1972 collection of the last three short mystery stories featuring Lord
Peter Wimsey.
Striding Folly is framed by the coming of the National Grid,
and pylons covering the landscape; the puzzle is straightforward,
but the phantasmagorical imagery makes the story worth revisiting.
While Lord Peter tells the police where to look for the culprit, and
how to prove guilt, the actual details of this are elided, as indeed
is the motive; well, we know Sayers didn't care for motive as a force
in detective-stories, and here she proves it.
The Haunted Policeman is set just after the birth of Lord Peter's
first son, which leaves him in a fey mood; so when he sees an off-duty
policeman wandering confusedly down the street, he invites him in and
gets his story, of a murder discovered and, impossibly, lost again.
Because the solution has to be shown to the reader rather later than
Wimsey puts it together, the clues on which it's constructed are
rather slight, and I found myself not entirely convinced.
Talboys is set some years later, with three sons and a domestic
mystery to be solved; but it also has the visiting Miss Quirk, clearly
a stand-in for Modern Methods of Rearing the Child (any child), who's
a bit of a strawman though mildly amusing. (Marsh's Final Curtain,
written some five years later, does a surprisingly better job with
this idea, perhaps because she can find some sympathy with modernity
rather than rolling into the opposition all of the traits she
doesn't like.)
'I knew it,' replied Harriet, resignedly. 'If I'd realised the
disastrous effect sons would have on your character, I'd never have
trusted you with any.'
The first two stories had been published previously, in Detection
Medley (1939), an anthology by multiple authors; the last had its
first publication in this collection (and the collected short stories
that came out the same year), though it had been written in 1942. It's
not clear to me why Sayers didn't have it published at the time;
perhaps she was waiting for the war to be over so that she could write
a story that didn't mention it, but by the time that had happened the
old story didn't fit any more?
I've now reviewed (and enjoyed) all of the Wimsey detective fiction…
but not, quite, all the Wimsey material.
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