Have his carcase Book

The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people seem to think,repose upon a manly bosom...

I think Have His Carcase is the book where Sayers begins to make the transition between a standard Golden Age detective story, and the much more interesting and engaging (I find) novels which make up most of the Wimsey-Vane stories. As much as the earlier novels are fun to read, with some very entertaining secondary characters, I think this is really the point where both Harriet and Peter start to acquire the depth that they really need as characters if the reader is supposed to buy their relationship as being able to function on a level other than the standard, trope, Designated Love Interest one.

The plot was, I think, overly convoluted, artificial and implausible, although still miles better than, say, Clouds of Witness (I do not think I can ever contemplate the denouement of that book without cringing a little at the sheer implausibility of it.) I'm not sure how it could have been thought to be a suicide at all, given the violence of the death-wound. I did, however, like the way in which Sayers wove the solving of the mystery in with the fact that Harriet is, herself, a mystery writer, and even a certain slyly humourous acknowledgement of the conventions of the Golden Age detective novel - I was terribly amused at Harriet's thinking that it would be very fun if the man on the rock turned out to be dead, and would therefore be found by a famous murder mystery writer, and then the dead-pan "Harriet's luck was in." There is more than a little acknowledgement of the artificiality of the genre, especially with the endless constructions and reconstructions of what might happen, and the obsessive gathering of pieces of 'evidence' that usually turn out to be worthless.

There were also points in which I felt that the plot could be trimmed slightly - the solving of the code, for example. My eyes just glazed over and I skipped forwards several pages. While I'm sure Dorothy L Sayers was delighted to show us all that she had constructed a code that actually worked, I frankly couldn't have given a monkeys.

The verbal sparring between Harriet and Peter was a treat as always, and it was their interaction that provided most of the tension and the drama. I loved how much more we got to see of Peter outside of the foppish persona he's built up for himself, and how Harriet is being developed much more, warts and all. The tentative attraction that developed in Strong Poison is developed here into an even more tentative courtship that is slowly, ever so slowly being built on, and which will eventually climax in Gaudy Night. I don't think it's as strong a novel as Gaudy Night - then again, that's one of my favourite ever books - but I do think it's well on the way to developing the characters which are the reason that it is my favourite.