As part of my foray into the "queens of crime", I thought I would take another look at Dorothy L. Sayers, whose work my 20-something-year-old self used to love. This is one that I'd never read. Published in 1931, it is the sixth in the series featuring aristocratic amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey.

We're in Galloway, an area that Sayers loved. Wimsey is on holiday, doing a spot of fishing, don't you know. He's accompanied by Bunter, his loyal and perspicacious manservant, and his Daimler, which gets a surprising number of mentions.

When one of the local artists, Sandy Campbell -- a wholly obnoxious character who picks fights with everyone -- ends up dead, Wimsey very quickly realizes that the apparent accident that has befallen him has been staged, and the case is actually a murder enquiry. Because a key element of the staging involves painting a picture in Campbell's style, six local artists come under suspicion. They all have cause to dislike Campbell, and they all have dodgy alibis.


Not Galloway, but further west, on the Kintyre Peninsula, 2019

It's a period piece, although I didn't taste the period in the way I remember doing with other Sayers novels.

Of the period, admittedly, is the use of racist terminology. And there's that classism again. The working class just have to be laughed at, it seems. Here's Mr Alcock, for example, spelling his name: "There is no h'aitch in the name, young man. H'ay is the first letter, and there is h'only one h'ell." Bunter is very smart, but again his speech is mocked, this time for being over-elaborate: "I apprehended, my lord, that your lordship would be engaged in investigation"; or "I invited her to attend the cinematograph entertainment in my company."

We have a couple of indications that the early 1930s economy is not robust (true, that...). A railway porter, for instance, is quoted as complaining about the stinginess of tips in those days: "With times so hard and money so tight you didn't get twopence nowadays where once you would have got sixpence or a shilling. Call this a Socialist Government. Things were harder than ever for a working man."

And I guess it's because we're in the 30s that people don't think twice about driving while drunk, or about leaving their 10-year-old daughter alone at home. And they wear their pyjamas for a week...

This is very much a trains-based puzzle (which makes it an appropriate story for our current circumstances). Personally, I don't at all object, as do some, to the meticulous rendering of (authentic) contemporary train timetables, in order to check or disprove alibis. I loved Sayers's railway world, and as this otherwise unimpressed reviewer notes, the book gives us a very comprehensive picture of the busy rails of Galloway before the Beeching cuts did away with about 650 miles of track in Scotland.



But the book really didn't work for me. Or at least, most of it didn't. There was none of the glamour and frisson of the Sayers books I remember. Am I just remembering a memory? Or am I just older?

One bugbear throughout is the excessively annoying phonetic rendition of the Scottish accent. (The repetitive use of "Imph'm" -- elucidated here -- is particularly tiresome, especially as I have no idea how the exclamation sounds.)

The plot is also insanely confusing... Keeping track of the six suspected artists is incredibly hard work (all the way through I had to keep checking back who was who, because their personalities and distinguishing features are not clearly enough delineated at the outset). And that's before you even get started with their cars and bicycles and train rides and alibis...

I'm not the only one to experience this. M.I. Cole, back in 1931, found the artists "rather indistinguishable", and the whole thing "dry and dull". Other contemporary reviewers complain about "a certain tediousness", with one even harrumphing: "We might just as well have been reading higher mathematics for all the sense we got out of it."



Then there's THAT parenthesis... As our upper-class sleuth is looking around the site of the so-called accident, he notices that something appears to be missing: "Here Lord Peter Wimsey told the Sergeant what he was looking for and why, but as the intelligent reader will readily supply these details for himself, they are omitted from this page."

Aaaaargh... You don't DO that!

I actually did twig what was missing, I'm happy to report. It's just faintly possible I remember this detail from the 1970s television adaptation (the one with Ian Carmichael). I know I watched some of them. But if I did see this one, I remember nothing else about it. So I'm going to credit myself with a canny wee bit of sleuthing all of my own.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that it's a dog of a book.

The final part, where they reconstruct the crime, is much more lively, and very funny in parts. So we go out on a high note. And because the verdict is manslaughter, you don't have the culprit's fate literally hanging over you, which always gave me the chills with these stories.

And there are some great cameos. The sub-plot involving poor, trapped Farren -- the man whose wife is "too good and too full of ideals to understand what the ordinary man is like" -- is quite heart-rending. He tries to escape: "My one idea was that I didn't want to go back. I was finished. Done. I wanted to go gipsying." But he realizes it's not going to work: "I don't know if I can explain how I felt, Wimsey. It was as if I'd escaped from something and was afraid of being -- well, bagged... You're not free when you have to tell lies to escape." As it turns out, even though he's not the culprit, he has to return to help the police with their enquiries, returning at the same time to domesticity. "My God," he says. "It's all up. Bagged. Trapped. Prison." And Wimsey silently agrees: "Yes... And you won't escape this time -- ever."

It's also an intelligent book. I had to look some of the references up (my classical education being limited to O-level Latin).



The self-conscious reference to "mystery stories", and the rules of the genre, was another illuminating element. Wimsey comments, for example: "One of these days I shall write a book in which two men are seen to walk down a cul-de-sac, and there is a shot and one man is found murdered and the other runs away with a gun in his hand, and after twenty chapters stinking with red herrings, it turns out that the man with the gun did it after all." And at one point Sir Maxwell complains: "See here, Wimsey, you're not going to turn round now and say that the crime was committed by Mrs Green or the milkman, or somebody we've never heard of? That would be in the very worst tradition of the lowest style of detective fiction."

Interestingly, the culprit "was a student of detective literature".

And at various junctures, there were interesting suggestions about authors I ought to follow up (J.J. Connington, Austin Freeman, Milward Kennedy, Freeman Wills Crofts...)

So, not my favourite Sayers by any stretch. But I will persist with my revisiting programme.