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igenlodeThe characterisation is good. The landscape descriptions are very vivid. The first scene or so is excellent, and for a few pages I thought I'd misjudged a book I remembered as disappointing and mechanical.
On the other hand, Wimsey is in full silly-ass mode (he gets less annoying later on, but that relies on the reader getting that far) and unfortunately the detection sections of the book are pretty boring, as is the section at the end -- in which the author doubtless took great professional pride -- when six different theories as to how the murder was committed are presented one after another, each one nominally fitting the known facts and laying great stress on its timetable.
If you compare this novel to "Have His Carcase", which also hinges around questions of available routes and timing, it's pretty obvious that the author shot herself in the foot by choosing to use real geography (resulting in a complicated map far too small to read in the paperback edition) and real train connections and times, which makes the whole set-up so complicated that you can't hold the scenario in your head or picture how one route relates to another. No doubt it was fun to work out how a complex murder could have been committed in real life around the area where she was staying on holiday, but it doesn't make for an effective narrative.
The main thing I remembered about the book was the 'cheat' at the beginning, where the author deliberately withholds what she claims to be a vital clue on the grounds that the reader should be able to work it out for himself. In fact it's not an especially enlightening piece of information, and so far as I can see the conversation about the missing tube of paint could quite easily have been reported verbatim without giving anything away until Wimsey's 'big reveal' at the end -- the reader wouldn't realise the significance of his observations of the various painters, since the text gives no indication of what he is trying to ascertain, or why.
The other thing I remembered was the beard, so I knew that particular red herring to be a false one. What I didn't remember was which of the remaining five suspects was the actual culprit... an indication not so much of the ingenuity of the plot as of its complete lack of psychological depth! (Generally speaking, one doesn't read Sayers for the 'whodunnit', because the motives are usually memorable enough to stick with you on a reread.)
I feel that this could have been a much better book if it had been more of a novel and less of a 'three-pipe-solution'. When Sayers allows herself to bring the characters to life in three-dimensional complexity -- as in that insight into the mind of the unlamented Campbell at the start of the story -- the writing gains a lot more depth. If it had been written from the point of view of the various suspects -- even if that involved a certain amount of artificial concealment of telltale knowledge -- then it could have been a good deal more interesting; if it had been written from the point of view of someone who was a member of the local community and had his own loyalties and prejudices towards the various characters, it could have been less mechanical. Putting Wimsey into it was probably a mistake -- he and Bunter come across as little more than caricatures of themselves, and he is an unlikely outsider. (But then Sayers pulls off just this scenario with masterly success in "The Nine Tailors", where Wimsey stumbles into a murder in an isolated rural community full of sympathetically-drawn and credible characters, and we are drawn into the village dramas to the point where the solution to the crime is almost an incidental discovery.)
As it is, it's a plot in search of a book. The final reconstruction of events is interesting; the encounters with individual suspects are interesting, where we get a sense of their motivations and personalities -- and their reactions to being under suspicion. The ticking off of numbers of miles, and the time needed to travel from point A to point B, and who drove Campbell's car and why, and when each train connects with each other train, and the endless hypotheses put forward to connect all these things... all these may represent the accepted 'game' of detective fiction in the 1930s (indeed, it reminds me of the 'round-robin' novel "The Floating Admiral", to which Sayers contributed a chapter, where each author had a different idea as to the eventual solution), but they rapidly become very boring, and as a result I didn't take in any of them. (Yet, again, in "Have His Carcase" Sayers manages to pull off presenting the reader with an actual literal list of suspects, motives, opportunities etc., as drawn up by the protagonists in an attempt to solve the crime, without losing the reader's interest. One wonders if her heart simply wasn't in this book.)
In the end, there are really too many red herrings and not enough story. There's an interesting Ruth Rendell-type book to be had here just from the inter-relationships between all the artists, but this isn't it. And Wimsey could be practically any fictional detective; the only gesture towards a tie-in with any events in Sayers' other Wimsey novels is the existence of Parker in London, though the two never even meet.
The annoying thing is that there are enough traces of good writing to make it clear that this could potentially have been a better book.
On the other hand, Wimsey is in full silly-ass mode (he gets less annoying later on, but that relies on the reader getting that far) and unfortunately the detection sections of the book are pretty boring, as is the section at the end -- in which the author doubtless took great professional pride -- when six different theories as to how the murder was committed are presented one after another, each one nominally fitting the known facts and laying great stress on its timetable.
If you compare this novel to "Have His Carcase", which also hinges around questions of available routes and timing, it's pretty obvious that the author shot herself in the foot by choosing to use real geography (resulting in a complicated map far too small to read in the paperback edition) and real train connections and times, which makes the whole set-up so complicated that you can't hold the scenario in your head or picture how one route relates to another. No doubt it was fun to work out how a complex murder could have been committed in real life around the area where she was staying on holiday, but it doesn't make for an effective narrative.
The main thing I remembered about the book was the 'cheat' at the beginning, where the author deliberately withholds what she claims to be a vital clue on the grounds that the reader should be able to work it out for himself. In fact it's not an especially enlightening piece of information, and so far as I can see the conversation about the missing tube of paint could quite easily have been reported verbatim without giving anything away until Wimsey's 'big reveal' at the end -- the reader wouldn't realise the significance of his observations of the various painters, since the text gives no indication of what he is trying to ascertain, or why.
The other thing I remembered was the beard, so I knew that particular red herring to be a false one. What I didn't remember was which of the remaining five suspects was the actual culprit... an indication not so much of the ingenuity of the plot as of its complete lack of psychological depth! (Generally speaking, one doesn't read Sayers for the 'whodunnit', because the motives are usually memorable enough to stick with you on a reread.)
I feel that this could have been a much better book if it had been more of a novel and less of a 'three-pipe-solution'. When Sayers allows herself to bring the characters to life in three-dimensional complexity -- as in that insight into the mind of the unlamented Campbell at the start of the story -- the writing gains a lot more depth. If it had been written from the point of view of the various suspects -- even if that involved a certain amount of artificial concealment of telltale knowledge -- then it could have been a good deal more interesting; if it had been written from the point of view of someone who was a member of the local community and had his own loyalties and prejudices towards the various characters, it could have been less mechanical. Putting Wimsey into it was probably a mistake -- he and Bunter come across as little more than caricatures of themselves, and he is an unlikely outsider. (But then Sayers pulls off just this scenario with masterly success in "The Nine Tailors", where Wimsey stumbles into a murder in an isolated rural community full of sympathetically-drawn and credible characters, and we are drawn into the village dramas to the point where the solution to the crime is almost an incidental discovery.)
As it is, it's a plot in search of a book. The final reconstruction of events is interesting; the encounters with individual suspects are interesting, where we get a sense of their motivations and personalities -- and their reactions to being under suspicion. The ticking off of numbers of miles, and the time needed to travel from point A to point B, and who drove Campbell's car and why, and when each train connects with each other train, and the endless hypotheses put forward to connect all these things... all these may represent the accepted 'game' of detective fiction in the 1930s (indeed, it reminds me of the 'round-robin' novel "The Floating Admiral", to which Sayers contributed a chapter, where each author had a different idea as to the eventual solution), but they rapidly become very boring, and as a result I didn't take in any of them. (Yet, again, in "Have His Carcase" Sayers manages to pull off presenting the reader with an actual literal list of suspects, motives, opportunities etc., as drawn up by the protagonists in an attempt to solve the crime, without losing the reader's interest. One wonders if her heart simply wasn't in this book.)
In the end, there are really too many red herrings and not enough story. There's an interesting Ruth Rendell-type book to be had here just from the inter-relationships between all the artists, but this isn't it. And Wimsey could be practically any fictional detective; the only gesture towards a tie-in with any events in Sayers' other Wimsey novels is the existence of Parker in London, though the two never even meet.
The annoying thing is that there are enough traces of good writing to make it clear that this could potentially have been a better book.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-12 02:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-12 12:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-12 07:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-12 12:33 pm (UTC)I've still got it, and I still have no idea what the front cover shows ;-)
(Apparently she wasn't worried that the content of the book might give an imaginative child nightmares...!)
no subject
Date: 2020-06-12 03:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-12 03:55 pm (UTC)It may have been that she simply thought the 1960s paperback covers were silly-shocking, while assuming that a child wouldn't pick up on (or wouldn't be disturbed by) the horror elements in the text. I didn't get nightmares, anyway -- though I still remember the boiling flood water when they were fighting with the sluice, and the hideous power of the bells.
Little things like tied-up corpses with their hands chopped off didn't worry me at all ;-)