This is the second of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels. It’s very good, but not an absolute Sayers classic, I think. (For me, she really hit her stride in the next one, Unnatural Death.)
Here, Wimsey’s elder brother, the Duke Of Denver, is discovered with the body of the fiancé of their sister Mary at 3am during a shooting weekend in Yorkshire. He refuses to provide an account of his movements and it is then up to Peter and the redoubtable Inspector Parker to get to the truth of a tangled affair. It’s a decent plot, if a little overburdened with coincidences, but it is Sayers’ characters and descriptions which really make her, in my view, the greatest of the Golden Age writers. She has enormous fun, for example, with both the solemnity and absurdity of the trial of a Peer in the House Of Lords, and there are plenty of other very enjoyable and interesting situations and characterisations. Some is just a little crude, like her view of the taciturnity of Yorkshire people, for example, and Peter’s facile manner can become rather too much at times – before settling down into the delightful character of the later books.
This may not have quite the five-star quality of the later books, but it is still a very enjoyable and involving read which I can recommend.
No comments:
Post a Comment