1934 mystery, ninth of Sayers' novels about Lord Peter Wimsey.
Stranded in a fen village on a snowy New Year's Eve, Wimsey helps out
with the bell-ringing since one of the regular men is down with 'flu.
But Fenchurch St. Paul has not finished with him, and soon enough a
body will be found.
This is a strange book. Yes, there's the village murder mystery:
a corpse found in someone else's grave, face bashed in and hands
missing, but with no obvious cause of death. Yes, there's the
garrulous Rector and the ailing Squire and the Rude Mechanicals and a
long-missing emerald necklace. But this feels like a story with a hole
in the middle of it all, and I think what's in that hole is Sayers'
experience of the relationship between the human and the divine. The
eight bells are central, connected with everything, glorious and
terrifying at the same time.
And this, I suggest, is why there's so much apparently irrelevant talk
about the mechanics of change-ringing, both in character and quoted
(when people dislike this book, all that material tends to be the
reason why): it is in effect holy text, the best that mere humans can
do to understand something that by its nature is beyond them. (The
reader is not helped by the fact that Wimsey is an experienced
ringer – he has to be, for the substitution at the start to work – and
so nobody needs to explain the basics to him.)
The mystery plot is important, and there's an interesting secondary
theme of the amount of damage one bad man can do to a community, not
to mention the difference between "good" and "bad" criminals. Of
course, this being Sayers, everyone here is an interesting person,
even the bit-parts. (I think it's a pity that Hilary Thorpe wasn't
brought back in a later book, though combined with Miss Meteyard in
Murder Must Advertise and Harriet Vane herself there's an
interesting triptych of the author at various stages of her life.)
There's a little bit of Bunter, and fenland drainage, and a little bit
of Parker, and another encoded message, and a largely gratuitous scene
of action near the end – leading to a death that seems completely
pointless, except that if you get your thinking into the right shape
it's exactly what is needed to make everything right again.
It's not a book I come back to very often; it's awkward and spiky and
defies easy classification. But it's very good. Followed by Gaudy
Night.
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