rororo 5599; Peter Wimsey & Harriet Vane #4, Lord Peter Wimsey #13
taschenbuch, 374 pages
German language
Published Sept. 29, 1985 by Rowohlt.
Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane marry and go to spend their honeymoon at Talboys, an old farmhouse in Hertfordshire which he has bought her as a present. The honeymoon is intended as a break from their usual routine of solving crimes (him) and writing about them (her), but it turns into a murder investigation when the seller of the house is found dead at the bottom of the cellar steps with severe head injuries. - Wikipedia.
I always love Lord Peter :-). But this book continues to go into the torment that he feels when a murderer has been convicted. It's touching. So the book is a great mystery and a somewhat unsettling dip into the humanity of the primary investigator.
I rinished reading this book a couple of days ago, and it's a classic whodunit combined with a love story. In this particular edition the foreword was written by [a:Elizabeth George|1402383|Elizabeth George|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1235518043p2/1402383.jpg], whose crime novels also feature an aristocratic detective and his love life.
In this story the amateur sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, has married Harriet Vane, and their honeymoon is complicated by the discovery of the corpse of the previous owner.
I've read a couple of other whodunits by [a:Dorothy Sayers|8734|Dorothy L. Sayers|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1206564934p2/8734.jpg], and while I've enjoyed them, I would not say that they are the best detective fiction I have read. Sayers is sometimes linked with the informal literary group the Inklings, and though not actually a member, she was a friend of some of the members, and they sometimes read her work at meetings.
When I read Sayers's novels, I am very conscious of the period …
I rinished reading this book a couple of days ago, and it's a classic whodunit combined with a love story. In this particular edition the foreword was written by [a:Elizabeth George|1402383|Elizabeth George|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1235518043p2/1402383.jpg], whose crime novels also feature an aristocratic detective and his love life.
In this story the amateur sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, has married Harriet Vane, and their honeymoon is complicated by the discovery of the corpse of the previous owner.
I've read a couple of other whodunits by [a:Dorothy Sayers|8734|Dorothy L. Sayers|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1206564934p2/8734.jpg], and while I've enjoyed them, I would not say that they are the best detective fiction I have read. Sayers is sometimes linked with the informal literary group the Inklings, and though not actually a member, she was a friend of some of the members, and they sometimes read her work at meetings.
When I read Sayers's novels, I am very conscious of the period they are set in, and in which they were written, and so I'm very conscious of it being another age, almost another world. It is the world of Downton Abbey. Indeed, perhaps seeing Downton Abbey enables one to appreciate her stories more.
But contrast, when reading books by Inklings [a:Charles Williams|36289|Charles Williams|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1217390107p2/36289.jpg] and [a:C.S. Lewis|1069006|C.S. Lewis|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1367519078p2/1069006.jpg] I'm not so conscious of the period in which they are set. Though Lewis's descriptions of Mars and Venus are nothing like what we now know them to be, one can suspend disbelief for the sake of the story. And even though Williams's novels are set on earth, there is nothing quite as dated as the descriptions in Sayers, perhaps because she gives more details of everyday life -- characters smoking, ordering food, taking care of wine and the like.
There's also a lot of erudite literary wordplay between the amateur and the professional detective, which is a bit spoilt by the slightly patronising tone. If course back then being patronising was regarded as a good thing, noblesse oblige and all that. But there's another thing -- the characters keep breaking into French, with no hint of a translation. I suppose back then educated Englishmen (of both sexes) could be expected to converse freely, if not fluently in French, but that too just makes one aware of how much times have changed.
