pride and Prejudice, and a jaundiced commentator in this book. The old battleship pronounces magisterially at one stage: 'I have never approved of protracted dying. It is an affectation in the aristocracy; in the lower classes it is merely an excuse for avoiding work.' Not something of which the indefatigable Dame James could ever be accused.