The concept has merit.

What devotee of Jane Austen hasn't wished to peek into the later lives of Elizabeth Bennet and her Mr. Darcy? What became of the other characters of "Pride and Prejudice," of Georgiana Darcy, Colonel Fitzwilliam, or Jane and Eliza's remaining unmarried sisters? Every Janeite I know would love to have an opportunity to go back in time and discuss Austen's books with Austen herself.

This truth universally acknowledged, combined with the absence of copyright strictures, has led to a host of published attempts to continue the story. Most of them, alas, have been by writers whose ambitions far outpace their abilities in the literary arena.

That made P.D. James' "Death Comes to Pemberley" welcome news. James, creator of the Adam Dalgleish detective novels, is a strong stylist who writes murder mysteries of literary merit and is a Janeite to boot.

The Prologue of "Pemberley" opens with a reasonably Austen-like statement ("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") and goes on to give a longish precis of "Pride and Prejudice" from the viewpoint of those gossipy neighbors.

We find the Darcys happily settled six years after their wedding, living with their two little sons at Pemberley, his family estate. It is the eve of their annual ball; Darcy's cousin Col. Fitzwilliam and sister Georgiana, Elizabeth's sister Jane and her husband, Mr. Bingley, are there for the occasion. So is Henry Alveston, a well-born young lawyer with a practice in London and warm feelings toward Georgiana.

Then trouble arrives, in the form of Jane and Elizabeth's sister Lydia, still silly after all these years. Her husband, she screams, has been murdered — and the story's tone and direction change abruptly.

"Pemberley" has inspired passages and uninspired pages. James, like Austen, is an acute and stylish observer of society, but their styles mesh uneasily. The reader can almost see the gears shifting as the plot turns to the 1803 equivalent of a police procedural, and the mystery is not laid out with James' usual skill.

The references to Austen's other books are great fun, but "Pemberley" contains a surprising number of errors concerning Austen's world. (To start on page one, the lugubrious Mr. Collins is Mr. Bennet's cousin, not his nephew.) There are anachronisms: It is hard to imagine the word "lifestyle" emerging from the lips of Mr. Darcy.

(And I refuse to believe that James, a longtime member of the Church of England's Liturgical Commission, could have called a 19th-century English clergyman "Reverend Cornbinder," as if he were a 20th-century American preacher wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a tie. This must have been the error of an editor, for James certainly knows that the proper form is "the Reverend Mr." on first reference, and "Mr. Cornbinder" thereafter.)

For all its faults, "Pemberley" is still an enjoyable book, with interesting characters and situations. The great disappointment is that it's literary fast food, a quick read to be consumed and tossed aside, rather than a tale to be savored and reread. The fans of both Jane Austen and P.D. James expect rather more.

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'Death Comes to Pemberley'

A novel by P.D. James

Published by Knopf, 304 pages, $25.95