Dorothy L. Sayers: Murder Must Advertise (1933)

Edition: Gollancz, 1971
Review number: 1393

There are several Dorothy Sayers novels which have an unusual background: bell ringing in The Nine Tailors, the Bohemian London intelligentsia in Strong Poison, and so on. This idea is not that uncommon in crime fiction since her day, but she makes her backgrounds more closely integrated with the puzzle than is often the case. Murder Must Advertise is the best of these in many ways. Like Gaudy Night (Oxford womens' college), it uses a setting extremely familiar to the author, that of the adverstising agency, similar (one assumes, but for the likelihood of violent death) to the one in which she worked. It even has a character, a copy writer named Miss Meteyard, who is clearly something of a self-portrait.  Advertising has obviously changed since the 1930s, so this makes Murder Must Advertise something of a historical record, particularly with episodes such as discussions about how to encourage more women to take up smoking which would be viewed rather differently today.

The novel begins when a new copywriter arrives at Pym's agency, to fill the place of a man who died falling down the stairs. The new man signs himself Death Bredon, and the reader is likely to realise very quickly that these are the middle names of Lord Peter Wimsey, undercover to unravel a death more suspicious than it first appears.

One aspect of the novel doesn't really work at all. As part of the investigation, Lord Peter needs to charm a wild young woman, a rich society party-goer who is involved with a set connected to drug smuggling. He does this - rather bizarrely - by dressing up as Harlequin and playing silly but mysterious games to tantalise her. This includes physical feats unlikely to be carried out by a twenty year old (unless a circus acrobat), let alone Lord Peter, who is described as being about twice that age. The contrast between these sections and the rest is rather jarring, and doesn't encourage belief in Lord Peter as a character. I also felt that it was unlikely that Lord Peter, who is supposed to be so well known to the public, was not recognised in what seems to have been a playing of a role with no real disguise of his features - he is nearly discovered at one point because he is still wearing tailored clothes which would be far beyond the means of the man he is supposed to be.

On the other hand, one literary trick does work, even though it must at the time of publication have seemed out of place in a crime genre novel. At several crucial points in the novel, Sayers places paragraphs which consist solely of advertising slogans (for the made up products of Pym's clients). Apart from punctuating the narrative, they provide a particular kind of background, due to the all pervasive nature of advertising in the twentieth century. A successful advert needs to catch the mood of the moment, and feed off it, or else it won't be able to capture the imagination of the consumer - they are in a way the essence of popular culture. This means that the style of adverts is instantly evocative of the time of their creation, and makes these paragraphs in Murder Must Advertise redolent of the early thirties.

Flawed, but still one of the best classic crime novels - 8/10.

Dorothy Sayers & Jill Paton Walsh: Thrones, Dominations (1998)

Edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998
Review number: 366

I would normally avoid sequels to stories by dead authors like the plague; they are frequently written in a way which shows the new writer too lacking in imagination to have ideas of their own, and involve implausible plots when they attempt to continue a story which was concluded by the author (not leaving loose ends easily unravelled). There are exceptions. Peter Tremayne's Raffles stories are one, George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels another - though they are off at a tangent from rather than being straight continuations of Tom Brown's Schooldays. There are several reasons for expecting this novel to be another exception: it was started by Dorothy Sayers herself, fills in a gap in her series rather than continuing it, and is completed by an author who has a good reputation in her own right (and one whose work I like).

These expectations are to a large extent fulfilled. No indication is given as to the stage at which Thrones, Dominations was left by Sayers, or what information there was as to her plans for the remainder of the story. (She abandoned the novel to work on the translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, also uncompleted at her death.) The novel itself is about the early months of Peter and Harriet's marriage, following on from Busman's Honeymoon, and in structure and style it is a close relation of that novel.

In both novels, the first half is concerned with the relationship between Peter and Harriet and the way that those around them react to it. (The difference between their positions in society would have been far more important in the late thirties than now.) These chapters in both books contain extensive quotations from the diary of Peter's mother, the dowager Duchess of Denver. Then, in the second half, we have a mystery, less difficult here than in most of Sayers' own books.

The quality of the job that Walsh has done is shown by the fact that she has produced a novel in which it is virtually impossible to detect her hand at all. It is perhaps more similar to Busman's Honeymoon than I suspect that Sayers herself would have left it, the prose is perhaps a little more smooth, and the puzzle not so dependent on complex mechanical details (like the radio in Busman's Honeymoon, the haemophilia in Have His Carcase, for example). The strong characters of Peter and Harriet are as central as ever - the hero worship of Lord Peter maybe toned down a bit, perhaps to better suit modern readers - and are just as convincingly portrayed. The flattering expectation of literary knowledge in the reader is still present, though restricted to English more than in the novels by Sayers alone.

I would be interested to know what relationship this finished product bears to the material left by Sayers, but the very least that can be said is that Walsh has produced an excellent and convincing Lord Peter novel.

Dorothy L. Sayers: Busman's Honeymoon (1937)

Edition: New English Library, 1977
Review number: 70

This was the last full-length Peter Wimsey story written by Dorothy Sayers, and follows on more or less immediately from Gaudy Night. The first half of the book details the preparations for Lord Peter and Harriet to get married, and enables Sayers to bring in many characters who will be remembered by fans of the earlier books in the series, from the architect from Whose Body to the retired burglar from Strong Poison to the senior common room of Shrewsbury College from Gaudy Night.

This part of the book is basically a romance about the long-term characters of the series, is not very serious and is quite fun. The second part tells the story of the honeymoon they have in a house they have just bought near the village where Harriet grew up. They have arranged with the former owner to pick up the keys on their wedding night, but he isn't there and they need to wake up his niece to get a spare set from her.

It's not until the next morning that they discover what had happened - the body of the owner is downstairs in the cellar. Peter and Harriet are flung into an investigation of a murder during their own honeymoon.

The expected result follows: in the face of bafflement by the police, Peter reconstructs the crime - a most ingenious booby-trap being used to commit it - and the murderer is caught. Unusually for this class of fiction, Dorothy Sayers had a good idea what catching a murderer meant - a lengthy trial followed by an unpleasant execution and untidy loose ends. She made a point of this in several of her books, and in this one it is really made obvious. The execution has a most unpleasant psychological effect on Peter, and leaves an unmarried girl pregnant with the murderer's child. This is almost contrary to the whole spirit of the detective novel, where everything is sorted out, and the murderer is an evil person who deserves what he gets. The ability to do this is something that raises the greatest practictioners of genre fiction above the other writers in the field.

Dorothy L. Sayers: Gaudy Night (1935)

Edition: New English Library, 1975
This is one of my favourite novels, partly because I have a soft spot for the Peter Wimsey series, and partly because it is set in Oxford. It reads as though Dorothy Sayers was finally really indulging herself - she resolves the long-running romantic tension between Harriet Vane and Lord Peter, and she clearly also had very fond memories of her own time in Oxford. The plot may be self indulgent, but the writing is as good as ever; this is probably going to be the favourite among most Peter Wimsey fans.

The plot isn't actually a murder mystery, but is concerned with an investigation into a poison pen letter writer and player of nasty practical jokes in Harriet Vane's old college. The seriousness of these attacks are shown by an attempted suicide by one of the students.
It is not until Peter returns from abroad that progress can be made in solving the mystery - naturally, since he's the Sherlock Holmes to Harriet Vane's Watson; but the mystery is not so important as the relationship between the two of them and the background of Oxford in the thirties.