Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

[lightreads]

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


All I really remembered about this book was that it made me laugh; what I didn’t remember was it also has teeth.



A peter Wimsey mystery, wherein Peter goes undercover in an ad agency, and then there are a lot of shenanigans, and also bad puns, and a climactic cricket match that made me snigger to myself for ten minutes straight, much to the consternation of my morning train seatmate.



(This is, incidentally, a pretty good place to start with Peter Wimsey. Not the chronological beginning of the series, but it’s one of the best, and it sets you up nicely to read forward or back without ruining your first Wimsey on, say, the one with all the goddamn train schedules.)



Anyway, so it’s thoroughly amusing, and peter capers here and there, declaiming and punning and being horrible and being grand. Also solving a murder, and tripping into a viper’s nest of crime, like he does.



But under that is a tense, frantically unhappy book. About the ad game and the life game – buy this, that’ll solve your problems, now buy that, snort this line of cocaine, try that dangerous stunt, run faster, work harder, more more more – why aren’t you happy yet? What do you mean you came to a bitter end along the way? And if that weren’t enough, also a pointed meditation on a particular stripe of British classism.*



God damn, when she was good, no one could touch Sayers.



*There’s this bit where one character explains to another how there’s a cultural divide in the office between the Oxbridge chaps and the rest of them. How the blokes who went to, like, Manchester, will get all earnest and upset and froth at the mouth about metaphysics, and one of the Oxbridge guys will come along and just make a bad pun at them and ask why they can't take a joke. And I was like, “Ahahaha, Dorothy Sayers! Your Oxbridge chaps are hipsters.”





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Comments

[ellen_fremedon]

I've seen several people independently (AFAIK) seize on that cricket match as an example of Not Science Fiction. You can follow what's going on emotionally. You can follow, roughly, who is winning the game and by how wide a margin, and how difficult it's going to be for the other team to catch up. You can understand everything you need to understand for the scene to make plot sense and emotional sense.

But if you don't already know cricket, you will not learn a damned thing about the gameplay or the rules from that scene.

[lightreads]

That is completely true. I possibly no less about cricket now than I did before the book, actually, because my vague sense that it has something to do with bats and balls has been replaced with "Peeeeeeeeter."