Have His Carcass by Dorothy Sayers

[lightreads]

Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers

My 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.





View all my reviews

Comments

[lightreads]

*nodding* Yeah, I can see that.

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.