The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is mostly about a very particular part of the British countryside, the fens, and loving descriptions of it and the things that happen there and the kind of people who live there.

It’s also about churchbells. Sayers has to have done a great deal of studying churchbells. There’s a whole British way of ringing bells that’s interesting and difficult and mathematical.

The ‘tailors’ aren’t tailors, by the way. They’re bells.

Bunter is awesome. So competent and great.

Also, I really liked how the solution to the mystery was revealed. It was an exquisitely-timed release of information. Delivered with a precision-calibrated surgical heat-seeking trajectory.



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Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The best part of this is that Lord Peter Wimsey’s monocle is a magnifying glass and his cane is a measuring rod and a secret sword-stick.
No, wait, the best part is Lord Peter’s mom, who rocks, and who speaks in bird-brained run-on sentences that make everybody think she’s slightly dumb, but actually she’s using those sentences to adroitly manage very delicate social situations. The humor in this is very dry, and I wouldn’t have understood it in my 20s.
I think the pleasure of the book is more from the humor of having a guy who is basically Bertie Wooster (and is touchy about it — there are several sly jabs at Wodehouse) as the detective, managing the contradiction between his upper-class life and his sleuthing life.
But then if you look a little deeper, behind that contradiction, behind the humor, you’ll see the massive Great War PTSD Lord Peter suffers from.



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The post Strong Poison appeared first on Matthew Talamini.

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The best part of this is that Lord Peter Wimsey’s monocle is a magnifying glass and his cane is a measuring rod and a secret sword-stick.
No, wait, the best part is Lord Peter’s mom, who rocks, and who speaks in bird-brained run-on sentences that make everybody think she’s slightly dumb, but actually she’s using those sentences to adroitly manage very delicate social situations. The humor in this is very dry, and I wouldn’t have understood it in my 20s.
I think the pleasure of the book is more from the humor of having a guy who is basically Bertie Wooster (and is touchy about it — there are several sly jabs at Wodehouse) as the detective, managing the contradiction between his upper-class life and his sleuthing life.
But then if you look a little deeper, behind that contradiction, behind the humor, you’ll see the massive Great War PTSD Lord Peter suffers from.



View all my reviews

The post Whose Body? appeared first on Matthew Talamini.