This week’s BotW sees normal service well and true resumed with Silent Nights – a book of Golden Age detective short stories set at or around Christmas. This is one of the British Crime Library’s reissues – I’ve read quite a few now and have discovered some really good authors that I was previously unaware of and who help me with my cravings for “proper” classic crime.
As well as familiar names like Dorothy L Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle and lesser known but still in print authors like Margery Allingham, there are others I hadn’t heard of before and who I’ll now try and investigate. Some of them have had long out of print titles recently republished in the same series, some of them are even more obscure than that.
There’s also a really good variety of types of mystery. The Conan Doyle is a Sherlock Holmes, complete with leaps of deduction unfathomable to the normal person, The Sayers is a Wimsey locked room-esque short story about a missing necklace. There’s also really quite creepy suspense in the form of Ethel Lina White’s Waxworks, a story based around a chess problem, another which leaves you to work out who was arrested (with an explanation at the back of the book) and a poisoning with a really nasty old man.
I enjoyed all of the stories in Silent Nights. The weak point for me was the chess-based story, but that was because chess isn’t really my game. I also really appreciated the biographical notes about each of the authors at the start of the stories – complete with information about other notable titles.
If you’re looking for some Christmas reading, this might be a nice, bite-sized place to start, and equally it would make a nice present for any fan of classic crime – particularly those who haven’t ventured much beyond the obvious suspects. It’s also not violent or graphic so might work for the cozy-crime lover in your life too. Talking of Christmas present ideas, I have many more to share with you – and they’ll be posted very soon as I know this is prime Christmas shopping time!
My copy of Silent Nights came from NetGalley*, but you can the very pretty paperback from Amazon or I’ve seen it on the speciality Christmas displays in several Waterstones stores as well as Foyles in Charing Cross Road – so it may have made it into your local bookshop too. And the Kindle version is a bargain £2.99 at time of writing, so you could treat yourself to a bit of festive sleuthing without having too big an impact on your Christmas Present Buying Fund! Several of the other British Library Crime Classics are a similar price, I can recommend Mavis Doriel Hay – Her festive story Santa Klaus Murder as well as Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell are all under £3 at the moment – as well as books by J Jefferson Farjeon and Christopher Sprigg.**
* And as usual, I only feature books here that I genuinely like – I’ve read 25 books from NetGalley in the last quarter, but only a few of those have made it to a review on here (although they all get reviewed over on Goodreads).
** Back on full disclosure again – I bought Murder Underground and Death of the Cherwell for myself, but have read various Farjeons and Sprigg’s Death of an Airman via NetGalley over the last year.
This week’s book of the week is a rediscovered Classic crime novel, Christopher St John Spriggs’ Death of an Airman – first published in 1934 and now re-released as part of the British Library’s Crime Classics series. Regular readers of this blog will know that I love Golden Age Crime (and re-listen to a Peter Wimsey audiobook at least once a month) and this was right up my alley.
George Furnace is a flying instructor at Baston Aero Club – killed when his plane crashes. But the people who knew him are baffled – he was a skilled pilot and the plane was in perfect condition. Although the inquest decides it was death by misadventure, a visiting Australian bishop suspects the truth may be more complicated. Is it suicide? Or murder? Together with Inspector Bray a very cunning scheme is uncovered.
This is brilliant. I’ll admit that I don’t know enough about flying (and in particular 1930s flying) to be able to tell you how accurate the aeroplane information is, but it certainly all made sense to me – and the titular death is brilliantly contrived. I didn’t figure out all the solution until very late on – at which point I appreciated how clever Spriggs had been in dropping hints earlier in the book which passed off as totally innocuous at the time.
I’ve now read about half a dozen titles in this British Library Crime series – and have really enjoyed discovering forgotten murder mysteries from my favourite era – which in many cases rival their more well known counterparts – the Wimseys, the Poirots etcs. The actual paperback copies look lovely (although they are a weird inbetween size) and some serious knowledge of the genre has clearly gone into the selection. I read two from the series last week – I didn’t enjoy the other one as much, but it was clearly an important book in the development of the genre – and I’ll keep looking out for more.
My copy came via NetGalley – but it should be out now in book shops (I’ve seen and bought titles in the series in both Waterstones and Foyles usually displayed with a couple of others from the series) but if you can’t wait to get to a proper book seller, then here are some links – Foyles, Waterstones, Amazon, Kindle – although I couldn’t find it on Kobo.
So, last week was a holiday week and I read a fair few books (some of which will feature in a holiday reads post in the near future) but my favourite book of the week was Ben Aaronvitch’s Rivers of London. This appeared on my radar as an if you like then you might like recommendation from someone/somewhere and I laid in a copy and saved it for one of my paperbacks for the holiday and it was so, so good.
I love the cover illustration, but I’m not sure it actually reflects the sort of book this is
Peter Grant is a newly non-probationary police constable in the Met. He’s just been assigned to the unit which does the paperwork so everyone else doesn’t have to, when he tries to take a witness statement from a ghost after a particularly unusual murder in Covent Garden. Then Chief Inspector Nightingale turns up and he’s suddenly an apprentice wizard. And that’s where the fun begins.
This book is a total mash-up of some of my favourite things – it’s a police procedural (but not too thrillery chillery) with a strong fantasy element (magic! ghosts! spirits!), which knows exactly how its world works and isn’t going to dump it all on you at once, with a cast of intriguing and complex characters and a load of humour too. So Urban Fantasy Crime Comedy. Maybe. Anyway, it’s fabulous and I need to read the next one, not least because there are still some fairly important questions unresolved about the characters and the wider world.
You should be able to get a copy of Rivers of London at any good bookshop – I checked a mid-sized WH Smith in a local supermarket shopping centre* and they had two copies and 3 other books from the series. If you have poor impulse control (like me) the kindle edition is just £1.99 at time of writing. Or you can buy actual copies from Amazon, Waterstones, Foyles and the like.
* The sort of shopping centre that is based around a giant supermarket. Like you get in France, but less classy as this particularly shopping centre was on the front page of the Daily Mail website the other week as the Tesco shoppers went a bit nuts over reduced price meat.
This week’s BotW Death at the Opera and also is a bit of a compare and contrast. I read of Gladys Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley Mysteries last week – this one I loved and the other I could barely get through. As I didn’t read a huge amount last week – and two of them were books I’m reviewing for Novelicious (which I can’t preempt here) – I’ve made Death at the Opera my book of the week. Death at the Opera ticks a lot of my boxes – it’s a murder mystery set in a girls school – but Mrs Bradley is a bit different to a lot of the Golden Age Sleuths. She’s going to track down whodunnit, but she’s not necessarily going to hand them over to the authorities when she does. And that’s what makes her interesting – she wants to know, but often without having a yearning for justice for the victim – she’s more detached and curious than some of the other dectectives of the time.
Death at the Opera is fulled with interesting and intriguing characters, some of whom have very modern attitudes, and a twisty turny plot that I didn’t work out until right at the end. I absolutely zipped through it and went straight on to another Mrs Bradley from the to-read pile (I picked up three from the charity shop a couple of months back) – and what a contrast that was. I really struggled with Come Away, Death. I didn’t like the characters or the setting and I found it really difficult to get into. I finished it, but only just – and only because I liked the Death at the Opera so much I was hoping it would improve. But I guess when a series is so long running there’s bound to be a few duds. Hey ho.
Here it is finally – the post about Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series that I’ve been promising for so long!
Phryne was my discovery of the year in 2013 – I read the first book, Miss Phyrne Fisher Investigates* on June 1 last year – and by September I’d read the first 18 books in the series (books 19 and 20 took a bit longer because they initially fell outside my Kindle book cost limit as they were so new – although I stretched my limits on occasion for some of the others) reading them almost in one sitting. I’ve just re-read the whole lot to see if they’re as good second time around – and they really are.
So who is Phryne? Well firstly, it’s pronounced Fry-knee (not Frinn as I had it in my head until she told some one how to say it!) and the Honourable Miss Phryne Fisher is a 1920s aristocrat, who spent her childhood in poverty in Melbourne before her father came into his title. She returned to Australia in her mid-twenties to investigate a mystery for a friend of the family (and to get away from said family). She liked Melbourne so much that she stayed and has established herself as a Private detective. She’s smart, she’s pretty, she’s brave, she knows what she wants – and she has the money to do it.
There aren’t a lot of (good) female leading ladies in historical detective fiction**. This is mostly because for the vast majority of history women haven’t really had the power to do much on their own – and it’s hard to construct realistic stories around what they would have been able to accomplish. From this point of view, Kerry Greenwood has done a perfect job in creating Phryne. The post-war period brought greater freedom for women, particularly if you had money – which Phryne does. Greenwood has also given her a stonking – and realistic – back story which explains why Phryne has the attitudes that she does and also creates openings for stories that aren’t too far fetched.
And in a genre where men often get all the action in the bedroom, Phryne more than holds her own. She may on occasion pine for a man – but not to marry, she just wants them in her bed! Her lovers rarely last more than a book – but they always leave on good terms. Lin Chung is the notable exception to this rule – but I’m not going to tell much more than that because I don’t want to ruin it for you.
Like every good detective, Phryne has a gaggle of loyal helpers including her maid Dot (frequently described as a “good girl” who tries not to be scandalised by her employer), her adopted daughters (picked up during a case) and Bert and Cec, the wharfies-cum-taxi drivers-cum-red raggers. And as she’s not actually a policeman, she has her own Inspector Japp in the form of Inspector Jack Robinson and his constable, Hugh Collins.
I don’t know a lot about inter-war Australia, but I can’t remember a jarring word or phrase in the books, and rarely has anything struck me as being too far-fetched. There’s often a bibliography at the end to reassure you that the author really has done her homework. In fact the more I read about what people could get up to in the 1920s (Kenya’s Happy Valley, some of the Bright Young Thing’s antics), the more I think that Kerry Greenwood’s been positively restrained!
So, in short, if you like your period crime novels with strong heroines, interesting plots and a little bit of bedroom action (fairly subtle, not too graphic) and you haven’t read any of Phryne’s adventures, may I point you in the direction of Miss Phryne Fisher Investigates in paperback or on Kindle. She’s well worth it.
* The first book was originally published as Cocaine Blues – I’m assuming they changed it for the UK market to make it clearer that it’s the first in the series. I can’t think of any other reason. It’s still called Cocaine Blues in Australia.
**I’m planning posts on some of my other favourites as well – and I’m always looking for recommendations – please leave a comment if you have suggestions for more that I should read.
I always feel a sense of trepidation when I hear that a book or series that I like is being turned into a film or a TV series. There have been some notable successes, but equally a number of failures too. When I analyse it, I tend to prefer the adaptations where I’ve read the book after watching the TV show or movie. So here for your delectation are some of my hits and misses.
Miss Marple
To me, Joan Hickson was perfect
I’m fairly sure that I watched the Joan Hickson Miss Marple adaptations before I started reading the books. I was 10 when I first watched them (as mentioned in my post on Lord Peter Wimsey), twenty years on I still love them wholeheartedly – and actually have a fair few of them on my TiVo box which I watch whilst ironing. My favourites are Body in the Library, A Murder Is Announced, The 4.50 from Paddington and Nemesis (despite the fact that the murdered girl is called Verity!). I’ve only seen a couple of ITV’s “Marple” adaptations – and I’ve loathed them – not only do they change the plot and sometimes even the murderer, but they are utterly unnecessary considering the perfection of the 1980s adaptations.
Hercule Poirot
David Suchet gets it pretty much spot on
Moving from one Agatha Christie creation to another – I think my first encounter with the little Belgian detective was David Suchet’s audiobook version of Murder on the Orient Express, although I may have read a book or two first. I think this means I was predisposed to like his TV version – and I forgive it the tweaks and alterations. I don’t rewatch these the way I do with the Miss Marples, but if one happens to come on, I won’t turn it off. I also love the film of Murder on the Orient Express with its starry cast and gorgeous music by Richard Rodney Bennett (if you’ve never heard it, spare a few minutes to watch the wonderful Proms performance below) – a rare occasion of my liking two different adaptations of the same property!
Pride and Prejudice
My much-loved TV tie-in edition of Pride and Prejudice
I started reading the book after I’d watched the first episode of the legendary BBC adaptation with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. I’d finished the book by the time the second episode aired. Because I read it that way around, Ehle and Firth were Lizzie and Darcy in my head from the start – and that’s where so often it goes wrong with adaptations for me – when the actors just don’t look like the image you have in your head of the characters. I’ve never managed to get past the first 15 minutes of the Keira Knightley/Matthew Macfadyen version – possibly because I’m so attached to the 1995 adaptation and it’s so fixed in my head.
Harry Potter
German hardback Harry on Chamber of Secrets doesn’t look like Radcliffe
The “image in your head” issue is at the heart of the problem with Harry Potter. My sister was very angry when the first film came out – she wasn’t pleased with Daniel Radcliffe, but her bigger problem was Emma Watson – “Hermione’s not meant to be pretty and she’s about as convincingly plain as Rachel Leigh Cook is in She’s All That”. I agreed – and there are also parts of the books that I’m sentimentally attached to that are left out (the last lines of Prisoner of Azkaban for a start – “He was my mum and dad’s best friend. He’s a convicted murderer, but he’s broken out of wizard prison and he’s on the run. He likes to keep in touch with me, though … keep up with news … check if I’m happy.”).
The look of the trio definitely “evolves” once the films start
But of course for children reading the book now (or anytime in the last decade) that’s not a problem – you can’t avoid the film versions, so you’re unlikely to have the same strong mental image of what Harry et al look like that those of us who were fans of the books before the movies appeared. I read Harry in French and German to improve my vocabulary (for degree and A-Level respectively) and it’s noticeable that the cover illustrations of Harry grow more like Daniel Radcliffe as the books go by. On a side issue, I’m still sad that children now won’t experience Harry we (my sister and I) did – today, if you read the first one and like it, you can read all the way through to the end of the series. Never again will you have to wait a year to find out what happens next, or worry about how it’ll end.
Phryne Fisher
Book Phryne…
Back on the literary adaptations, we move on to the inspiration for this post. I love the Phryne Fisher books – but I have serious issues with the TV adaptations. I have to try to view them as completely separate entities or I get ragey. Very ragey. In the books, Phryne is in her late 20s, solves murders and gets a lot of action in the bedroom department. She has two adopted daughters, Mr and Mrs Butler to run her house, her regular man (or as regular as any) is Lin Chung and she unofficially assists the happily married policeman Jack Robinson. In the TV series, she still solves murders. The actress playing Phryne is at least a decade too old (although, to be fair, she is a good actress and does her best), one of her daughters and Mrs Butler have disappeared, Lin Chung appears in one episode (and looks young enough to be Phryne’s son), they’re trying to work up a love interest with Jack Robinson (who is divorced from the daughter of a police bigwig) and Phryne’s lesbian socialist sister has been replaced with Miriam Margolyes as an uptight class conscious aunt. On the plus side, the costumes and locations are gorgeous, although there have been some really shonky wigs.
…TV Phryne
I appreciate that for a family audience you can’t get away with what you can in a book, but the two are so different that it sometimes seems that the only thing they have in common is the names of some of the characters! One of the reasons for my recent Phryne re-read was to banish the memory of the second series of the TV series – which I mostly watched whilst yelling at the TV over the character changes and the narrative alterations, much to the amusement of The Boy. Still, so far, I’ve managed to keep my own mental image of Phryne going without it being overwritten with the TV version – I credit my rage for this!
So, there you have it. Three good, and two not so good. A couple of other snapshots for you: I found the TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale deeply disappointing when we watched it during A-Levels, but I like the first Bridget Jones film (the second was a bit of a let down, but then the book isn’t as good either). The Boy is a big fan of HBO’s True Blood and I’ve almost finished reading the books. We have fun comparing the plots of the two – which seem to differ wildly (Typical conversation: Him “Has the governor appeared yet?” Me: “What governor?” Him “He does experiments on Vampires and starts poisoning True Blood” Me: “That’s not in the book!”). I’m also working my way through the Inspector Alleyn series – both the books and the TV adaptations (the latter being classic ironing fodder) and the jury is still out on those.
I’ve got the TV version of Tales of the City waiting to be watched next time I do some ironing so that I can see how it compares to the books and I’m currently debating whether to go to see The Fault in our Stars at the cinema – but that’s not so much because I’m worried it’ll upset my mental image of the characters, but because I’m not sure I can handle all that crying again so soon after the book – and this time in public!
If you’ve got any literary adaptations that you love or loathe – or think I ought to watch, leave your comments below!
A few friends have already asked me for ideas for books for their summer holidays, so I thought now might be the time to come up with a proper set of recommendations for holiday reads. It is a tradition in our family that you get a holiday book – this was started by my mum back when I was small and I have various books on my shelves with neatly written notes in the front from my mum telling me which holiday she gave them to me for. My sister and I have continued this as grown-ups – The Boy thought it was weird at first but I now have him so used to it that he starts to offer suggestions for what he’d like me to get him. I have terrible trouble deciding what to take to read on holiday (thank goodness for the kindle) so I’ve tried to include a range of options.
The One that Everyone’s Reading
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simison –I know. It really is everywhere. But I read this on our trip to Rome earlier this year and laughed so hard that people on the plane started staring at me. It has had a lot of hype, but it is very, very good. I don’t want to say too much about the plot, but watching Don Tillman hunt for love is properly funny – and in places you’ll want to read through your fingers as you cringe at his mistakes. I’m already looking forward to the sequel.
The One if you like “Chick Lit”
I guess this could be considered my home genre (unless you count historical novels. Or cozy crime), anyway I read a lot in this sort of genre. So I couldn’t just pick one. Books I’ve recently really enjoyed are The Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan (which is definitely a holiday read – it’s set in Cornwall by the coast!), Trisha Ashley’s Every Woman for Herself (which has a full review here) and Sinead Moriarty’s Mad About You (although I think I’d have liked it more if I had read the other books about the characters) which all should be available in the sort of multi-buy offers you get at WH Smiths and the Supermarkets.
The One if You like Cozy Crime
It’s not really new, but try Manna from Hades by Carola Dunn if you like the sort of cozy crime that’s set in the past – this is in 1960s Cornwall where Eleanor Trewynn has retired to after a life working for charity abroad. It’s as readable as the author’s Daisy Dalrymple series. If you like your cozy crime modern, I reviewedJenn McKinlay’sDeath of a Mad Hatter a few weeks back which is fresh on the market – or you can’t go wrong with Donna Andrews’ Meg Langslow series – Death with Peacocks is the first one and as it came out 10 years ago, you can get it for cheap second hand.
The One if you like Non-Fiction
This is a tough one for me – because I’m very behind with my non-fiction pile. Of books released recently, I enjoyed Neil McKenna’s Fanny and Stellawhich is the story of two young men who dressed as women in Victorian London and the scandal that ensued when they were caught. Apart from that, all my recent non-fiction reads have been published some time ago. I hesitate to recommend anything I haven’t yet read, but the excellent Helen Rappaport has a new book out (in hardback sadly) – Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses which has been picked out as a recommendation at various places. If you haven’t read her Magnificent Obsession (about Queen Victoria’s relationship with Prince Albert) that is available as a paperback and is well worth a look – as is her Beautiful Forever which is about a cosmetician and con-artist in Victorian London – who coincidentally also gets a mention in Fanny and Stella.
The One if you like Thrillers
A Delicate Truth by John le Carré –I got given copy of this a month or two back – you can see the long review here. Its pacey, suspenseful and disturbing. If you haven’t read any le Carré, go get yourself some of the Smiley series and try them out – they’re Cold War and this is modern, but all the ones I’ve read have been very, very good.
The One that’s a Kindle Bargain
Vintage Girl by Hester Browne – This was 56p when I wrote this blog – which by any standards is a bargain, let alone when it’s as fun as this. Valuer Evie gets sent to Scotland to asome heirlooms – romance, family secrets and Scottish Dancing ensues. (NB previously published as an e-book called Swept Off Her Feet – so don’t buy it twice!)
The One(s) if you want a series to start
The Amelia Peabody books by Elizabeth Peters. I have a terrible habit of starting a series and keeping going with it, ignoring all other claims from the to-read pile. E-readers make this so easy and if you’re a quick reader, you may need more than one book for your week at the beach (hell I need more than on book for a DAY at the beach). Amelia is a Victorian feminist who sets off for Egypt to do a spot of archaeology. I can’t come up with the words to do her justice, but’s like a funny female Indiana Jones. There are 19 books in the series (more than you could read on one holiday surely!) and the later ones feature various members of her family too – her son is a scream!
So there you are. I hope there’s something for everyone in the list – I think most of them should be easy to find and in some cases as available in multi-buy deals. As usual most of my links are to Foyles – because I like independent bookshops and the name of their loyalty scheme Foyalty. And if you’ve got any recommendations for books I should be reading this summer – please do put them in the comments below!
I have a rather complicated history with detective stories. When I was 11, I scared myself silly by forgetting I’d put a pillow in my bed to confuse my sister while I was downstairs watching Joan Hickson’s Miss Marple with my parents. Once I’d seen Miss Marple on the TV, I promptly read all the Agatha Christie books that my mum owned, bought more with my pocket money and then in a fit of angst over death (in particular my own), gave all my purchases to the jumble sale and hid mum’s copies out of sight. I know. I was a strange child.
After that, I left detective stories alone for probably about five years. Then a friendly librarian, who found out that I was a bellringer, pointed me in the direction of The Nine Tailors, which I duly read, enjoyed and then forgot about – although by this point I had started reading Agatha Christie again.
Fast forward nearly 10 years and I’m living in Essex, working the early shift at a radio station, a bit lonely and hitting the library hard. I don’t know if I started reading them because I was reading Margery Allingham (who had lived locally) and seen comments that Albert Campion had started as a take-off of Peter Wimsey, or because I’d seen a recommendation, or because I happened across them in the stacks at the library and remembered I’d enjoyed The Nine Tailors, but I did rediscover them and boy did I love them.
My little local library didn’t have many books in the series – and once I’ve found something I like, I want to read them all, as quickly as possible. So I started buying them in the local book shop. But it didn’t have many in stock. So I picked up a few second hand paperbacks from my friendly book dealer who happens to do detective stories as well as classic school stories, then I started buying the ones that I’d read at the library (because I *had* to have the whole set) and so my rag tag collection was born.
My Dorothy L Sayers collection
For those who have had the misfortune to have never come across Lord Peter Wimsey, he is the archetypal gentleman detective – much copied and never equalled. The second son of the Duke of Denver, born in 1890, educated at Eton and Oxford, he is a bon vivant with a private income who solves mysteries because he can. But Peter is troubled – he’s battle scarred after the First World War, with shell-shock and a fear of responsibility; which sits badly with sending men to the gallows. He’s much more than just an idle rich man with a vaguely foolish face – which is the image he likes to project to the world. Assistance comes principally from his faithful valet Bunter (who had been in his unit in France) and Chief Inspector Charles Parker of Scotland Yard. The books were published between 1923 and 1937 – and Peter ages in real time as the series progresses.
The four books that feature Lord Peter Wimsey and the mystery writer Harriet Vane
My favourite four books are what I call the Peter and Harriet Quartet – that is Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon – the novels that feature Harriet Vane, first encountered in the dock at the Old Bailey on trial for murder – who Peter falls in love with and pursues across the next three books. As well as my paperback copies, I have all four as audiobooks or radio plays – and they run in high rotation on my generic mp3 device on my journeys on the train, on my lunchbreaks and late at night when I’m staying away from home and need something to listen to to get to sleep. I didn’t read them in order – Have His Carcase came first, then Busman’s Honeymoon, Strong Poison and finally Gaudy Night.
I’m firmly convinced that Busman’s Honeymoon is probably the most romantic detective novel in existence. In the dedication at the start Sayers writes:
It has been said, by myself and others, that a love-interest is only an intrusion upon a detective story. But to the characters involved, the detective-interest might well seem an irritating intrusion upon their love-story. This book deals with such a situation.
And to me, that pretty much sums it up perfectly. Busman’s Honeymoon is a perfectly formed detective novel (I didn’t figure out who did it until the reveal) but also is a beautifully romantic story about the start of a couple’s married life. And if you’ve read the three books that lead up to it, it’s the perfect end to a long and sometimes painful courtship, which must have felt tortuous to readers when the books were first published – because Strong Poison was appeared in 1931 – and Busman’s Honeymoon came out six books later in 1937.
Gaudy Night is the weakest of the four when it comes to the detective plot – it’s not an actual murder but a poison pen mystery and actually has very little Peter to a lot of Harriet. But it’s still a very good book and you learn a lot more about Harriet, her life, her side of the courtship and what she was doing while Peter was solving the mysteries in the two novels of that part of the series that she doesn’t feature in. Strong Poison and Have His Carcase have two of Sayers’ best puzzles – they’re utterly ingenious and perfectly plotted.
Among the other novels, my favourite is Murder Must Advertise, where Peter – under the psedonym of Death Bredon – goes to work at an advertising agency where one of the copywriters has fallen to his death, leaving a letter hinting at scandalous goings on in the firm. Sayers was herself a copywriter for a decade – and the book is a fascinating glimpse into the world of advertising in the early ’30s as well as a really very clever murder mystery.
My collection (unusually for me) has several different styles of cover
I could write at even greater length about the wonders of these novels, but this post is already massively long. I hope that if you’ve read this far and you haven’t ever read any of Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, you might be tempted to go and try one. My recommendation as a starting point would be Strong Poisonor Murder Must Advertise, although equally Nine Tailors or even the very first book Whose Body?would be a good introduction. Don’t start with Busman’s Honeymoon (I’m not even linking to it to deter you further) as you’ll regret it if you don’t read Peter and Harriet for the first time in the order in which they were intended – I know I do and as soon as I had finished Gaudy Night for the first time I went back and read all four again in the right order!
As usual, my links are to Foyles – because I love them, their Foyalty points, their order in the morning and pick it up from a store in the afternoon feature (which even gives you discount) and I’ve found that for this sort of book (ie not a mass-market new release) they are often cheaper than the alternatives – but equally you can find Lord Peter in your high street bookshop, at major online booksellers and often in charity shops. They’re also widely held by libraries because they are, after all, classics of the genre.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 