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3.9 AVERAGE
3.9 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
So honestly, I needed a book for the "read a book published from 1900-1950" for the Book Riot Read Harder challenge, and I was looking at some list for suggestions and saw this one listed. I've read one other Dorothy Sayers book ([b:Whose Body?|192893|Whose Body? (Lord Peter Wimsey, #1)|Dorothy L. Sayers|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387573241s/192893.jpg|1090544]) and I remember not really caring for it. But everything suggested this was pretty well a stand-alone mystery so I decided to go for it knowing very little about it.
Including apparently, what the name referred to. I thought there were going to be nine men darning suits (after all Whimsey is a bit of a fancy-man, right?). Imagine my surprise when the novel opens with a long passage on bell playing in a small English town. Ohhh...the bells are the tailors...
Anyway, once the murder got underway it was a lot of fun, and I'd really recommend it. Like a lot of the Agatha Christie murders I've read, the list of potential suspects is pretty insular and the crime has to be solved by wits and questioning without a whole lot of gadgetry. Critical information for crime solving includes which sermon the rector preached on which days, the schedule of meals, and the health of various animals.
This, I think, is also a great book to read toward the end of the year near Christmas/New Year's, since so much of the action takes place then.
Including apparently, what the name referred to. I thought there were going to be nine men darning suits (after all Whimsey is a bit of a fancy-man, right?). Imagine my surprise when the novel opens with a long passage on bell playing in a small English town. Ohhh...the bells are the tailors...
Anyway, once the murder got underway it was a lot of fun, and I'd really recommend it. Like a lot of the Agatha Christie murders I've read, the list of potential suspects is pretty insular and the crime has to be solved by wits and questioning without a whole lot of gadgetry. Critical information for crime solving includes which sermon the rector preached on which days, the schedule of meals, and the health of various animals.
This, I think, is also a great book to read toward the end of the year near Christmas/New Year's, since so much of the action takes place then.
Much better than the last Lord Peter mystery I read....although I did guess the murderer pretty early on.
The mystery itself was incredibly clever - but there were too many superfluous characters and it felt like a slog at times
A good old-fashioned murder mystery in a small parish in East Anglia in the early nineteen hundreds. The language of the book was a big plus for me, certainly very well-written, witty, and often comical. (uhm, that, on the other hand, was not very well-written...) The only reason I cannot give this mystery of bells a good 5 stars is indeed the bells themselves. I used to have this problem with many books when I was younger, too, for example reading Agatha Cristie or Hemingway, I would always have to skip the "descriptive" parts of the narrative, parts describing a house, church, village, or a complicated action done by one person or several people. In the case of this book, it is the bells and how one rings them alone and more importantly in unison with others. I got to learn terms like change-ringing and belfry and peal and Treble Bob and Grandshire Triples, but I still have no image in my head of how this all would work from the lengthy descriptions in the book. I skipped most of the lengthy ones, because they got my head a-turnin'! There is, of course, a part of the mystery that centers around the change-ringing of bells, so that "clue" I had to just let go of, instead of trying to understand it. So if you are like me, get lost easily when someone says "Just make the first left and then a right and it's on the south side of the street." then you may want to ease up on the change-ringing parts. Other than that, really, the book was a pleasure to read.
In my early teens, I read a LOT of Agatha Christie novels. All the ones I could find in translation at my local library, in fact, and once I became more proficient in English, quite a few more of them in English. I've probably read at least 90% of all the novels Dame Agatha wrote. I've heard about the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries over the years, but never had the opportunity to read one before now.
Lord Peter Wimsey is on his way to friends on New Year's Eve when he accidentally drives his car into a ditch, due to the excessive amounts of snow. He and his manservant are taken in by the kindly rector of the nearby village. Due to an influenza, one of the locals due to help out with a special bellringing feat is incapacitated, and his lordship earns the respect and gratitude of his host by helping out with the New Year's peal. The rector is called away as Lady Thorpe is dying, and Lord Peter hears the story of the priceless emerald necklace that was stolen when Sir Charles Thorpe married his lady. The emeralds were stolen before the First World War, but both the thieves were imprisoned, and neither would admit where the loot was.
A few months later, Lord Peter receives a letter from the rector, announcing that Sir Charles Thorpe has also passed away, and when he was to be buried, an unidentified corpse was found in Lady Thorpe's grave. The corpse had been badly disfigured, with the hands chopped off, and the rector asks for Lord Peter's help in figuring out the identity of the dead man, as well as who killed the stranger. Working with the local police, Lord Peter is slowly able to piece together who the disfigured corpse is, and how he came to end up in Lady Thorpe's grave, but the identity of the murderer is not revealed until the very end of the book.
I suspect hearing about Dorothy L. Sayers' books for so many years, and especially that The Nine Tailors was her best novel, I had my expectations set too high. I did like the unusual mystery, and the final reveal, but much of the book irritated and bored me. There was a lot of waffle about the damming of the fens, and Lord Peter talking to random rustics about fairly inconsequential things (yes, I know some of them became important later, but in no way that felt necessary) and all the stuff about bell ringing was completely uninteresting to me. The various villagers were very well depicted, and I especially liked young Hilary Thorpe, who was very clever, but if this is actually Sayers' best novel, I'm not going to be in a hurry to check out any of her other ones. A bit of a disappointment, this.
Lord Peter Wimsey is on his way to friends on New Year's Eve when he accidentally drives his car into a ditch, due to the excessive amounts of snow. He and his manservant are taken in by the kindly rector of the nearby village. Due to an influenza, one of the locals due to help out with a special bellringing feat is incapacitated, and his lordship earns the respect and gratitude of his host by helping out with the New Year's peal. The rector is called away as Lady Thorpe is dying, and Lord Peter hears the story of the priceless emerald necklace that was stolen when Sir Charles Thorpe married his lady. The emeralds were stolen before the First World War, but both the thieves were imprisoned, and neither would admit where the loot was.
A few months later, Lord Peter receives a letter from the rector, announcing that Sir Charles Thorpe has also passed away, and when he was to be buried, an unidentified corpse was found in Lady Thorpe's grave. The corpse had been badly disfigured, with the hands chopped off, and the rector asks for Lord Peter's help in figuring out the identity of the dead man, as well as who killed the stranger. Working with the local police, Lord Peter is slowly able to piece together who the disfigured corpse is, and how he came to end up in Lady Thorpe's grave, but the identity of the murderer is not revealed until the very end of the book.
I suspect hearing about Dorothy L. Sayers' books for so many years, and especially that The Nine Tailors was her best novel, I had my expectations set too high. I did like the unusual mystery, and the final reveal, but much of the book irritated and bored me. There was a lot of waffle about the damming of the fens, and Lord Peter talking to random rustics about fairly inconsequential things (yes, I know some of them became important later, but in no way that felt necessary) and all the stuff about bell ringing was completely uninteresting to me. The various villagers were very well depicted, and I especially liked young Hilary Thorpe, who was very clever, but if this is actually Sayers' best novel, I'm not going to be in a hurry to check out any of her other ones. A bit of a disappointment, this.
The thing I really like about Dorothy Sayers' books is that she shows how devastating the murders are to everyone involved. In many mysteries, the problem is solved and everyone goes on their merry way. Dorothy Sayers doesn't allow that. This book has a very melancholy ending, with even Lord Peter realizing that sometimes it's better that things stay buried. Sayers is also a very sympathetic writer; she writes with equal love for good people among the nobility and the working classes. This book may have one of the more easily solved murders, but I think it's one of her best because she is able to show so well the feelings of all involved.
This book was a real slog to get through. The first quarter or so gives more background than you'd ever want to know about change-ringing, which is sort of interesting in a "it's something I know exists but don't care about further" sort of way. The body doesn't appear until after we're done with the bells. I found the extended middle, with men leading double-lives, new characters appearing and then disappearing, and more about bells, to be tedious at best. The whole section about who had access to which keys and when was frustrating. I couldn't keep track of it and as yet am not clear if it had any bearing on the murder.
The solution was unexpected, but not as dramatic as I thought it would be, given that it was left until the last page and a half.
I'll just quote Edmund Wilson's New Yorker review, since it says what I feel and would say if I were as good a critic as Edmund Wilson: "I set out to read The Nine Tailors in the hope of tasting some novel excitement, and I declare that it seems to me one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field. The first part is all about bell-ringing as it is practised in English churches and contains a lot of information of the kind that you might expect to find in an encyclopedia article on campanology. I skipped a good deal of this, and found myself skipping, also, a large section of the conversations between conventional English village characters ... I had often heard people say that Dorothy Sayers wrote well ... but, really, she does not write very well: it is simply that she is more consciously literary than most of the other detective-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub-literary level."
I have Gaudy Night still on my shelf. I'll probably give it a try but maybe see what Wilson thought first.
The solution was unexpected, but not as dramatic as I thought it would be, given that it was left until the last page and a half.
I'll just quote Edmund Wilson's New Yorker review, since it says what I feel and would say if I were as good a critic as Edmund Wilson: "I set out to read The Nine Tailors in the hope of tasting some novel excitement, and I declare that it seems to me one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field. The first part is all about bell-ringing as it is practised in English churches and contains a lot of information of the kind that you might expect to find in an encyclopedia article on campanology. I skipped a good deal of this, and found myself skipping, also, a large section of the conversations between conventional English village characters ... I had often heard people say that Dorothy Sayers wrote well ... but, really, she does not write very well: it is simply that she is more consciously literary than most of the other detective-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub-literary level."
I have Gaudy Night still on my shelf. I'll probably give it a try but maybe see what Wilson thought first.