sarahmatthews, 10 months ago

#BookReview Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers
Read on audio
RNIB Talking Books
Pub. 1930, 240pp

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I’ve only read Murder Must Advertise in this series and was going to head for Gaudy Night but someone helpful on here suggested I read this novel first as it introduces Harriet Vane, who’s also in that one.
Lord Peter Winsey instantly falls for Harriet in court when she’s accused of murdering her former lover and is determined to get her freed as he’s convinced she didn’t do it. The mystery revolves around him trying to figure out a tricky puzzle with little evidence to a tight deadline and is hugely entertaining. He’s smitten with Harriet, she’s having none of it and their dialogue is fantastic.
At the start he’s stumped as to where to begin: ‘As the taxi lurched along The Embankment he felt for the first time the dull and angry helplessness which was the first warning stroke, the triumph of mutability…for the first time, too, he doubted his own power to carry through what he’d undertaken. His personal feelings had been involved before this in his investigations but they’d never before clouded his mind. He was fumbling, grasping uncertinly here and there at fugitive and mocking possibilities.’
And then after visiting a witness he comments ‘everyone’s so remarkably helpful about this case, they cheerfully answer questions which one has no right to ask, and burst into explanations in the most unnecessary manner. None of them seem to have anything to conceal, it’s quite astonishing.’
There are so many wonderful period details, and this one about a document Wimsey reads doubles as a clue:it had been typed on a Woodstock machine with a chipped lower case p and an a slightly out of alignment’
And I loved the bit where Wimsey dispatches one of his assistant sleuths to a town and she goes on “an orgy of teas” in the local teashops in search of her target.
This is a great detective story in which the supporting characters are very strong.
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