Busman’s Honeymoon remains a very fine novel and a terrific read from the Golden Age. It is the fourth in the sequence featuring both Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey; it can be read as a stand-alone, but I strongly recommend that you read Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night before this. (It won’t be any hardship whatsoever.)
Here, Peter and Harriet finally get married and there is a delightful epistolary opening from a wide variety of correspondents in which we get the story of the wedding and which shows Sayers’s brilliance as a writer. It then reverts to third person narrative, largely from Harriet’s point of view, in which (of course) a body is discovered at their newly-bought home in Hertfordshire and the solution of the case is intertwined with an examination of their developing relationship.
It is, for the most part, quite brilliantly done. The story is cleverly but fairly plotted and Sayers’s insight into her characters is remarkable, I think. It does have its little flaws; there is some rather annoying quotation-mongering between Peter and the police superintendent, a good deal of untranslated French in places and some of the inevitable snobbery of the period, but, at least 25 years since I last read it, it remains an immense pleasure. Very warmly recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment