The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers

[lightreads]

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The last Wimsey. Last that I hadn't read, I mean. I couldn't remember whether this one or Five Red Herrings was the truly bad one; I meant to save the worst for last, but guessed wrong, so ended up surprised by the quality of this chilly, densely-peopled, eerie book. She writes beautifully of the fens, the tiny villages, the convolutions of life around the church, the rising water, the ringing ringing ringing of the bells. I stopped reading this as a murder mystery very early and recalibrated my attention to a novel of place. That turned out to be just right, because it's a good novel of place, though I think many people will like it more than I did. And also it set me up perfectly to be genuinely chilled by the ultimate solution, even if I had guessed three-quarters of it all correctly. Ooof.

I am not, I must say, sorry to see the back of Peter's 'oh woe is me, I wish I had never carelessly wandered into this murder mystery because I'm endlessly nosy and then discovered later that real people really got hurt, oh waily waily.' I understand this is supposed to be a function of his PTSD, and this book does weave together the strands of his war recollections with the present abdication of responsibility. In fact, I think it does so notably better than Busman's Honeymoon does (Busman's Honeymoon being the obvious thematic and structural companion to this book, at least to my eye). I just don't have to like it, and for complicated reasons I deeply do not.




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Comments

[readerjane]

I think Peter does his best at accepting responsibility for the results of his detecting in Murder Must Advertise. Maybe because he begins by deceiving at the ad agency, so can't pretend he stumbled upon anything?