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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.





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