Fiction Reviews
A Crime Through Time
(2025) Amelia Blackwell, Pan, £18.99, hrdbk, 357pp, ISBN 978-1-035-05409-1
Georgiana Darcy is a minor character in Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice, whose main purpose in the novel is to establish Wickham as an untrustworthy rake and in doing so provide the proximate cause of his feud with Mr Darcy. However, in A Crime Through Time she takes centre stage as a time-travelling, crime-solving sleuth in this gentle detective drama.
Plagued by unwanted suitors and disenchanted with her existence, Georgiana is transported by a magic pager from Pemberley (1799, Derbyshire) to Saltram House (1995, Devon), where she finds herself at the scene of a murder and a film shoot. The film is a period drama, naturally – parts of the classic 1990’s Ang Lee adaptation of Sense & Sensibility were filmed at Saltram – and conveniently enough Georgiana fits right in among the cast and crew.
The murder, however, is much more perplexing: a dead man in a tree who disappears before she can draw anyone’s attention to the body. As she flits back and forth between the centuries with a press of the pager, Georgiana becomes convinced that she has been called to the future to solve the crime. But is the film responsible for the deed, or merely the backdrop to it?
Her guide to the late twentieth century is Quinn, a handsome young Irish ex-pat, working estate security, who takes the outlook and demands of an eighteenth century heiress in his stride. An odd-couple romance slowly develops between the two.
Meanwhile at Pemberley, Elizabeth Darcy (née Bennett of course) falls seriously ill while pregnant with her first child. Mysterious comings and goings and strange phenomena suggest something singular is happening there too.
The unlikely plot duly summarised, let’s cut to the chase: A Crime In Time is yet another work of modern fiction playing in Jane Austen’s sandpit. And much though this reviewer loves himself a bit of drawing room drama, this furrow has been so well ploughed that it is hard to believe there is much left to be harvested. The best of such new works exist in dialogue with the original story – the worst simply use the IP of classic literature for want of an original idea.
A Crime Through Time falls somewhere in between these poles. Blackwell clearly knows her Austen well and has the right amount of affection for the source material, while also being unafraid to turn Miss Georgiana into a time-hopping detective. I powered through its pages with every sign of moderate enjoyment.
And yet the question remains: did we need this addition to the Austenian literary universe? Compared to the recently reviewed The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennett, Witch, which was at least trying to rehabilitate one of Austen’s more problematic characters and do something interesting with the source material, it’s hard to argue that this book was needed.
Instead, A Crime Through Time feels more like high-end professional fan fiction; a romp without a great deal of rhyme or reason. Which is not an inherently bad thing, but it does set limits on what it can achieve.
And as far as the murder mystery and its resolution goes, it employs a fairly contrived plot which showcases Georgiana’s talent for getting into trouble as much as it does her sleuthing skills.
The Genre Border Patrol also notes: A Crime Through Time is also a textbook example of our old friend time travel being used in a completely different way in mainstream fiction. SFF would be concerned to show the reader whether Georgiana’s temporal pager is powered by magic or by some sort of sufficiently advanced technology. This book either doesn’t mind, or is saving the reveal for the sequel.
In summary, this was never less than a pleasant read, but not so great that it removes my reservations about the whole undertaking. If encountered in a moment of weakness, I would pick up the sequel, but I’d be going into it with my eyes open.
Tim Atkinson
See also Peter's take on A Crime Through Time.
[Up: Fiction Reviews Index | SF Author: Website Links | Home Page: Concatenation]
[One Page Futures Short Stories | Recent Site Additions | Most Recent Seasonal Science Fiction News]