I had intended to read the Wimsey series in order this time round, but I must have misread something, since I went straight from Whose Body? to this. I’ll go back and read the others before continuing, but I don’t feel I missed out. Something that I’ve really come to appreciate in these books is the treatment of the Great War and the experiences of those who fought, especially the frank discussion of the PTSD that many soldiers suffered. There’s also an interesting generational gap between those who fought and those who were too old to. It’s not quite boomers vs millennials, but the obvious lack of understanding of some in the older generation regarding what their children suffered makes for startling reading.
And through all this, Lord Peter Wimsey walks, with his mask firmly on, using an act of mild stupidity and geniality to try to forget about and move on from that past. This time, he’s got a dead body in his club and it turns out that finding out just when it became a dead body is very important. A throwaway line about the dead man has stayed with me: he was an old man, someone for whom “the war” meant the Crimean war, not even the Boer war never mind the Great War. I don’t quite know why that line resonates with me, but it really does.
Despite some dated language, the book feels very fresh. Despite being a world apart, it doesn’t feel nearly a century old by any means, and I blitzed through it. My Queen of Crime has always been Christie, but Sayers is pushing in deep on her flank.
