Our book today is Jane and the Waterloo Map by Stephanie Barron, the latest in her long-running series of murder mysteries in which Jane Austen takes time out from being a novelist to try her hand at being a crime-solving sleuth. The series started back in 1996 with Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor and has plugged along since then to this 13^th volume, somewhat heavy-handedly mixing copious biographical details about Jane Austen’s life and times with fairly standard whodunit outlines familiar from dozens of historical murder mysteries. It’s hard to tell which element precisely makes these little books so much fun to read: Barron’s skill at conventional murder mysterying or the comfortable way she doles out details from Jane’s writing life:

I wrote directly to John Murray and desired him to wait upon me at Hans Place. He was so good as to appear the following morning, and the briefest of conversations secured our mutual satisfaction. I am to retain the copyright of Emma, publishing the work at my own expense; and Mr. Murray is to take ten percent of the profits, for his trouble in putting out the volumes. As I followed a similar course with all my dearest children but Pride and Prejudice – which copyright Egerton purchased outright for the sum of £110 – I am untroubled by fear of risk. Murray has agreed to publish a second edition of Mansfield Park, on similar terms.

In this latest book, Jane is invited by the Prince Regent’s obsequious chaplain to pay court at Carlton House, where he begins to natter on about some kind of privilege that’s in the process of being bestowed on our heroine, who grows a bit testy at all the roundabout verbiage and seeks to get to the point:

Bewildered, I stared at him, my ratafia suspended. “If you could perhaps speak more plainly, sir,” I said.

“Of course. To be sure.” He turned again, hands clasped behind his coat. “You are away that on occasion the Regent grants the favour of a Notice to various Luminaries of Art and Letters. It is to be your honour, Miss Austen, to receive that Notice.”

I felt heat in my cheeks. What was the absurd little man suggesting?

“It is His Royal Highness’s pleasure and happiness to command that your next published work be dedicated humbly, and gratefully, to Himself, as Regent of the noble land that gave you birth, Miss Austen – that inspired your Genius – that has so warmly embraced your interesting histories of Genteel Romance.”

The proposal shocks Jane, who bridles at the idea (“I, commanded to dedicate my cherished Emma to a man I abominated? Commanded, moreover, to regard His Royal arrogance as an occasion for gratitude? Absurd.”), but before the whole scheme can progress, the requisite murder intervenes: a soldier late from Waterloo is found bloodied and dying on the floor of the library at Carlton House and manages to gasp out to Jane the mention of a certain map before exiting stage left. The map in question might prove very valuable, it seems, and Jane’s brother Henry has recently had severe financial reversals, and, after all, there’s a killer on the loose … and so we have a murder plot.

The tension implicit in that plot is exactly the thing that ought to obliterate the whole series: while Jane is traipsing around among the Duke of Wellington’s high-society set, sifting clues and catching people unawares in conversation, both she and we are acutely aware that her time would be ever so much better spent writing – whether it be revisions to Emma or the beginning of some new work. In reality the parameters of a working writer’s life – daily workloads, mental dead-ends, plenty of subfusc contemplation – hardly left Jane Austen spare time for a bustling family life, much less crime-solving. It would be different if Barron – writers like her – picked an author like the JD Salinger in Shoeless Joe, characters in epic writing slumps, or retirement, or some combination of the two (can a series of Southern mysteries starring the late Harper Lee be far off?). It’s that element of the series (plus a certain amount of one-dimensionality in the character of Jane herself) that’s always nagged at me, but I suppose Jane and the Fourth Round of Revisions might not have quite the same mass appeal.