Book review – ‘Strong Poison’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

By Dennis Fischman

If you’ve read any detective fiction at all, you’ve heard of Sherlock Holmes. You’ve probably made the acquaintance of Hercule Poirot. But do you know Lord Peter Wimsey? If not, you are in for a treat.

Picture a foppish looking British aristocrat, sporting a monocle. He’s the younger son of the late Duke of Denver, so he has not inherited any great responsibilities: only all the money he needs to drive a fast car, go to nightclubs, and compile a fabulous collection of rare books and manuscripts.

You would think he’s a blithering idiot, at first glance, but that’s his disguise. As author Dorothy Sayers remarks, Lord Peter knows that the easiest way to be smarter than you look is to appear a bit more stupid than you are. (“If anybody ever marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle,” he is aptly told.)

Underneath that façade is a man who wants to know everything, from how the drains work to what women really think and feel. Unlike the sleuth of Baker Street, Peter Wimsey understands the emotional life. He went through the horrors of WW I and came out of it with shell shock (what we today would call PTSD). With the aid of his former comrade in arms, now valet, Mervyn Bunter, Wimsey brings murderers to justice partly to heal himself, partly to restore a sense of order in a world gone mad.

Where should you start this series? If you’re a completist, you could meet Lord Peter plus Bunter and some of the other recurring characters at the very beginning, in Whose Body? If you’re interested in his family dynamics, you can see him save his brother Gerald in Unnatural Death. For a stand-alone novel that casts light on the modern advertising industry decades before Mad Men, read Murder Must Advertise.

My own recommendation is to start with Strong Poison, the first of the books that pair Peter Wimsey with mystery writer Harriet Vane. In this book, she is on trial for allegedly murdering her lover. In 1920’s Britain, that would be scandalous enough. What especially puts her under suspicion is that the murder was committed using a poison that featured in one of her own books!

Peter is convinced that Harriet didn’t do it. What’s more, he’s sure that she’s the woman he’s meant to marry. “What I mean to say is, when all this is over, I want to marry you, if you can put up with me and all that,” he says awkwardly.

But getting them together is going to be ticklish: first he has to make sure she isn’t hanged, and then, the two of them have to figure out whether owing her life to him is going to keep her from ever being free to love him, just for himself.

All that is on top of the differences in class and wealth between a lordling and a woman making her own living as an author – to say nothing of the notoriety that’s going to follow her the rest of her life. “‘I intend to marry the prisoner.” “What?” said the Duke. “Good lord what, what?” “If she’ll have me,” said Lord Peter Wimsey’”.

This is one of my favorite series of British mysteries, and it is a classic. Pick it up soon!

Dennis Fischman is a member of the Somerville Public Library’s Mystery Book Club and an inveterate reader.

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