"Strong Poison" by Dorothy L Sayers

A Lord Peter Wimsey mystery.

The book starts with the judge's summing up at the trial of detective story writer Harriet Vane; Lord Peter has been watching the trial and decided (a) she didn't do it and (b) he is in love with her. Fortunately the jury is hung and a retrial is ordered giving Lord Peter a month in which to find evidence clearing Harriet. This process involves a literary bohemains of the 1920s, Miss Climson, Lord Peter's undercover private investigator, who has to pretend to be a medium at a seance, Miss Murchison, taught lock-picking by one of Lord Peter's underworld acquaintances, and of course the butler Bunter. This is not a tight whodunnit, mostly because the cast iof suspects is severely limited so that it becomes more of a how-was-it-done but it is a gently amusing picaresque crime story. During the course of it Peter persuades Detective Inspector Charles Parker to propose to Lady Mary, Peter's sister, much to the consternation of the Duke and Denver and his wife.

Some great moments:

• "There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood. The judge was an old man; so old, he seemed to have outlived time and change and death." (first lines)
• "I hope you won't mind, because I haven't shaved since this morning, but I'm going to take you round the next quiet corner and kiss you." (C 3)
• "A person who can believe all the articles of the Christian faith is not going to boggle over a trifle of adverse evidence." (C 4)
• "Up like a rocket, down like the stick." (C 6)
• "I've thought of a good plot for a detective story." "Really?" "Top-hole. You know, the sort people bring out and say, 'I've often thought of doing it myself, if I could only find time to sit down and write it.' I gather that sitting down is all that is necessary for producing masterpieces." (C 7)
• "I would dispense with all definite notes. After all, the cat does not need them for his midnight melodies, powerful and expressive as they are. The lovehunger of the stallion takes no account of octave or interval in giving forth the cry of passion." (C 8)
• "In detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They're the purest literature we have." C 12)
• "Perhaps the charwoman disturbed them?" "Not she. She never disturbs the dust, let alone the cover." (C 13)
• "He was one of those imperturbably self-satisfied people who cannot conceive of themselves as being out of place in any surroundings" (C 13)
• "The stately volumes on his shelves, rank after rank of Saint, historian, poet, philosopher, mocked his impotence. All that wisdom and all that beauty, and they could not show him how to save the woman he imperiously wanted from a sordid death by hanging." (C 15)
• "For the last five years or so," said Wimsey, "you have been looking like a demented sheep at my sister, and starting like a rabbit whenever her name is mentioned. What do you mean by it? It is not ornamental. It is not exhilarating. You unnerve the poor girl." (C 15)
• "It was an ordinary plain Lyons, without orchestra or soda fountain." (C 16)
• "Even a watched pot cannot absorb heat for ever." (C 19)
• "There is something about wills which brings out the worst side of human nature. People who under ordinary circumstances are perfectly upright and amiable, go as curly as corkscrews and foam at the mouth, whenever they hear the words 'I devise and bequeath.'" (C 19)

Not great literature nor even a classic whodunnit but fun to read. April 2020

I have set myself the task of reading all the Lord Peter Wimsey novels (mostly again) in order. The ones I have read and reviewed in this blog so far include:

• Whose Body in which my Lord and his manservant are introduced
• Clouds of Witness in which Lord Peter must sleuth to get his brother Gerald, Duke of Denver, off a murder charge
• Unnatural Death which introduces another Wimsey sidekick: Miss Climpson
• The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
• Strong Poison which introduces Harriet Vane, a detective writer who becomes Lord Peter's love interest
• The Five Red Herrings; Lord Peter in Scotland
• Have His Carcase: Harriet and Peter investigate the death of a gigolo with dreams

There are also Wimsey books written since the death of DLS by Jill Paton Walsh. These include:

• The Attenbury Emeralds in which Lord Peter, in 1951, recalls the circumstances of his first case, the Attenbury Emeralds, which have gone missing again.
• The Late Scholar: in which Wimsey returns to Oxford