Murder Must Advertise / Dorothy L. Sayers

 

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is what I expect of Dorothy Sayers! A good twisty mystery combined with a shrewd insight into human behaviour. Plus details about things like cricket (about which I know nothing), dog racing, the use of the catapult (sligshot), the role of cocaine in the early 20th century society, and of course the advertising industry.

Talk about the best use ever of personal experience in a novel! Sayers parlays her nine years experience in the advertising biz into an excellent novel. She writes office politics that you can totally see happening. The personalities, the rivalries, the in-fighting, and the gossip. Ah, the gossip! And of course, the morality (or lack thereof).

”Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising,” announced Lord Peter sententiously, “is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow.”

And what a look at the supposed “good old days,” when everybody smoked and even a very moral sort like Mr. Pym could advocate encouraging more & more smoking, particularly for women. The women are still just beginning to kick against the restrictions of their gender roles—the women at the agency provide cleaning, food services, and typing. Only one of them seems to contribute to the advertising biz. Vices are more easily available to women than fulfilling employment. Not to mention the class divide which I guess is being replaced today by the wealth divide.

Wimsey gets to indulge himself with a lot of masquerading, as his own illegitimate cousin, as the Harlequin, and (briefly) as a policeman. There is zero presence of Bunter (he is mentioned only once). Harriet Vane is also referred to once indirectly. Despite the absence of these two usually crucial characters, I enjoyed this rumpus very much.




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