Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

Posted on 3 October 2024 by Katrina

Book Cover Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers was first published in 1933. My edition is a Hodder reprint from 2016.

The very successful advertising agency Pym’s Publicity has taken on a new copy-writer by the name of Death Bredon, it is of course Lord Peter Wimsey looking exactly like himself but claiming to be his disreputable cousin Bredon when he is recognised.

There had recently been a death within the offices of the company. Victor Dean had fallen down a metal spiral staircase, but was it purely an accident or a dastardly murder? Lord Peter is engaged to go undercover and get to the bottom of the mystery, but the bodies pile up before he cracks the case. In some ways the plot seems quite a modern one involving fast living upper class types and illegal substances, but I suppose there’s nothing new in crime.

There’s an introduction by Peter Robinson.

I read this one about 30 years ago and as I’m quite a fan of Sayers it was about time I had a re-read. It doesn’t feature Harriet Vane, those ones are my favourites, but it’s still really enjoyable, with what I’m sure was a very authentic setting as Sayers got the idea for the book while she was working as a copy-writer in an advertising agency. It’s thought that she came up with the famous Guinness adverts featuring a Toucan. She injects plenty of humour into the tale with quick witted wordplay as you would expect from such characters.

LOVELY DAY FOR A GUINNESS - Alcohol Advertisement Wall Poster Print - 30cm x 43cm / 12 Inches x 17 Inches

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

Posted on 5 August 2024 by Katrina

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers was first published in 1923. It begins with Lord Peter Wimsey getting a phone call from his mother. She tells him that Mr Thipps the architect who is working on her local church’s roof, has discovered the body of a man in his bath. The body is naked apart from wearing a pair of pince nez. When Peter goes to investigate he realises that the corpse is supposed to be the wealthy businessman Sir Reuben Levy who has gone missing. It bears a resemblance to Sir Reuben, but Peter isn’t fooled.

Inspector Sugg jumps to conclusions and thinks he has solved the case, of course he is completely wrong, and Lord Peter is going to enjoy proving him to be wrong.

This was a good mystery which kept me guessing. There is some slight discomfort in that Sir Reuben’s Jewish background is mentioned a few times, but nothing really disparaging, considering the times in which the book was written. He’s portrayed as being a kind and generous husband and Lord Peter is an admirer, despite his father having disliked self-made men like Sir Reuben. Sheer snobbery.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers – 20 Books of Summer 2024

Posted on 31 July 2024 by Katrina

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers was first published in 1935 and it was a re-read for me, for at least the third time. The first time I read it was in the late 1970s. I think this one might be a love or hate book as I’ve realised over the years that some people hate it. I think they think that Sayer’s writing is pretentious because she did write quite a lot of quotes, bits of poems. I still love it and I’ve decided to re-read the other Lord Peter Wimsey books soon, in order this time. He probably annoys some readers, I just think he is funny and I’m pretty sure she modelled him and his ‘man’ Bunter on Wodehouse’s Wooster and Jeeves.

Anyway, the setting is mainly a women’s college in Oxford where Harriet Vane has gone to do some academic research. Shrewsbury is her old college so she knows some of the staff. Not all is well though, some of the staff and students have been receiving poison pen letters, and they think that as Harriet writes detective novels she might be able to get to the bottom of it all.

Things escalate though and even Harriet is targeted with letters, grafitti appears, there’s vandalism, destruction of academic work and all sorts of nastiness going on. Harriet decides that she needs help from Lord Peter, but he is out of the country and uncontactable.

Meanwhile she meets Peter’s nephew for the first time and he doesn’t realise that Harriet is completely in the dark about large parts of Peter’s life, he’s far from being the sybaritic poseur and posh twit that she thought him to be. When he’s out of the country he’s on important government business. Harriet begins to revise her feelings about Peter.

In a weird way this is my comfort read, – well – that and du Maurier’s Rebecca.

Do you have a comfort read that you turn to now and again? My mother-in-law’s was Gone with the Wind, but I am never going to go to that one.

Striding Folly by Dorothy L. Sayers

Posted on 15 May 2023 by Katrina

Striding Folly by Dorothy L. Sayers contains three short stories, apparently the last three cases of Lord Peter Wimsey. This book was first published in 1972, but two of the stories had previously been published in 1939. This book has an introduction by Janet Hitchman.

Striding Folly wasn’t terribly entertaining, for me anyway. Two neighbours Mr Creech and Mr Mellilow play chess a couple of times every week, but it seems that everything is going to change as the valley they live in has been sold to an Electrical Company – by Mr Creech. Mellilow had moved to the area because it seemed so unchanged, he thought that nothing would ever spoil the solitude. There’s a murder which is when Lord Peter appears, towards the end of the story. It was okay-ish.

The Haunted Policeman begins with the birth of Lord Peter and Harriet’s son Bredon in a hospital. On the way back home after the birth Lord Peter falls in with a policeman who is new to the beat so Lord P is a stranger to him and he’s supicious of him, until he explains he has just become a father. The policeman is a worried man though, he had thought he had seen a murder victim earlier in the night – through a letter box – but the house seems to have disappeared. Of course Lord Peter can help.

Talboys was written in 1942 but hadn’t been published before. Bredon is now a young lad and is more than a bit of a handful. Lord Peter is an indulgent father but believes in corporal punishment. Miss Quirk is a guest in the house, she’s keen on child psychology and speaks her mind. This is quite an amusing read and I enjoyed being in the Vane-Wimsey household.

Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers

Posted on 9 October 2022 by Katrina

Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers was first published in 1932 and it was a re-read for me. I first read it when I lived in Essex and worked in a building which overlooked what had been the author’s home in Witham. My copy of the book is a lovely Folio edition.

Harriet Vane has just been on trial for murder and had been pronounced not guilty. All the publicity has done wonders for her writing career and money is no problem for her. She has travelled to the south-west of England for a holiday, planning to get lots of writing done while there. But while she’s on a coastal walk she discovers a dead man, it looks like he has committed suicide, but maybe it has just been made to look like a suicide and is really a murder. With Harriet finding the body and even getting blood on her the local police are a bit suspicious of her, but Lord Peter Wimsey arrives to help out, and constantly proposes marriage to Harriet of course.

Eventually the body is discovered to be that of a male dancer/host at the hotel where Harriet is staying. He was of Russian descent and he seems to have been a bit of a dreamer, thinking that he was related to Russian royalty. Was it murder or suicide? He had just been 20 years old, but had been going to marry a wealthy middle-aged widow in a few weeks, he had been her favourite dance partner at the hotel.

Things look a bit dicey for Harriet – again, but Lord Peter helps with the investigations.

I think I enjoyed this one a lot more the first time I read it. This time around I was annoyed by the minutiae of the evidence, secret codes and timetables are involved. I suspect that the author wrote those into the tale to prove that women could do that sort of thing as well as male crime writers. In fact at one point Harriet says:
‘You men have let yourselves be carried away by all these figures and timetables and you’ve lost sight of what you’re really dealing with’

Well, she proved she could write that sort of plot, but for me it’s just as tedious whether written by a male or a female. Thankfully that part of the story didn’t last too long.

It must be about 30 years since I last read her Gaudy Night which I loved, I wonder if I would love that one as much nowadays. Sadly I can’t read my old Gollancz copy of it as the ghost in my old house got it. I was in the attic where I had books shelved right under the eaves and when I spotted Gaudy Night I threw it up to the doorway so I didn’t have to crawl out with it in my hand, it’s quite a thick book. A few minutes later as I was crawling out I expected just to pick it up at the doorway but it was nowhere to be found, and as the attic was all lined and even carpeted it can’t have slipped down anywhere. Several years later as we packed up the whole house to move out I expected to find it but still no luck. Now that IS a mystery which will never be solved!

Bookshelf Travelling in Insane Times

Posted on 12 July 2020 by Katrina

It’s Bookshelf Travelling in Insane Times again, it comes around so quickly. This meme is hosted by Judith at Reader in the Wilderness.

Jack took this photo and as this shelf is home to a lot of my books too I thought I would just use it this week. The shelves contain mainly Folio books, yonks ago we were in the Folio Book Club, the books are so beautifully produced – a real pleasure to handle. I’m just going to mention a few of them. Quite a lot of these books have been bought secondhand over the years though – such as the two by Dorothy L. Sayers – Murder Must Advertise and Have His Carcase. I see from the price pencilled inside that they cost me all of £3 each – bargain!

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett is one of those books that I have collected a few copies of. This Folio edition is illustrated by Dodie Masterman, there aren’t a lot of drawings and they’re not coloured but I really like them. I’m presuming that she also designed the cover.

Have his Carcase cover

The collection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield is illustrated by Susan Wilson but I can’t find any images of her work on the internet. The design of the book cover is very jazzy I think.

Lastly Perrault’s Fairy Tales illustrated by Edmund Dulac is a beauty inside and outside, you can see some of the illustrations here.

The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley

Posted on 27 August 2018 by Katrina

The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley was first published in 1929 but I read the recent British Library Crime Classics reprint. It has an introduction by Martin Edwards.

The book begins at a gathering of the Crime Circle, a club for crime fiction writers, and Chief Inspector Moresby of Scotland Yard has gone there to ask the writers for their help. The Scotland Yard detectives are stumped over a case of murder by poisoning and Moresby hopes that the writers might be able to give them some new ideas as to who the culprit might be.

This of course involves each of the writers in turn explaining how they think the murder was committed and by whom. They all come up with different ideas of course, but which one is correct?

This isn’t my favourite style of writing as it can become a bit tedious at times with the constant repetition of facts in the case. I found myself being more interested in who the fictional detectives were based on in reality. I think that Dorothy L. Sayers was very easy to spot, but I’m not so sure about the other two female writers.

In 1979 the writer Christianna Brand wrote yet another solution to this murder puzzle and that chapter is included in this book, and Martin Edwards has the last word with his epilogue.

If you’re interested you can read about Anthony Berkeley in an interesting article by Martin Edwards here

Murder Under the Christmas Tree – short stories

Posted on 12 December 2016 by Katrina

Murder Under the Christmas Tree is a compilation of short stories by well known authors, all set around about Christmas – as you would expect.

The first story is The Necklace of Pearls by Dorothy L. Sayers. I’m quite a fan of Sayers but I have to admit that I was a wee bit disappointed with this one as I guessed the solution fairly quickly.

The other contributers are Ian Rankin, Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Val McDermid, Ellis Peters, Edmund Crispin, G.K. Chesterton, Carter Dickson and Ngaio Marsh. The sleuths include Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Cadfael, Father Brown, Rebus and others you will recognise.

It’s quite a collection of authors and I’m sure there’s something for everyone here, well everyone who enjoys a good murder around the festive season – as I do!

I read this book for the Christmas Spirit Reading Challenge.

Kirkcudbright – Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland

Posted on 7 September 2016 by Katrina

Kirkcudbright was one of the places that I particularly wanted to visit when we were down in the south-west of Scotland recently with Peggy. I had been there once before, years ago when our boys were wee and we stopped off there just to break a journey. McClellan Castle below is a stone’s throw from the harbour.

It’s well worth visiting this wee town but I must admit that I was a wee bit disappointed that it doesn’t have an awful lot in the way of shops or interesting places to visit. I had read somewhere that there were quite a few art galleries around as the town has always been very popular with artists, but we only found two galleries, one that had been taken over by an Edinburgh gallery for some weeks, and one which had artwork by just one artist.

The house below belonged to the artist Jessie M. King. She’s probably best known for her book illustrations. They’re beautifully delicate and ethereal. She lived there with her husband fellow artist E.A. Taylor.

There’s a mixture of building types in the town, from teeny wee medieval cottages to quite grand Georgian villas, and just a stone’s throw from the main street the streets are amazingly peaceful.

Below is the artist A.E. Hornel‘s house which is open to the public I think.

And there are closes like the one below leading to much older wee medieval houses.

Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the many artistic people who frequented Kirkcudbright and she actually set one of her books there – Five Red Herrings – when it was dramatised for TV they filmed it in and around Kirkcudbright.

It’s a fairly remote part of Scotland, but it’s a pretty wee place and it’s worth a visit if yoy find yourself in that area.

The Late Scholar by Jill Paton Walsh

Posted on 30 September 2015 by Katrina

The Late Scholar by Jill Paton Walsh and published in 2013 is one of those books in which she has taken the Dorothy L. Sayers characters, Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey and written a tale, supposedly in the style of Sayers. I read the first one which Walsh wrote, actually she finished a book which Sayers had begun, and I wasn’t too convinced by it as I recall.

But either I’m getting less fussy or this one was better. Set in 1953, Peter is now the Duke of Denver due to the death of his elder brother and part of his duties is to be the ‘visitor’ of an Oxford University college, St Severins.

There has been quite a lot of upset at the college between two warring factions of fellows. Some want to sell a rare book which may have been owned by King Alfred, and some of the writing in it may even be by the king. The other faction want to sell the book so that some land can be bought as a money making opportunity for the college.

The voting for and against has been at a deadlock and it seems that in desperation someone has taken to murder as a way of winning the vote. Harriet and Peter, with the help of Bunter of course sort things out.

Jill Paton Walsh does a good job of writing the characters, albeit they are less witty, mainly because they are now married, the storyline lacks the ‘will they won’t they’ sparkle of the earlier Sayers books. Peter and Harriet are now an old married couple with almost grown up sons, the chase has been long won and Peter doesn’t have to dress up in a harlequin suit again. A shame really as it was fun when Harriet kept turning his offers of marriage down. Especially as a large amount of the female readers would have jumped at the chance to marry someone like him, including Sayers herself.

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