Have His Carcase

This is the eighth book featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. We first meet Harriet Vane, crime writer and previously on trial for murder, in, “Strong Poison.” She then vanished in the next novel, “Five Red Herrings,” which I struggled with, and so I was pleased to become re-acquainted with her in this story. The book opens with Harriet Vane on a walking tour, when she finds the body of a man on a beach. His throat has been cut and, with the tide coming in, Harriet attempts to contact the police – but this involves such a long journey that the body has vanished by the time she manages to alert anyone. The next morning the police and press are all gathered at the seaside watering place where Harriet is staying, and then Lord Peter Wimsey arrives. The victim turns out to be a Russian professional dancer who, not only was paid to dance with the elderly ladies who visit the hotel, but had actually proposed marriage to one of them – a very wealthy, and seemingly heartbroken lady, named Mrs Weldon. As the investigation unfolds though, nothing seems to be clear cut – there are disappearing witnesses, letters in ciphers and even tales of Bolsheviks… I enjoyed this far more than the previous, “Five Red Herrings.” Harriet Vane was more involved in this plot, but she did not take over and Lord Peter Wimsey had a large part in the investigation. Dorothy L.Sayers did not only create a fantastic sleuth in Wimsey, but gave him a good array of friends and family to flesh out the books; so we have the intrepid Bunter tailing a suspect and a mention of his new brother in law, Parker, as well as lots of local police input. Overall, an enjoyable addition to the series and I look forward to reading on.

This is another of those 'game changer' books in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, and I'm so glad that I've been reading them in order and relatively close together, because it's giving me a lot more insight into how Sayers went about writing them. According to the preamble in the edition I have, she had finished with Wimsey in the last book. Then a very unhappy marriage a few years later made her return to him - and to give him the promise of a happy marriage with Harriet Vane to compensate for her own personal troubles! So, this is a much longer book than the others so far. It opens with Harriet, and puts her at the centre of the crime - though not, this time, accused of committing it. Enter Peter stage right, protective and fascinated, and we finally see the two beginning to work together. There's a lot about their relationship in this book, and there's a great deal to show that Peter really does 'get' Harriet in a very modern way. He becomes endearing in this book too, and much more mature - for the first time, in an outburst of frustration, we get his own opinion of himself and his true understanding of the situation between them. I sooooo loved him for that. However - this is also a bit of a whodunnit-thon, and I felt a bit too much of one. There was an awful lot of toing and froing of theories, and too much consultation between the various police officers and Wimsey for my personal taste - to the point where it became pretty unbelievable, to be honest. There was way, way too much code-breaking detail. And too much tide calculations. So I did feel that the overall book could have been edited down just a wee bit. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed it. And of course (WTG Ms Sayers) I can't wait for the next one.

This is one of the last of the Lord Peter Wimsey adventures I have now to read and, as usual, it is very well written and so reminiscence of the period in which it was written. Unlike many period fiction books this book was actually written at the time it portrays so there is no problem with anachronism or badly researched details. I like the fact that it is thicker than most of the early books Sayer's wrote as it really gets into the story and is well researched, well written and pulls you into the story with room to get into the detail. I am not keen on the short stories that Sayers had written about Lord Peter - she is at her best when she pads it out, because unlike a lot of authors, you don't feel as if there are details put in to make it overlong, details which are unnecessary and sometimes boring. You get a lot for your money with Sayers. Although her stories are complicated, they make sense and Sayers also writes in such a way as to keep the reader interested.

Dorothy Sayers is a hit or a miss for me and after reading 3 of her novels and a few of her short stories, I now know why. I really enjoyed Strong Poison and this one (Have His Carcase) but I didn’t really like Gaudy Night so much. Unfortunately, her strongest points as an author (and most often what people love about her) are what keep her books from being included in my favorites. In my case, I read these novels for the mystery first. Everything else- the characters, the ambience, how detailed and well researched a thing is- while important, take second place. In all Sayers novels I’ve read (most especially Gaudy Night) the focus is on the novel and the mystery is just sort of included. They are often decently written but nothing amazing, IMHO. In that novel, more care was given to how the reader could enjoy descriptions of Oxford, student affairs, banter between the professors, etc. I appreciated it for its feminist POV but the mystery was plain shallow and petty, which prevented me from enjoying it as much as I could have. Have His Carcase is much better than Gaudy IMHO, and while the puzzle does not begin to approach Christie, Carr or even Queen, it is still pretty well thought out and entertaining. Most importantly for me, I like how the background supports the plot and not the other way around. Also, some issues I have with my eBook: 1) The images are missing and show a broken camera icon. This is a pretty big problem, considering that the chapters are about a cipher which I could not follow due to the missing diagrams. I hope the publisher can remedy this since it is part of the plot. 2) There is no way to access the table of contents (the button is grayed out) from the Kindle drop down menu...I have to go to the beginning of the book to get to it.

It has been said that Sayers fans either love Harriet Vane or detest her, and I’m in the first camp. To me they are all five-star reads, but “Carcase” has the most puzzling mystery, where the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ keep pointing in different directions. “Have His Carcase” is the second Vane/Wimsey story. Up to the addition of Harriet Vane to the series, Lord Peter Wimsey was a wealthy, charming but rather shallow character. He dabbles in mystery investigations as a hobby, as he is insatiably curious and underneath a ‘foolish-looking face’, extremely intelligent. As he was so popular that his creator Ms. Sayers couldn’t kill him off à la Reichenbach Falls, she invented Harriet Vane, who first appears in “Strong Poison” as a defendant convicted of poisoning her Bohemian lover. Wimsey, seated in the courtroom at first just to watch, instantly became certain of two facts: -1- Harriet Vane was innocent, and -2- He, Wimsey, was going to marry her. At the end of “Poison”, Lord Peter solves the ‘whodunit’ and proposes – but Harriet refuses him. A successful mystery writer herself, she is determined not to be the beggar-maid to Wimsey’s Cophetua. (Note: In the intervening period between the first and second Vane-Wimsey stories, there is the Wimsey-only “Five Red Herrings” novel.) As “Carcase” begins, Harriet embarks on a solo walking tour along the southern coast. When she finds a dead body on a beach, she decides to do a murder investigation on her own, paralleling the police. The publicity about the corpse discovery alerts Wimsey, who rushes down to help. “Carcase” nicely balances the complex mystery of who murdered Paul Alexei and the (very) slowly developing romance between Harriet and Lord Peter. There are numerous red herrings to lead the reader astray, and just the right amount of timetable checking – not too much (unlike “Herrings”) and not too little. There is tragic romantic illusion contrasted against an emerging 'meeting of the minds'. As always with the great writers, the side characters are memorable and well-developed, easy to imagine in the mind’s eye. For fans new to the Wimsey stories, there are two other superb Wimsey-only novels which follow “Carcase”. The Vane romance then continues with “Gaudy Night” and its follow-up “Busman’s Honeymoon”, and the final short, “Talboys”. The Vane-Wimsey novels were later continued by author Jill Paton Walsh, who wrote four more to end the series. BBC Television in 1987 produced an excellent mini-series of the Vane-Wimsey books 1–3, with Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter, Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane and Richard Morant as Bunter. They could not obtain the rights to Busman’s Honeymoon, unfortunately. The series was released on DVD and is available through Amazon.