BUSMAN'S HONEYMOON
UK publication: 1937 (Victor Gollancz)
US publication: 1937 (Harcourt, Brace)
Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey
Plot summary and comments: Sayers subtitled this novel "A love story with detective interruptions." A stage version, written by Sayers in collaboration with her college friend and fellow writer Muriel St. Clare Byrne, had run for several months in 1937, before the book was issued.
CLOUDS OF WITNESS
UK publication: 1926 (Unwin)
US publication: 1927 (Dial Press)
Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey
Plot summary and comments: The Duke of Denver, Lord Peter's elder brother, is hosting a shooting party at a lodge in Scotland. When one of the party, George Cathcart, who is the fiancee of Peter's sister Lady Mary, is discovered dead outside the lodge door in the middle of the night with the Duke himself standing over him, and the Duke refuses to give an alibi, he is arrested and sent for trial before the House of Lords. Peter, collaborating with Chief-Inspector Parker, must unravel a string of coincidences---over the active opposition of most of his family, especially Mary---to clear the Duke independently, and then, to satisfy himself, to establish what did happen, while trying to avert scandal. Peter's family are not so well-drawn as they are in later books; the Duke's wrong-headed obstinacy is certainly in evidence, but his wife is less interesting. The Dowager Duchess (Peter's mother), as always, takes Peter's side with unerring command of the situation.
THE FIVE RED HERRINGS
US title: SUSPICIOUS CHARACTERS
UK publication: 1931 (Victor Gollancz)
US publication: 1931 (Warren and Putnam)
Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey
Plot summary and comments:
GAUDY NIGHT
UK publication: 1935 (Victor Gollancz)
US publication: 1936 (Harcourt, Brace)
Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey
Plot summary and comments:
HAVE HIS CARCASE
UK publication: 1932 (Victor Gollancz)
US publication: 1932 (Brewer, Warren and Putnam)
Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane
Plot summary and comments: The story takes place a little after the events of Strong Poison, so that Harriet Vane is a friend of Lord Peter and in fact is being wooed by him, but is resolutely refusing to fall in love with him or accept his cheerily repeated offers of marriage. Harriet is on a hiking-tour along the seaside when she discovers a recently dead body--a young foreign-looking man--in a deserted cove. Unable to move it, she photographs it before it disappears with the rising tide. The local police take up the matter and when word gets out, Peter appears and takes a share in the investigation. At first there are no clues even to prove murder rather than suicide, and much worrying about timetables, tides, and alibis occupies most of the story. The solution is fair but incredibly tortuous in its discovery. In fact, the book feels long; there is much detail given about each clue, each reasoned step, and the details of interviews (including at least 7 pages on the details of breaking a cipher), and less time spent on Peter and Harriet as personalities than one might wish. There are several flashes of emotion and character between them, which are well thought out and foreshadow the rich writing of Gaudy Night; unfortunately such scenes are few here, and there is no attempt to make their relationship evolve during the story.
MURDER MUST ADVERTISE
UK publication: 1933 (Victor Gollancz)
US publication: 1933 (Harcourt, Brace)
Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey
Plot summary and comments:
THE NINE TAILORS
UK publication: 1934 (Victor Gollancz)
US publication: 1934 (Harcourt, Brace)
Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey
Plot summary and comments:
STRONG POISON
UK publication: 1930 (Victor Gollancz)
US publication: 1930 (Brewer and Warren)
Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey
Plot summary and comments: The novel in which Peter Wimsey first meets his wife-to-be, Harriet Vane. At the outset, she is a successful mystery novelist, and when her ex-lover dies by poison exactly as described in one of her books, she is arrested and tried for murder. Wimsey is initially a spectator at the trial, but Miss Vane makes a strong impression on him; a guilty verdict (and death sentence) is expected, but there is a hung jury, giving Peter a chance to investigate and prove Miss Vane innocent-- which he has determined to do in order to marry her. He has a month until the new trial, a period which occupies the rest of the book; most of the time is spent in the human-interest part of the search for clues and evidence against the real murderer, rather than deduction, of which there are only three instances. Characterization is patchy; Peter is beginning to be a more fleshed-out character, but prattles a little too much, and the rest of his family is barely involved (although it is in this story that Inspector Parker proposes to Peter's sister Mary). Nonetheless, there is real insight into the characters of Peter and Harriet as they deal with their feelings for and about each other.
UNNATURAL DEATH
US title: THE DAWSON PEDIGREE
UK publication: 1927 (E. Benn)
US publication: 1928 (Dial Press)
Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey
Plot summary and comments: One of the early stories. Peter's character is still in the caricature stage, and his family does not appear. A remark overheard by chance involves Peter in the story of a suspicious death: an old woman in a small Hampshire village, Agatha Dawson, who is under a doctor's care, dies very suddenly and many months earlier than the doctor (Edmund Carr) had predicted-- after some strange behavior from her family and lawyer. Dr. Carr is suspicious of Miss Dawson's niece and sole heir (Miss Whittaker), but after an exhumation finds no evidence of murder and the doctor is blamed for blackening the niece's name, he is forced to leave the village. Peter brings Inspector Parker into the case, and they manage eventually to clear Dr. Carr's name, but the mystery remains deep for a considerable time; more deaths occur, and double identities must be sorted out. The redoubtable information gatherer Miss Climpson is introduced in this book and does much of the legwork in digging up rumor and gossip. The trail eventually climaxes in a fashionable London flat and a dangerous piece of playacting by Wimsey. Peter is very much the worldly sophisticate and some of the writing is a bit condescending toward the provincial classes. It is noteworthy that the book includes a preface, supposedly by Peter's Uncle Paul Delagardie, that gives a detailed biography of Wimsey.
THE UNPLEASANTNESS AT THE BELLONA
CLUB
UK publication: 1928 (E. Benn)
US publication: 1928 (Payson and Clarke)
Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey
Plot summary and comments: An early work; very much a standard puzzler, with a plot that depends hardly at all on character. Peter himself discovers the aged General Fentiman, dead in his chair by the fire of the Bellona Club, that hushed sanctum of discreet furnishings and decaying old members. There would have been no questions if the exact time of death had not been the determining factor in the distribution of a huge inheritance; attempts to delve into the matter by Peter (as an agent of the family solicitors) lead into deeper waters than anyone expects. Inconsistencies mount, and it becomes clear that Fentiman was murdered, with a variety of people (including Fentiman's sons) possibly to blame. Chief-Inspector Parker figures prominently, but none of Wimsey's family or other series characters appear at all, and the story is really an example of the by-the-rules, chess-problem mystery.
WHOSE BODY?
UK publication: 1923 (Unwin)
US publication: 1923 (Boni and Liveright)
Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey
Plot summary and comments: Sayers's first detective novel, in which Wimsey, Bunter, the Dowager Duchess, Parker of Scotland Yard, and the dim-witted Inspector Sugg are introduced. Lord Peter happens to become involved with the mysterious appearance of a body-- a middle-aged man, stark naked except for a pair of pince-nez-- in the bathtub of an inoffensive architect (Mr. Thipps) and his deaf old mother. Oddly, the body appears to have been cleaned and shaved after death. The police (in the form of Sugg) are convinced that the deceased is a prominent financier who has just gone missing; Wimsey knows this is wrong, but when Parker (who is in charge of the disappearance case at the Yard) and Lord Peter put their heads together, they realize that the two events are connected in a way that no one suspects. The criminal is eventually caught, despite the fact that Peter has a crisis of conscience and tries to warn him. The characters, especially Lord Peter, are somewhat caricatured here; Peter himself is indeed accomplished, but so flippant and impudent that it is something of a surprise when, the murderer named at last, he is unable to cope and suffers a temporary relapse of his post-war breakdown.
THE DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE
UK publication: 1930 (E. Benn)
US publication: 1930 (Brewer and Warren)
Detective: John Munting and Paul Harrison
Plot summary and comments: Written in collaboration with Robert Eustace, a pseudonym for Dr. Eustace Robert Barton (1868-1943), and the only detective novel that doesn't include Peter Wimsey. The novel is entirely in the form of a portfolio of documents---letters, statements, reports---relating to the apparent suicide of a suburban businessman and plant expert (Mr. Harrison) by mushroom poisoning. The plot is essentially a love triangle: Harrison is unsympathetic and dominating; his wife Margaret is much younger and feeling stifled; and Lathom, who with writer John Munting lives upstairs from the couple, is an arrogant and brilliant artist and probable seducer. We learn of their stormy relationships through verbatim letters from John to his fiancee, from the household help to their relations, and from Harrison to his grown son, Paul. When matters come to a crisis---a full-fledged affair that may or may not have been discovered---Harrison dies alone in his country cottage by poisoning. He had been eating mushrooms; though he was one of the country's experts, it is still assumed that he accidentally ingested a poisonous variety. Paul Harrison has doubts and suspicions, and assembles the dossier/novel, but it is John Munting who unwillingly makes the final connection that allows murder to be proven. The case is fairly technical, which explains the presence of a scientific type as coauthor. This is not Sayers's most successful book, and suffers from a lack of power in the emotional plot as well as the constraints of the epistolary form. Because of the letters, there is less of Sayers's voice to be heard here than usual, but she is quite descriptive of personal types indirectly. There is also a lot of wrangling about the new discoveries of modern physics (circa 1930) and their bearing on the philosophy of Life, which is in a way relevant to the plot, but which can be hard going nowadays.
THRONES, DOMINATIONS
UK publication: 1998 (Hodder & Stoughton)
US publication: 1998 (St. Martin's)
Detective: Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane
Plot summary and comments: Completed by Jill Paton Walsh (1937- ).This novel, a sequel to the Wimsey mysteries in which Peter and Harriet are the parents of three sons (as in Sayers's short story "Talboys"), was less than halfway finished at Sayers's death; the manuscript consisted of five completed chapters and a sketchy outline. After the death of Sayers's heir, her son Anthony Fleming, the existence of the manuscript became widely known, and her estate decided to commission respected mystery author Jill Paton Walsh to complete the story for publication. After extensive research, Paton Walsh's effort was published in early 1998. Reviews praised the result and Paton Walsh's seamless extension of Sayers's work. Many commented, however, that the plot as conceived by Sayers was rather perfunctory, and suggested that she had lost interest in the detection side of the novel, spending most of her energy on the evolution of Peter and Harriet's relationship.