JILL PATON WALSH: R.I.P.

Sad news. Jill Paton Walsh  died yesterday. Paton Walsh was an English novelist and children's writer, best known to readers of this blog for her Peter Wimsey–Harriet Vane mysteries that completed and continued the work of Dorothy L. Sayers.

From Wikipedia:

In 1996, Paton Walsh received the CBE for services to literature and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1998 she won the Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association, for A Chance Child as the best children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award. 

In an essay on realism in children's literature, Walsh stated that realism (like fantasy) is also metaphorical, and that she would like the relationship between the reader and her characters Bill and Julie to be as metaphorical as that between "dragons and the reader's greed or courage". 

Books

Knowledge of Angels (1993), a medieval philosophical novel, that she published herself was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. Other adult novels include: Farewell, Great King (1972), Lapsing (1986), about Catholic university students, A School for Lovers (1989), reworking of the plot of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, The Serpentine Cave (1997), based on a lifeboat disaster in St Ives, A Desert in Bohemia (2000), which follows a group of characters in England and in an imaginary Eastern European country through the years between World War II and 1989.

Characters:

Imogen Quy 

Paton Walsh wrote four detective stories featuring part-time college nurse Imogen Quy, set in fictional St. Agatha's College, University of Cambridge: The Wyndham Case (1993) A Piece of Justice (1995) Debts of Dishonour (2006) The Bad Quarto (2007) 

Lord Peter Wimsey 

In 1998, she completed Dorothy L. Sayers's unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey–Harriet Vane novel, Thrones, Dominations. In 2002, she followed this up with another Lord Peter novel, A Presumption of Death. In 2010, she published a third, The Attenbury Emeralds.[8] Her last addition to the series, The Late Scholar, was published in 2013 in the UK, and January 2014 in the U.S.

 In addition she wrote over 30 children's books.