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Title: Have His Carcase
Series:
Lord Peter Wimsey #8
Author: Dorothy Sayers
Rating:
3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Mystery
Pages:
374
Words: 139K
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Synopsis: |
From Wikipedia
During a hiking holiday on the South West coast of England, the detective novelist Harriet Vane discovers the body of a man lying on an isolated rock on the shore, not far from the resort of Wilvercombe; his throat has been cut. Harriet takes photographs and notes that death must have been very recent as the man's blood is still liquid. There are no footprints in the sand other than hers and those of the victim. Unfortunately, the corpse is washed away by the rising tide before she can summon help.
Alerted to the discovery by a friend, Lord Peter Wimsey arrives, and he and Harriet start their investigations. The victim is identified as Paul Alexis, a young man of Russian extraction, employed by a Wilvercombe hotel as a professional dancing partner. The police tend to the view that Alexis's death was suicide and that he had cut his own throat.
Wimsey and Harriet discover that in the period leading up to his death Alexis, an avid reader of Ruritanian romances, had believed himself to be a descendant of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. A series of cipher letters received from an unknown source convinced him that he was being called to return to Russia to take his place as the new rightful Tsar.
Alexis had been engaged to a rich widow in her fifties, Mrs Weldon. Her son, Henry Weldon, ten years older than his mother's lover and by all appearances a simple and brutish man, is appalled at the prospect of his mother's remarriage to a gigolo, and at his potential loss of inheritance. He travels to Wilvercombe to monitor the investigation while ostensibly comforting his mother after her loss. Weldon appears to be a likely murder suspect, but he has an unshakeable alibi for the time of Alexis's death – as do a large number of other possible suspects.
Alexis's death, staged to look like suicide, is gradually revealed to be the result of an ingenious murder plot that played upon Alexis's fantasies. He had been lured to the rock by his anonymous correspondent who urged him to be ready to meet a 'Rider from the Sea', a rider who it was said would be carrying instructions for his onward journey to Warsaw. Once at the rock, Alexis met his death at the hand of the murderer who had ridden his horse along the beach through the incoming tide to avoid leaving tracks.
Wimsey and Harriet ultimately realise that Weldon is not the simple character he has been presenting, but a criminal who has been living under two different identities. Weldon was himself the rider, and had been provided with his alibi by two co-conspirators, a friend and his wife. Although his alibi was secure for the believed time of death, the investigators discover that Alexis had died far earlier than had been thought. The still-liquid and unclotted blood noted by Harriet when she found the body had been the result of Alexis's haemophilia. Weldon and his co-conspirators are undone by their unsuccessful attempts to reshuffle their alibis to match the new information about the time of death.
Even as Wimsey and Harriet solve the case, Mrs Weldon has already moved on to another gigolo at the hotel, a sympathetic French dancer named Antoine.
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My Thoughts: |
I had taken a break from Lord Peter Wimsey after the last book dealt with train schedules in excruciating detail. I do mean excruciating. I read that last August and I figured 5'ish months was probably a good enough of a break, so I dived into this book with fresh vim and vigor.
Only to have all that vim and vigor squashed like so much many sta-puff marshmallows as Lord Peter Wimsey and his beloved Harriet discuss every single way that 2-3 people could get to a specific rock on the coast in time to cut someone's throat at 2pm, using a combination of horses, walking, and possibly bicycles and automobiles. After I skipped pages and pages and had just come up for air, thinking that maybe I had survived it just fine, then the author takes me down a path of code breaking. Once again, in excruciating detail.
OH. MY. GOODNESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have come to the following conclusions, based on my own keen deductive skills.
Mystery readers are not a homogeneous group
Some mystery readers just want to piggyback on the overall story
Some mystery readers want to solve the mystery themselves
Some mystery readers want to solve the mystery BEFORE the detective in the story does
Some mystery readers are dolts who the author panders too, thus making every other mystery reader suffer agonies, probably excruciating agonies
While I have zero issues with the overall plots and characters (I rather like them in fact), I simply can't stand the level of detail that is given. I don't want to solve the mystery. I suspect that Sayers is writing her stories for the Other Kind of mystery readers. I'm going to read one more Wimsey novel and see how it pans out. Should the exacting details continue, I'll be done with her.
One funny thing that happened while reading this was that I had misread the title as Have His Carcass, which made total sense as Harriet finds a dead body. Then partway through I realized it was Carcase and was waiting for an automobile to get involved. When it didn't show up, I went and did a little Grammar Investigating. Turns out “carcase” is an alternate form of “carcass”. I didn't do any more digging so I'm not sure if its an American English vs Kings English thing, or an Old vs New spelling thing. Do you know?
★★★☆☆
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