After a brief fling with Miss Marple, I'm back with Lord Peter Wimsey - the most delightful detective who ever delighted whilst detecting. This book is one of two Dorothy Sayers mysteries featured on The List, and while I didn't enjoy it as much as Strong Poison, it was still very good. The majority of the action takes place at Pym's Publicity, an advertising firm in London. One of their employees recently and mysteriously died after falling down an iron staircase in the office, and it's suspected that he may have known something about another employee that caused him to be murdered. So Lord Peter gets out his Super Awesome Detective Disguise Kit and goes to work at Pym's undercover in order to find out what this guy might have known. Like Strong Poison, you learn a lot of random but useful information over the course of the mystery. Then, it was lockpicking and Spiritualism. Now, it's the secrets of advertising and the cocaine trade. (and the two are not necessarily unrelated) In fact, you learn a lot about the whole advertising business, resulting in some interesting bits like this:"Like all rich men, [Lord Peter:] had never before paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion." Wow. I'm also happy to report that Lord Peter is still a darling in this one, and still hilarious. My favorite moment was at a point in the plot when it becomes necessary to sneak Peter out of police headquarters. His brother-in-law, an officer, is explaining that they'll have to sneak him out the back and Peter interrupts happily, "Disguised as a policeman? Oh, Charles, do let me be a policeman! I should adore it." A few other reviewers have complained about Lord Peter's conduct towards one of the characters, Dian de Momerie. She's in with the cocaine-smuggling crowd, so Lord Peter basically has to seduce her in order to get at the drug kingpins. This involves dressing in disguises, following Dian around, and admittedly treating her rather dismissively. Ungentlemanly? Yes. Proof that Lord Peter isn't as great as I say he is? Shut your whore mouth. Here's the thing: I think Lord Peter acted like a jackass to Dian because that's the kind of guy she'd be most attracted to. She's dating a drug kingpin who treats her like dirt, and she in turn treats her various beaux like dirt. She responds best to dismissive and insulting behavior (what we'll call the Bella Swan Complex), and that's just the fastest way to get on her good side. I maintain that Lord Peter is still wonderful.Also there's a great offhand line that mentions that Lord Peter "went out to keep his date with the one young woman who showed no signs of yielding to him" and I got really excited there because I knew who Sayers meant. I read that line and was like, "It's Harriet Vane! He's going on a date with Harriet! Hi, Harriet! Hi!" and it was a little embarrassing.
All I really remembered about this book was that it made me laugh; what I didn’t remember was it also has teeth.A peter Wimsey mystery, wherein Peter goes undercover in an ad agency, and then there are a lot of shenanigans, and also bad puns, and a climactic cricket match that made me snigger to myself for ten minutes straight, much to the consternation of my morning train seatmate.(This is, incidentally, a pretty good place to start with Peter Wimsey. Not the chronological beginning of the series, but it’s one of the best, and it sets you up nicely to read forward or back without ruining your first Wimsey on, say, the one with all the goddamn train schedules.)Anyway, so it’s thoroughly amusing, and peter capers here and there, declaiming and punning and being horrible and being grand. Also solving a murder, and tripping into a viper’s nest of crime, like he does.But under that is a tense, frantically unhappy book. About the ad game and the life game – buy this, that’ll solve your problems, now buy that, snort this line of cocaine, try that dangerous stunt, run faster, work harder, more more more – why aren’t you happy yet? What do you mean you came to a bitter end along the way? And if that weren’t enough, also a pointed meditation on a particular stripe of British classism.*God damn, when she was good, no one could touch Sayers.*There’s this bit where one character explains to another how there’s a cultural divide in the office between the Oxbridge chaps and the rest of them. How the blokes who went to, like, Manchester, will get all earnest and upset and froth at the mouth about metaphysics, and one of the Oxbridge guys will come along and just make a bad pun at them and ask why they can't take a joke. And I was like, “Ahahaha, Dorothy Sayers! Your Oxbridge chaps are hipsters.”
What do You think about Murder Must Advertise (1995)?
I enjoyed this very much, but these intricately plotted murder mysteries are wasted on me, because I'm not reading the book for the mystery. I'm reading it for the characters, the setting, and particularly in Sayers' case, the wonderful writing. In two weeks I won't be able to remember whodunnit.The plot has to do with drug running, and I couldn't be less interested in that, but I loved the details about life in the advertising business, and I enjoyed the scenes with Charles and Lady Mary. Peter in disguise at the wild party was just weird.If I'm going to keep reading these British books, one day I have got to sit down and read up on how cricket is played. There's a 4 or 5 page cricket game towards the end of this book, and I hadn't the faintest idea of what was going on.Previously written:My copy of this book is in a volume with three other Sayers novels, including Gaudy Night, so when I picked it up yesterday I wasted a couple of hours re-reading my favorite scenes in Gaudy Night before I could get settled down with this one. But so far it's very good.
—Jamie
An absolute delight. I am increasingly of the opinion that Dorothy Sayers is the finest mystery serial writer of - well, I can't say "all time," having only read two or three of her competitors, but VERY FINE INDEED. Sayers doesn't just write good mysteries, she writes good novels. One might almost mistake Murder Must Advertise for a novel about an ad firm (and brilliantly done at that) that happens to concern a murder, rather than the other way around, and I don't say that at the expense of the mystery itself.One of Sayers's many likeable qualities is that she never comes off as an innocent, even in books where the plot turns on the interpretation of a will and the characters are frequently known to say, "Oh! Dear me. Rather. I do say. Shocking, what?" (I enjoyed Unnatural Death and adored The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, but one must be honest.) What was I saying - oh. Sayers's astonishing wit, the seeming tameness of some of its objects regardless, always betrays a penetrating understanding of human mischief. And in this novel, with its sex and cocaine, the innuendos are keener and more hilarious than ever. Not that she places undue reliance on innuendos, either.Of Lord Peter Wimsey, I do occasionally think to myself, "I wish there was something he couldn't do." But those moments pass quickly and are soon forgotten in an onslaught of Sayers's pitch-perfect dialogue.Naturally, the plot is clever and well-integrated. Nothing hugely astonishing, but one hardly cares; there are enough surprises throughout to keep up the pace. And as yet another sign of Sayers's rare and intelligent style, the climax contains an unusual solemn, sad nod to human dignity.
—Kate
08/2013 It is hard for me to talk about Murder Must Advertise, because I am easily reduced to squeeing and flailing about. It is a neat little mystery, and we see two interesting sides of Wimsey that aren't often apparent. Murder Must Advertise is different because it isn't Lord Peter Wimsey solving mysteries. Well, not exactly. (view spoiler)[Wimsey spends his time as a working man, as Death Bredon at Pym's Publicity, and among the 'bright young things' addicted to cocaine as the Harlequin. He takes on two identities to solve a murder that turns out to be somehow connected to cocaine smuggling. It is particularly interesting because Wimsey isn't himself in either place. He isn't himself at a publicity agency, which is all about making things what they aren't, and he isn't himself among the partying 'bright young things', who are empty and not much of anyone themselves (as evidenced by Dian, who is bored with life, even having everything, and keeps looking for more thrills). (hide spoiler)]
—Kate
