Have His Carcass by Dorothy Sayers
Jan. 9th, 2011 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. SayersMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I would say ‘another Lord Peter mystery,’ but it’s more accurate to say, ‘a Sayers book, marking the transitional point in the series where we stop having Lord Peter mysteries.’ And start having Peter-and-Harriet books, I mean.
Not as enjoyable as I was expecting. Peter and Harriet are, of course, rubbing along very complexly here, with suppressed romantic sentiment (mostly Peter, but not all) and resentment (mostly Harriet, but not all). There is only one real eruption between them; the rest of the time they take carefully calculated shots, watch each other too closely, and very rarely get wrapped up in the puzzle and accidentally slide towards partnership.
And the puzzle. I realize that the endless back-and-forth with layered theories and time tables and who-done-its and how-done-its is how this book works. It’s all about how mysteries are made, with Harriet applying her writer’s eye to the problem of constructing a solution that isn’t just possible, but balanced and right. Unfortunately, I find that style with the endless theorizing extremely tedious. But I think my real problem is that after all that commentary, those layered narratives and fictions, Peter does what Peter does – what a golden age detective does – and tootles off into the sunset, crime and victim(s) slotted in as just another pretty puzzle, just another story. That sort of thing rubs me exactly the wrong way. It’s the opposite of the modern TV crime drama problem, where every episode has a connection to the investigator’s tragical past so that the investigator is the real victim. It’s not like I’m fond of that, but in the golden age tradition, there were no victims at all, because it’s just an intellectual game. And this book didn’t interrogate that, the way it did most other parts of the mystery form.
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Date: 2011-01-10 03:18 pm (UTC)I disagree with this, and will talk to you about why once you have finished the rest of the Wimsey-Vane books!
ETA: I think you can disagree based only of the text of Have His Carcase without bringing in future knowledge. I just don't trust myself not to accidentally bring in spoilers for you.
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Date: 2011-01-10 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-11 02:22 am (UTC)So, especially in light of that, I don't think Peter is untouched by the puzzle; at the end of the book he's frustrated by what is probably going to be the near impossibility of getting a conviction (what are the odds that the mom will testify against her son?) but aware that they have to push it or the other professional dancer might get axed next. They leave in a state of frustration and almost horror, having done what they can and knowing that the next steps are up to the official machinery of the law until they have to testify.
It's not the striding into action on behalf of the accused that Peter does at the end of Busman's Honeymoon, but in that one the case against him is much more watertight. In this case it's quite a good chance that the murderer will get off without Peter's conscience on his side.
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Date: 2011-01-11 05:36 pm (UTC)I have very . . . complicated feelings about the end of BH, actually. On the one hand, I liked it for breaking out of that frustrating Golden Age mold you can see particularly in a lot of the short stories, where Peter just pops in to solve something awful, and then pops out again with a wave. And it makes perfect sense that Peter's conscience would come into play -- someone said somewhere that Peter's lasting trauma from the war is clearly deep discomfort with being responsible for other people's lives, and that makes perfect sense. But at the same time . . . hmm. It bugged me that Peter's conscience is about Peter, you know? That within the frame of the book, the important internal conflict is Peter's for having caught a killer, not the victim's, or the secondary and tertiary victim's, or the killer's. Which, I mean, Peter is the person we care about, obviously, and I'm not explaining this well. Must think more.
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Date: 2011-01-11 01:40 am (UTC)Whose Body? is Sayer's first book and Have His Carcase is one of her later books. I read both at the same time, which made for some pretty interesting comparisons. XD Like, in Whose Body?, Lord Peter won't do any routine detective work -- he won't even make inquiries in the neighborhood where the body was found. But in Have His Carcase, he traces a razor halfway across the country, and looks up timetables, and checks alibis, and all of this other extremely boring and routine stuff! Is this the evolution of Lord Peter? And: To what do we owe this miraculous transformation? (By his own admission, to Harriet.)
On the whole I enjoyed Whose Body? much more than I enjoyed Have His Carcase, though, even though Whose Body is the more flawed book. And boy is it ever flawed. XD; [discussion of flaws here]
So why did I like Whose Body better? Well, it wasn't boring. ^^; Have His Carcase is so boring. It's a timetable mystery. Sayers, in Whose Body?, makes fun of timetable mysteries! ("Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning...") I also have to admit that I enjoy loose-speaking Peter, who drops the final "g" from all his continuous-tense verbs, much more than I enjoy Peter-the-straight man, who is aloof and disapproving when (for instance) interrogating Weldon, the gentleman farmer who holds ungentlemanly views towards women. Whose Body? has a more frivolous Lord Peter, one whose hallmark is his irresponsibility (I laughed when he was given the medical advice to be less responsible, and he remarked that he did that already) and whose special area of knowledge (the one all detectives must have) is men's fashion.
The one thing Have His Carcase has going for it are the scenes between Lord Peter and Harriet Vane, which are so much more interesting than the surrounding text that they practically leap off the page. Unfortunately, pagecount-wise, these are few and far between, and the first really interesting one does not occur until about 150 pages in. That's the scene when Harriet confronts Peter about only having taken the case because he wanted to protect her. Since the reader (or at least, this reader) has probably been wondering for the last hundred pages whether anyone was going to bring this point up, and also maybe wishing that the case was more interesting, Harriet's remark is right-on. She pulls the same trick after another hundred and fifty pages when she complains that the mystery, as laid out by Lord Peter and the detectives, is much too mechanical. ("You men," said Harriet, "have let yourselves be carried away by all these figures and time-tables and you've lost sight of what you're really dealing with. But it's all machine-made. It creaks at every joint. It's like -- like a bad plot, built up round an idea that won't work.")
It's at this point you realize that Dorothy Sayers' method for making Harriet Vane awesome is to reserve all the meta-critical comments, previously made by Lord Wimsey or the narration, for her. XD But the lines are still amusing even after you've realized where they're coming from.
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Date: 2011-01-11 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-12 07:47 pm (UTC)