the detective mode when a body is discovered in their rambling village honeymoon house. A locked house, rather than a locked room story, with a good trick but a little too much time is spent making sure that the reader recognizes that every character in the cozy little circle could have done the foul deed. 

So who killed Mr. Noakes and pushed him down the cellar steps? Lots of business around clocks. One realizes he must be dead rather early on, this being the genre that it is, although I kept half-expecting Sayers to pull some kind of punch and have him fall down the chimney in a great cloud of ash. A great deal of quoting of Renaissance poets which might annoy some, but that I found rather fun. There isn’t in fact much to say or to learn from this confection, done as one would expect with aplomb and too much sweetness. Suffice it to say, Peter is well done, though a bit sillier than usual, uxorious in the extreme—hard pressed I am to understand how the more practical Harriet Vane can stand it. It’s interesting to ponder Sayers’ own attitude to the book, something of her swan song as a mystery book writer. Perhaps she got tired of the business for after this she her attention turns to more serious matters of religion. Anyway it’s hard to conceive how Peter and Harriet could turn into an on-going detective pair like Tommy and Tuppence, probably they settle down in the country with plenty of money and a tumbling brood of kiddlings brought up by Bunter into perfectly adorable children. Busman’s Holiday reads, I thought, almost like a parody of itself, the only vaguely interesting touch being an inconclusive discussion between Peter and Harriet regarding which is the more helpful question for a detective to ask: "How was the murder done?" or "Why?" For a number of reasons, I found the earlier novels are far better, far cleverer examples of the genre. I guess she did this one for the fans. Or perhaps it's because she was in the end a more thoughtful writer than the ordinary hack churning out thrillers to earn a living; she got bored with conventions and moved on to something else. One day I may read Dorothy Sayers’ biography. 

If nothing else one can thoroughly enjoy the satire, the wonderful product names: Nutrax, Maltogene, and Jollop's Concentrated Lactobeef Tables for Travellers! Harriet does not appear.  I'm not certain that's important, but some spark is definitely missing. Couldn't put my finger on it until I went searching around for something clever to say. And Lo, I find that Sayers herself disliked this one. She wrote it quickly to fulfill her contract with Victor Gollancz. And while she wrote she was really thinking about the book she wanted to write:

The new book is nearly done. I hate it because it isn't the one I wanted to write, but I had to shove it in because I couldn't get the technical dope on The Nine Tailors in time. Still, you never know what people will fancy, do you? It...deals with the dope-traffic, which is fashionable at the moment, but I don't feel that this part is very convincing, as I can't say "I know dope". Not one of my best efforts. Dorothy L Sayers as quoted by Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L Sayers: Her Life and Soul.[3]

H'm. Sayers was right, and a good judge of what she was doing. Clever as usual, but it doesn't ring quite true. Flat. Which only goes to highlight the problem with writing to meet contract deadlines, and for mystery writers these are getting swifter and swifter. Publishers don't mind asking for two, even three, books a year. Ah, beware, my friends. After a while it's just a job, and even good writers falter. Call it another reason to support indie publication. If memory serves, "Nine Tailors" is a better novel. I am starting that one tonight. Promise.

for which I understand she won an Edgar. Well, friends, she deserved it! I'm not sure why I picked this one up, but I did. It's a stand alone, and for a while I thought it was going to be a rewrite of Othello, driven to do murder by the infamous Iago. But hang in there, friends. It gets way better. A bit of a romp in fact, though nothing like the romps of Lord Peter. And it even has a serious side, not particularly deep, but serious, and I do like that too. Not going to say more than that, except it's fun and fits none of standard categories, but is sufficiently mysterious to fit the genre. 

As the story opens, Harriet is wandering happily alone along the southwest coast of England, on an independent walking tour trying to heal the psychic bruises from her murder trial (described in Strong Poison), give herself space to work out the plot of her new detective novel, and escape Lord Peter's endless and irritating declarations of love and proposals of marriage, which Sayers now begin to develop in earnest as a romantic counterpoint to the mystery. ( Did Sayers invent the popular subgenre of the romantic mystery? Perhaps). 

One day, after a sandwich and a quick nap on the beach, Harriet notices what looks like a man, lying atop a lone rock standing in the distance at the low tide mark. Being moderately civic minded she heads on over--figuring at first that the person had fallen asleep and was in danger of sunburn. She discovers instead a bloody corpse, its throat cut. Looks like a suicide, Harriet thinks climbing up. But the tide is turning, and she realizes that she needs to do something before she herself is trapped by the rising water level. She hasn't the strength to drag the body off the rock and up to higher ground, so she decides to document the situation as best she can, calling on the detection skills a là the hero of her own crime novels. She gathers evidence and photographs the body. As the tide laps at the base of the rock, she descends and heads off to call the local police. But finding a phone in the remote countryside, where there are few homesteads and fewer people, proves difficult. She marches about, following rural lanes, wasting valuable time following false leads towards the ever elusive telephone. Predictably, by the time Harriet gets her message to the local police, the corpse has washed out to sea, as she knew it would. For a moment, I thought, A-ha, this is going to be about nobody believe Harriet's story, or Harriet herself being accused of murder--something like that old film Blow Up maybe. But I was wrong. Thanks to Harriet's skill with the camera, the owner of the body is soon identified: he's Paul Alexis, dancing instructor at the tawdry Resplendent Hotel by the seaside, a gigolo, an artiste who preys on silly rich widows. Not a very candidate for suicide in fact, though the evidence of murder is slim.

Lord Peter appears on the scene. He and Harriet team up, sleuthing together, quarreling about his proposals, and there's much fun to be had as Harriet's feminist and independent nature always assumes the worst. But detection wins out, they focus on solving the crime and together gradually solve Sayers' very complicated puzzle, a puzzle involving time tables, replacement codes, false beards, pretenders to the Russian throne, Bolshevik spies, and perfect (actually too perfect) alibis. It's an enjoyable read, a bit of merriment between the sexes with some good Sherlockian sleuthing. Inspector Parker turns up to "assist" the bumbling local police (he's now married to Peter's sister Mary), while the stolid, steady-on Bunter (in disguise) follows a suspect (also in disguise) in and out of the movie theater, up and down and around town, in and out of bathrooms. Much detail and an abundance of evidence is gathered, none of which coheres, of course, until the very end. One has suspicions about whodunit and the Why, but the How? Well, that's made impossible to guess--so it all works very well.

I quibbled a bit about the rather too many pages, I thought, devoted to unlocking the replacement code in that letter--I admit to skimming, suspecting that the pages I missed might well contain useful instructions for how it all works, spoiled I suppose by the knowledge that it's now all on the Internet if I cared enough. Overall? I felt Sayers has reached her own kind of high water mark in the construction and resolution of impossibly complicated plots. The book becomes in fact a sort of a satire on itself, on the zealous mystery writers who concoct ever trickier and trickier plots. Perhaps this is in fact the reason for introducing us to Harriet Vane, the crime novelist turned detective. At any rate, I'm rather glad Harriet has appeared to distract Peter from his infinite Bertie Wooster sillies. If memory serves, the next four (last four) Sayers books make a happy shift away from the tricky acrostic type mystery to a more psychological mode. Then comes, as Dorothy Sayers fans know, comes the major shift away from murder mystery to the mysteries of religion and theology where she spends the rest of her career. 

combining the cozy with the police procedural and pushing the puzzle solving business until it becomes something much more substantial, more literary I guess one might say, though that sounds condecending.

I hesitate to say much about what actually happens in the story, or to discuss its theme, events or characters, because I don't want to diminish the experience for the reader. It's not , but about discovering, gradually, the thematic complexities of the whole. I believe this latest effort by Penny is something of a masterpiece, not simply a masterpiece of the genre--we have lots of those (Sayers for example) but of literature--the believability and depth of characterization, the consistency and complexity of plot (a different type of complexity used by Sayers in her early books),  the way the theme builds and develops, the subtle harmony of the play of points of view as the narrative moves in and out of characters heads. Louise Penny is not, of course, the first writer to realize the possibilities of this mystery genre, of layering into the pure entertainment something more substantial and nourishing. It's been done before, of course. Life itself is a type of murder mystery. But Penny manages a kind of lightness in her handling of the genre: the page turner that makes the reader stop and think, not about how to solve the puzzle before them, but also about the human condition itself--what matters after the murderer is caught. It's what I'd like to write, if only I could.

For those who have encountered Penny's books before, let me say that the characters--Gamache (Chief Investigator for homicide of the Quebec police) and his "side-kick" Jean Guy Beauvoir--continue to deepen, that is become more interesting, as the series progresses. About The Beautiful Mystery? Suffice it to say, it's set in a remote "lost" monastery in Eastern Quebec inhabited by twenty-four monks who live under vows of silence broken only by heart-wrenchingly beautiful Gregorian chants. Early one morning just after lauds a monk is found with his head bashed in. The abbot calls the police. Gamache and Beauvoir arrive by boat. It seems in part the ultimate locked-room mystery coupled with the country house cozy, a bit reminiscent of Christie's And Then There Were None. The murderer must be among these few. But who?? And why?? Indeed it was a beautiful mystery. Certainly it kept me awake and happy on the long flight from London back home to San Francisco. Highly emotional. Evocative. Just enough action and suspense. And some very effective cliff hangers. All without succumbing for a moment to the gratuitous violence of so many contemporary thrillers. Very satisfying. Now, back to Dorothy Sayers!

"The last of the long evening's sunlight was in the bedroom, a big gold contraption falling down slantways from the window. Quirke stood and took a deep breath, then another. He took off his suit and hung it in the wardrobe--the jacket smelled of stale sweat--and put on a pair of gray slacks that were too tight for him, and found a pale-blue cashmere sweater he did not know he owned, and put that on, too. Then he caught his reflection in the wardrobe mirror, gaudy in pastel shades. He peeled off the pullover and the trousers and put on a pair of khaki bags and an old tweed jacket."

It's a poet's way, to think of the long evening sunlight as a "big gold contraption"... And I do like the unexpected, almost throwaway description that catches the quirky nature of, 'um, Quirke, our Irish pathologist, our detective hero. Quirke drinks too much, smokes too much, tends to have lurid dreams and a lascivious but discontented sex life. Definitely not happy about himself or what he does or the state of the world; he's not married, not divorced, not even widowed, just not... A remote, disconnected outsider. So what's not to like? 

Noir to be sure, but not the crackling daylight noir of Hammett, even though the story begins with a violent and nightmarish death: man with his head shot off. The rest has a kind of darkly ambiguous broody dreaminess about it, with detectives who "behave like a pair of school boys" even as they attempt to solve terrible crimes that are undoubtedly not schoolboy fare. It's the Fifties in Dublin, sort of--I mean, polio is on the rise and Gamal Abdel Nasser has just been elected president of Egypt. Nevertheless it feels contemporary. The aura is thoroughly noir, for the world IS darkly ambiguous, a place where criminals get away with their crimes, where even good people have a dark side, just as the worst of criminals have a glint of good that makes them, on some level, likeable. 

In Black's world detection is a soft sort of business, intuitive, almost accidental, having none of the sureness of Sherlock or even Wimsey, both of whom always know exactly what that little button means, though they may not explain immediately. Poor Quirke, silent , stubborn, relentless self-appointed knight in shining armor that he is barely knows himself. At one point it seemed to me that the greatest mystery to be solved would be whether or not the murder would in fact be solved. 

Not read any Black before, but I intend to put him on the ever growing list. John Banville, of course, has been writing wonderful novels since the 1970s; he won the Booker Prize for "The Sea" in 2005, then took to mysteries. Why this late career move? Something to ponder. Here's the list if you're interested: "Christine Falls" (2006); "The Silver Swan" (2007); "The Lemur" (2008); "Elegy for April" (2010); "Death in Summer" (2011); "Vengeance" (2012); and "Holy Orders" (2013).

which is quite different (slower) than the thrillers he's known for now--quite an interesting book, especially for a new mystery writer like me. I enjoyed it quite a bit; it even kept me up until two one morning determined to get to the end. Perhaps I'll do a post on that one too. And now, I'm reading Iain Pear's "Dream of Scipio"--slow to start, but improving now that I've gotten the hang of the triple plot scheme. There's more of course (I read a lot), some of it history related to our up-coming travels; probably not good material for this particular blog. Now, however, I need to say something about Ms. Sayers' five herrings. 

Well....everyone who reads mysteries knows about red herrings. Please tuck your tongues firmly into a cheek: in this book Lord Peter (sans Harriet--she's not even mentioned) heads for Scotland, where fishing and golf dominate ordinary life--or so we are to believe. 

"Did you hear aboot Mr. Campbell?" said Mr. Murdoch of the McClellan Arms, polishing a glass carefully as a preparation for filling it with beer.

"Why, what further trouble has he managed to get into since last night?" asked Wimsey. He leaned an elbow on the bar and prepared to relish anything that might be offered to him.

"He's deid," said Mr. Murdoch.

"Deid?" said Wimsey, startled into unconscious mimicry.

Mr. Murdoch nodded.

"Och, ay; McAdam's juist brocht the news in from Gatehouse. They found the body at 2 o'clock up in the hills by Newton-Stewart."

Not only is there no Harriet, but also there's a lot of dialect, so be warned. My favorite being "M'imph'm," which occurs frequently, though I'm not sure what it means. A belch ? Anyway our victim is a nasty, ill-tempered painter who cultivates enemies, so there are, as you might suppose, many (six to be exact) suspects as well as three Keystone-ish cops and Lord ("Bertie") Wimsey doing his Sherlockian thing, monitoring the local gossip, interviewing all and sundry, and putting together a complicated grid of evidence that's quite impossible to follow. It's all about bikes and train schedules as well as voluminous and contradictory details as people run around in the dark (rather like "Clouds of Witness" in that). Everyone lies, so a scorecard is definitely in order. Much foolishness of the usual sort. A jolly romp, written according to Sayers to please her Scottish summer landlord--"all the places are real places and all the trains are real trains, and all the landscapes are correct, except that I have run up a few new houses here and there...."

"Get real! I'm in prison and due to be hanged." Peter: "Then I shall save you, oh damsel in distress." Harriet, quite sensibly: "Don't be an ass." It's a lovely scene. All the romantic stereotypes blown to bits. 

Why is it so many readers (me included) can so quickly forget the details of a whodunit, no Sayers reader ever forgets how Harriet refuses Lord Peter, and refuses, and refuses, and refuses? Anyway, for those poor souls who have not read Strong Poison, the deal is that Harriet, a mystery writer, is accused of poisoning her lover with arsenic she quarreled with him (motive), he ate something at her house the night he died (opportunity) and she had just purchased a goodly supply of arsenic (method). Harriet denies feeding him the arsenic, claiming she was just doing research for her next book. A weak excuse, thought the police, and her defense attorney, and even the jury. Luckily, one member of the jury--Miss Climpson no less--didn't buy the prosecutor's argument  and so the jury is hung, not Harriet. Lord Peter has a few weeks before her retrial to do something to save her--he knows not what. 

This is not one of Sayers' more complicated puzzles, but it is one of her more enjoyable fictions. Lots and lots of lovesick Peter, though thankfully a lot less rank silliness. Peter even tells Bunter to "stop sounding so much like Jeeves!" Still, there are many very funny bits and a good bit of reworking of the male-female relationship. For my money, Strong Poison is where Sayers really hits her stride, no more messing with aspects of the genre, as in the first four novels, just a nice tricky plot and a couple of characters that are hard to resist. Peter meets his match in Harriet Vane, an independent woman with a determined mind of her own, values of her own too, and a thoroughly underwhelmed attitude to Peter's ego and his money. Mellows him out, you might say. Yes, February is going to be a great month, although I may not get quite as much sleep as I would like . . . 

Fortunately I keep on reading. And suddenly Lord Peter spun like a dervish and dashed off to Europe in pursuit of Robert Fentiman (the general’s nephew) in pursuit of the elusive Oliver (Oliver?!), leaving me, the reader, (and Lord Peter’s friend Inspector Parker) in the figurative dust with little to hang on to but a series of cryptic telegrams. 

What a stunt! But it serves to demonstrate there there’s always more than meets the eye in a mystery—or at least there can be, since in this book Sayers narrator does not permit the reader to see into Peter’s mind which seems mildly unfair. On the other hand, it does keep one reading if only to be told what Peter was holding back, and, as I said, two hundred more pages in the story. Anyway, with Peter’s mad dash across the Continent, the case the reader thought was solved goes in a new direction and Lord Peter is revealed to be not nearly the daft loony he pretends. The trick’s on the reader, I suppose, and should be considered part of the fun, if not Sayers’ own exploration of the genre’s possibilities, but it’s a definite challenge for any reader who thinks she can get to the solution before Lord Peter himself. Sorry, not going to happen in this one. I’m glad Sayers gives up this particular trick.

The spinning of the plot, as I call it, does start immediately with the opening exchange.

“What in the world, Wimsey, are you doing in this Morgue?” demanded Captain Fentiman. . .  

“Oh, I wouldn’t call it that,” retorted Wimsey amiably. “Funeral Parlour at the very least. Look at the furnishings. Look at the palms and the chaste bronze nude in the corner.” 

“Yes, and look at the corpses. Place always reminds me of that old thing in Punch, you know—‘Waiter, take away Lord Watsisname, he’s been dead two days’ . . .”  

Maybe I’m naive, but this exchanged produced in me a slight disorientation—Where are we?--then an amused admiration, for in fact, as these two pals soon discover, there is a corpse among all those nearly motionless, but still breathing, members of the Bellona Club—and it’s no obvious corpse either, slumped into a heap on the floor. Rather it’s General Fentiman’s corpse, dead in situ, sitting up just as he always does in his regular leather chair reading his paper. Has he really been like that for two days? Did no one notice his dying? How very strange! (I do admit to loving the way Sayers’ casually drops her corpses into the most unexpected places.) Anyway, it’s this situation that presents a pretty little problem referred to above. It sets up  a nice little thematic contrast between Peter’s high energy—frivolous and otherwise—and the eternal stillness of the old boys hanging out in silence at the Bellona Club. It’s a contrast to keep in mind when reading this book, as Lord Peter spins in all sorts of directions, but what looks like an irrelevant aside is all brought neatly together for the final solution. 

Finally, I’d like to say something about this business of  “Unpleasantness” of the title. Is this merely a display of Sayers’ humorous social satire or something else? She does repeat the word “unpleasant” often enough in the novel to be noticeable, e.g. with regard to the general’s death (the most obvious “unpleasantness”) but also the noisy intrusion of Bunter and his camera taking photographs of the scene as well as the police asking awkward questions of club members, the phones being out of order, the staff changing their hours, and so on. The murder takes place on Armistice Day, by the way, which back in the twenties represented more than just a bank holiday—the Great War in all its horror, lingering suffering, and social upheaval—was fresh in living memory. Lord Peter, as you recall, himself still suffers bouts of “shell shock” (PTSD) as does Robert’s brother George. Despite Peter's episodes of silliness (such episodes have decreased in this, her fourth book), most readers don’t miss the darker cast of this mystery. Anyway, I think “unpleasantness” is meant less as a comment on stuffiness of the old Edwardian men’s club than as an ironic thread woven throughout the web of this story, signallling Sayer's awareness of her own frivolity in writing mysteries about the untimely death of sick old people (recall the victim in An Unnatural Death) while the rest of Europe mourns the loss of so many young men from war. Such elements, for me, give Sayers her special punch. 

Perhaps you have to that question all figured out, but I like to revisit, see what authors who worry this genre every day have to say about it. Death after all is a natural event; it comes to us all. As the doctor in Unnatural Death remarks, specific time of death is unpredictable--no one can really know the day, the hour, the minute death will take hold. (It's rather like predicting the exact moment of a natural birth.) 

Sayers poses this problem as follows: The "victim" is old and terminally ill with cancer but in good spirits despite her pain and gradually weakening powers. She is surrounded by capable and beloved caregivers, and preparing to "let go." If this person dies a bit unexpectedly, should one suspect murder? Well, maybe--poor old auntie did argue with her solicitor towards the end and was a bit paranoid that her hired nurse was trying to poison her. So perform a postmortem. But what if this autopsy turns up nothing amiss? No sign of poison. No marks of murder. Lots of old people get a bit paranoid towards their ends. And more importantly, what does it matter one way or another if death is hurried by a couple of months? Has a real crime been committed? And if so, how? By whom? Not surprisingly, Lord Peter's imagination is captured by this "pretty problem" and we, the readers, are off . . .  

Lord Peter's gut, of course, tells him a murder has been committed. His friend Inspector Parker's experience however says not. We are treated to their musings on how easy it is to murder someone; how frequently murderers are not only not caught, but also no even suspected. I  googled that, and found--lo!--only about half the murders in the United States even today are solved. H'm. That's not good. And that's only for those deaths officially recognized to be murders.  For we have no Lord Peter on the scene, with his good humored doggedness following out his instincts. Who knows how many "natural" deaths are in fact "unnatural"? 

I could go on. Suffice it to say, this one is fun. The plot is nicely complicated; more suspicious deaths occur. Possible perpetrators appear and disappear. But the method remains unresolved until the end, when a tricky little event in Parliament (!?) provides the key. Sayers hits her stride I think, as authors do, around book three or four. Lord Peter has matured. He's still very attractive and very witty, but not quite so silly as in the first two novels, and if you found the upperclass lisp a bit annoying, it moderates herein. Looking forward greatly to The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, which comes next.