I read a couple Lord Peter mysteries and Have His Carcasse was my least favorite. It's just really boring. Here's the comparison I made with Whose Body, the earliest Lord Peter mystery:
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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momijizukamori and
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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.