It is many years since I last read Have His Carcase; it has held up very well in the intervening decades but it does have it’s flaws, I think.
This effectively follows on from Strong Poison, with Harriet Vane taking a holiday in Devon to recover from her ordeal and to write a new mystery. During a solitary walk she discovers a corpse with his throat cut by a razor, which the police regard as a clear case of suicide. However, she has her doubts and Peter Wimsey soon appears to help to unravel the complex riddle which begins to emerge.
It’s a classic Sayers mystery, full of wit, erudition and immensely enjoyable prose. As always, she paints both her setting and her characters very vividly (and sometimes rather acidly in the case of characters she dislikes) and her structure is ingenious and fairly done, so that when the critical piece falls into place we can see the evidence having been present throughout rather than it being a convenient disclosure at the last minute.
For much of its length, this is a five-star read for me, principally for the sheer pleasure of reading Sayers’s prose, but there are some longeurs. We spend a great deal of time examining possibilities which are then discarded, which became just a little tedious – and to be informed after several hundred pages of this that Wimsey sees that “every theory he had so far formed about the case was utterly and madly wide of the mark” felt somewhat disheartening. There is also a lengthy chapter in which Harriet and Peter crack a tough code in which Sayers takes us through the process in minute and forensic detail. Although I found the general idea very interesting, that level of analysis palled fairly quickly and became a bit like watching someone else solve a sudoku puzzle – not something I like to spend a long time doing.
A little judicious skimming took care of all this very well, but it did rather take the gloss off for me. It’s perhaps not one of Sayers’s absolute best, but it’s still very enjoyable indeed and warmly recommended.
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