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A review by lucyp21
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers
4.0
This is my first book of Dorothy Sayers, though I've heard a lot about her, and I found it a mix of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. It was a good book when it came down to it, but it went by a lot more slowly than I would have planned for.
Lord Peter Wimsey is a man who likes solving mysteries and he and his man, Bunter, stumble across this one quite by chance. This is the eleventh in the series but it was the first one I read and I wasn't lost at all. This is a great standalone book and I wasn't lost at all in who the characters were or their backgrounds, though I'm sure more will come up when I read further books in the series.
In this novel, Lord Peter breaks down outside an English village of Fenchurch St Paul just after Christmas. He is invited to take part in the bell-ringing and gets involved in the village life, along with the nasty influenza that is going around the village. This nasty bout of flu means that when someone wants to be buried with their wife, the woman's grave is dug up and they discover a man's body halfway down. Lord Peter is called back to investigate this mystery and find out who the man is (though be warned Lord Peter isn't involved in the murder until just over 90 pages in).
There are a lot of characters in this book as the mystery is tangled up with an event that happened in the village so many years earlier. It becomes easier to keep track of all these characters, though I will say this book requires concentration at times. I had to go back and reread certain points as I missed who a person was and what they were talking about. There were all sorts of little events going on in the background with the characters and they felt incredibly realistic. It also went very nicely with the setting of the post-WWI English village as they were still reeling from the effects of the war but they were starting to regain their equilibrium and carry on.
The mystery, on the other hand, kept me guessing right up until the end. There was not only the mystery of who the man was, but how he came to be buried in the grave, who put him there and how he died in the end. I loved the twists and turns of the mystery and how wonderfully everything slotted together. I marveled at how Dorothy Sayers managed to interweave the two mysteries, who killed the man in the grave and what happened to the emeralds, completely seamlessly and I loved what happened at the end. I could not even begin to guess the ending, especially how the man died, and it was only until Lord Peter found out that I could even begin to guess. It was a horrible way to die, I will say that, but a very inventive one nonetheless.
I enjoyed this but I have to say I found the information about bells quite hard to swallow. It got very technical at times and I just accepted that I wasn't going to quite understand and moved on in the story, rather than try to figure it out. This book is also a product of its time and there is some mild anti-semitism near the start of the book, though I couldn't remember anything else coming up later.
However, I did really enjoy this book and will be checking out more books in this series (and not just because my mum got very excited when she saw what I was reading). This is definitely a book I would recommend to people who enjoy historical mysteries, especially ones written during the time and were contemporary when they were published. 4 stars!
Lord Peter Wimsey is a man who likes solving mysteries and he and his man, Bunter, stumble across this one quite by chance. This is the eleventh in the series but it was the first one I read and I wasn't lost at all. This is a great standalone book and I wasn't lost at all in who the characters were or their backgrounds, though I'm sure more will come up when I read further books in the series.
In this novel, Lord Peter breaks down outside an English village of Fenchurch St Paul just after Christmas. He is invited to take part in the bell-ringing and gets involved in the village life, along with the nasty influenza that is going around the village. This nasty bout of flu means that when someone wants to be buried with their wife, the woman's grave is dug up and they discover a man's body halfway down. Lord Peter is called back to investigate this mystery and find out who the man is (though be warned Lord Peter isn't involved in the murder until just over 90 pages in).
There are a lot of characters in this book as the mystery is tangled up with an event that happened in the village so many years earlier. It becomes easier to keep track of all these characters, though I will say this book requires concentration at times. I had to go back and reread certain points as I missed who a person was and what they were talking about. There were all sorts of little events going on in the background with the characters and they felt incredibly realistic. It also went very nicely with the setting of the post-WWI English village as they were still reeling from the effects of the war but they were starting to regain their equilibrium and carry on.
The mystery, on the other hand, kept me guessing right up until the end. There was not only the mystery of who the man was, but how he came to be buried in the grave, who put him there and how he died in the end. I loved the twists and turns of the mystery and how wonderfully everything slotted together. I marveled at how Dorothy Sayers managed to interweave the two mysteries, who killed the man in the grave and what happened to the emeralds, completely seamlessly and I loved what happened at the end. I could not even begin to guess the ending, especially how the man died, and it was only until Lord Peter found out that I could even begin to guess. It was a horrible way to die, I will say that, but a very inventive one nonetheless.
I enjoyed this but I have to say I found the information about bells quite hard to swallow. It got very technical at times and I just accepted that I wasn't going to quite understand and moved on in the story, rather than try to figure it out. This book is also a product of its time and there is some mild anti-semitism near the start of the book, though I couldn't remember anything else coming up later.
However, I did really enjoy this book and will be checking out more books in this series (and not just because my mum got very excited when she saw what I was reading). This is definitely a book I would recommend to people who enjoy historical mysteries, especially ones written during the time and were contemporary when they were published. 4 stars!