![]() ![]() It’s not so much a whodunnit as a how and, more obtusely, whydunnit. Whose Body is poorly plotted in a much more mundane fashion. It was days after finishing Murder Must Advertise before I realised that it was, in fact, silly. The lyrical, astute social commentary (in particular the evisceration of the advertising industry which Sayers knew so well) of Murder Must Advertise doesn’t just compensate for the baldly absurd plot device of Wimsey pretending to be his own doppleganger and a supernaturally acrobatic harlequin, it paints over it entirely. And for me, usually, that doesn’t matter. There are lively debates in the mystery community over which of her stories is the most clumsily over-wrought (with The Five Red Herrings typically coming first or a very close second) but even at her best she wasn’t a patch on Christie at her worst. That which I like about Dorothy L Sayers is abundant in Whose Body and so I find myself wishing it were possible to know what it would have been like were it not the first Lord Peter Wimsey book and/or written ten years later, say about the time that she wrote Murder Must Advertise. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |