Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You cannot shame the shameless.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

He really is that stupid.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

You are here: Home / Medium Cool / Medium Cool – Agatha Christie & Dorothy Sayers, Part V

Medium Cool – Agatha Christie & Dorothy Sayers, Part V

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Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in.  We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.

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Agatha Christie & Dorothy Sayers, Part V

by Subaru Diane

Hi, everybody! Many thanks for returning for our fifth Medium Cool discussion of mystery writers Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, and the rapidly-changing England that was the setting for most of their fiction.

In Britain, as elsewhere, the 20th century saw countless new inventions and technologies. These included labor-saving devices (a boon to housewives in the face of a diminished servant class) as well as improvements in transportation and communications.

To sell these, along with a vast array of consumer goods, a new profession — advertising — emerged. Famously, Sayers supported herself through most of the 1920s by working as a copywriter for S. H. Benson Ltd, the legendary advertising agency. She used her experiences there when she wrote Murder Must Advertise, which is, among other things, a brilliant and very funny excoriation of rampant consumerism.

One of the best-loved advertising jingles written by DLS during her years at Benson’s.

Both Sayers and Christie frequently made reference to telephones, radio (wireless), trains, planes, and automobiles. Lord Peter Wimsey flies across the Atlantic in Clouds of Witness, a perilous undertaking at the time. Hercule Poirot never leaves the Orient Express to solve the baffling murder on that great train. And solutions to many short story mysteries, by AC and DLS alike, rely on knowledge of such things as telephone extensions and radio frequencies.

Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) solving the Murder on the Orient Express (1974) without leaving the train.

What are some other examples of the way Christie and Sayers used new (or newly accessible) technologies and the selling of them — as murder weapons, clues, and settings?

Reader Interactions

171Comments

  1. 1.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Looking forward, as always, to the discussion. I’ve learned so much and gained so many insights from all of you!

  5. 5.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Sayers herself didn’t much care for Murder Must Advertise, but it’s one of my personal top three in her canon.

  8. 8.

    Annie

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    I just re-read Murder Must Advertise and was reminded of how good it was and how much I enjoyed it.  (The Pym’s staff being united in hatred of the client reminds me of a lot of law firms I’ve worked in.)  Any idea of what Sayers thought was wrong with it?

  12. 12.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Wolvesvalley:

    Sayers was beautifully cynical about the role advertising and marketing played. There’s a wonderful rant between Ingleby and Bredon about the morality of their profession:

    “I think this is an awfully immoral job of ours. I do, really. Think how we spoil the digestions of the public.”
    “Ah, yes—but think how earnestly we strive to put them right again. We undermine ’em with one hand and build ’em with the other. The vitamins we destroy in the canning, we restore in Revito; the roughage we remove from Peabody’s Piper Parritch we make up into a package and market as Bunbury’s Breakfast Bran; the stomachs we ruin with Pompayne, we re-line with Peplets to aid digestion. And by forcing the damn-fool public to pay twice over—once to have its food emasculated and once to have the vitality put back again, we keep the wheels of commerce turning and give employment to thousands—including you and me.”

  13. 13.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @WaterGirl:

    Yes. There’s a major component to the story that deals with hard drugs and the people who both use them and distribute them. DLS didn’t know much about the drug trade and felt she had insufficiently researched it and wrote the book in too much of a hurry. She felt the book didn’t live up to her exacting scholarly standards.

  15. 15.

    Ken

    Christie made extensive use of her knowledge of poisons, and of the relatively-new chemical methods for detecting their presence during a post-mortem, in several of her stories. An example is “The Lernean Hydra” where arsenic is found in an exhumed body.  Sayers also used the chemical detection of arsenic, in a different way, in Strong Poison.

  17. 17.

    Wolvesvalley

    In The Mind of the Maker, Sayers made a disparaging comment about  MMA, saving that she had tried to contrast two artificial worlds: the advertising world and the world of post-war Bright Young Things. She felt that it was unbalanced because she was much more familiar with the advertising world. But she also said it was an example of how an intelligent reader can reveal a work to its author,  for when she made that complaint to a friend who had read it,  the friend said, “and Peter Wimsey,  who represents reality,  never appears in either world except in disguise.” Sayers said she had never realized that before.

  18. 18.

    Annie

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    Thank you!  I can see that, but I also felt like that part of the plot worked quite well as it was.

    Also, IIRC somebody asked what finally happened to Dian de Momerie — she was killed off by the drug gang as a way of framing Bredon.  It’s at the start of Chapter 19 of Murder Must Advertise.

  20. 20.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Ken:

    I have a book (unfortunately, not at hand!) that goes through every murder method Christie used and as you would expect, her greatly preferred method is poison ☠️

  21. 21.

    kalakal

    Not so much new technology but increased scientific knowledge. Sayers in Have his Carcass is able to have a puzzle based on a character being haemophiliac. At the time the disease  was only really known to those with it and the medical profession. I think Christie has Poirot using Mendelian Genetics to help solve a crime ( inherited eye colour)

    Both were very fond of using an injected air embolism as an undetectable means of murder

  27. 27.

    kalakal

    One that baffled me was in Five Red Herrings.

    * ***Warning Potential Spoiler***

    It was how did a character get from A to B on a bicycle in a certain time. There was one obvious answer but it required a car driver to be practically blind. Then I realised cars at that time didn’t have rear view mirrors

  28. 28.

    H.E.Wolf

    The murderer in Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club kills his victim because he wants to fund his own research into “glands” – a faddish interest in the endocrine(?) system as a cure-all. He even does a TED Talk of sorts, about 2/3 of the way through the novel! (The “glands” fad appears in a Sherlock Holmes story, too – monkey-gland extract as a purported youth serum – so I’m not sure it qualifies as new technology.)

    In Have His Carcase, a vital document that has been obscured by contact with blood and prolonged immersion in water is rendered readable by lab techs who use cutting-edge technology (“screens” and “photography”, per my fallible memory).

    The murderer in Busman’s Honeymoon takes fatal advantage of his victim’s regular listening to the wireless. (Fatal both to victim and murderer).

  29. 29.

    Steeplejack

    @Annie:

    I guess I can’t call for a spoiler alert after 70-odd years, but maybe remember that there are people who haven’t read the book (or other books that might come under discussion) who might yet do so.

    I brought up Dian de Momerie in an earlier thread, not to ask what happened to her but to say that I was interested to see what would happen to her. Fortunately I finished the book a week or two ago.

  31. 31.

    J

    Very much enjoying these discussions of Christie and Sayers, the obvious two great women detective novelists of the golden age with whom to begin, but if interest remains high, we could move on to Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Josephine Tey!

  34. 34.

    Ken

    @kalakal: Christie also uses some rather bogus genetics in some stories. In “The Cretan Bull”, Poirot deduces a man’s parentage from a physical habit (“thrusting out his face and bringing down his brows”) which would be learned behavior, not genetic.

    I think she does the same in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, though in that case there are also other, heritable characteristics such as height and hair color.

  35. 35.

    Annie

    In Death in the Clouds, a passenger on the same plane with Hercule Poirot is murdered during a flight from Paris to London.  Haven’t read it in a while so I don’t recall the murder method.  As I recall all of the passengers were allowed to leave the plane before the murder was discovered, thus losing a perfect opportunity for a kind of “locked-room” mystery.

  36. 36.

    H.E.Wolf

    One of Sayers’ short stories (“Absolutely Elsewhere”) plays with the concept of relativity in the course of solving a “locked-room”-style murder… not terribly compellingly, in my opinion, but that’s the fault of my pedestrian mind, not the author’s skill.

  38. 38.

    H.E.Wolf

    @J:”if interest remains high, we could move on to Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Josephine Tey!”

     Adding my vote for Josephine Tey.

  39. 39.

    Ken

    @Steeplejack: I guess I can’t call for a spoiler alert after 70-odd years

    I used to think that, but this XKCD reminded me that every day there are thousands of people who find out about the Orient Express for the first time.

  40. 40.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @kalakal:

    Similarly in Sayers’ one non-Wimsey mystery novel, The Documents in the Case, which uses a polariscope (I think it’s called — anyhow, polarised light) to determine whether a deadly mushroom dish was poisoned naturally or via a synthetic substance.

  42. 42.

    Steeplejack

    I’m not thinking of much on the technology front, except for niblets of nomenclature. Sayers has people use the ’phone (short for telephone, of course) instead of just the phone. And I can’t remember if she used phone as a verb. There are other places where she uses (what appear to be) bygone brand names as synonyms for the generic product (à la Kleenex for tisssue). That is part of the march of technology.

  43. 43.

    H.E.Wolf

    @Ken:”every day there are thousands of people who find out about the Orient Express for the first time.”​

     A couple of decades ago, a delightful neighbor of ours told us that she yearned to make a trip on the Orient Express, but decided against it after seeing the price of a ticket: “… and that was before considering the cost of the gowns and jewels.” :-)

  46. 46.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @H.E.Wolf:

    We will not dwell on the advanced age I was at, when I learned the correct pronunciation of the relevant definition of “row”.

    OW!!

  47. 47.

    kalakal

    One thing I found interesting in the Poirot series with David Suchet was the use of architecture. Nearly always the “Old” money characters live in Manor houses or picturesque cottages whereas the modern “New” money types all have stunning Art Deco houses. Poirot himself has an Art Deco apartment

  49. 49.

    H.E.Wolf

    @Steeplejack: ​
     Apologies! I didn’t stop to think about spoilers when responding to SiubhanDuinne’s request for “weapons, clues, and settings”.

  50. 50.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @H.E.Wolf:

    @J:

    Been a while since I read either Allingham or Marsh, but I reread my way straight through Tey’s eight mysteries approximately every eighteen months. Would love to do these other Golden Age + writers.

  51. 51.

    Steeplejack

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    Is it worthwhile to delve into the Wimsey short stories? I have finished all of the novels and feel pleasantly sated, but I could perhaps be tempted. Amazon is pushing Lord Peter Views the Body on me, but I am a bit ambivalent—especially after reading Harriet Vane’s comment(s) about churning out potboiler stories for cash!  (Okay, she did buy Peter a John Donne signature with some of the money.)

  53. 53.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @kalakal:

    Poirot, of course, wants everything symmetrical and cubular. He has been known to regret that hens do not lay square eggs.

    Saw a photo online recently of a bunch of cube-shaped watermelons, and thought how much Poirot would have admired them. Efficient use of space, stackable watermelons :-)

  55. 55.

    Steeplejack

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    Margery Allingham is the lightweight of the group; that’s my memory after a gap of 30-40 years. It is odd that I remember Ngaio Marsh as being “better” but can remember almost nothing about any of her books. So they both might be worth rereading.

    I am definitely interested in Josephine Tey. I don’t think I have read any of her books.

  56. 56.

    JoyceH

    @SiubhanDuinne: ​
     

    There’s a major component to the story that deals with hard drugs and the people who both use them and distribute them.

    What strikes me about both Sayers and Christie is that illegal drugs generally and cocaine in particular is very much an issue for the UPPER class. Someone upthread mentioned Death In The Clouds – the Viscountess (former actress) in that had a cocaine habit. Had nothing to do with the solution to the mystery, was just Local Color. Heyer’s mysteries also featured cocaine as an upper class vice.

    Why was this? Did the lower classes not use illegal drugs, or was it just not interesting enough to write about? The cocaine users and dealers in the mysteries always seemed so glamorous!

  58. 58.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @H.E.Wolf:

    I said to a friend only a day or two ago that mispronouncing words is probably the sign of an avid reader. I was well into my 20s before I learned that Beefeater is accented on the first syllable, not the second. I was making up a story in my head that the Yeomen of the Guard held off an invasion of stinging insects, hence “Bee Defeaters” — BeeFEATers.

  60. 60.

    Steeplejack

    @zhena gogolia:

    Yes, the ad agency side had a match with the team from one of their big clients. Wimsey was torn between wanting to do well for his side and not outing himself as a former star batsman at Oxford.

  62. 62.

    Miss Bianca

    @SiubhanDuinne: MMA ties for first in my book, along with Gaudy Night. I re-read all the Lord Peters fairly frequently, but those are absolutely the ones I tend to revisit the most.

    (Followed in frequency by Strong Poison and The Nine Tailors, if anyone’s keeping score.)

    And how lovely to have finally made the Sayers/Christie “Medium Cool” in real time! I went back and read all the previous installments when I returned from my Lenten break.

  63. 63.

    Annie

    @Steeplejack:

    I enjoyed them.  There’s a fun one called The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head in which Lord Peter’s nephew plays a major role.

  64. 64.

    JoyceH

    @Steeplejack:

    I am definitely interested in Josephine Tey. I don’t think I have read any of her books.

    I read Tey years (ulp – decades) ago, and remember enjoying them. The main one that I recall, though, is The Daughter of Time. In this one, her recurring sleuth character is hospitalized with broken bones and turns his detecting abilities to the question of the ‘princes in the Tower’.

  65. 65.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @JoyceH:

    Yeah, that’s a really good observation and I don’t know the answer (about the lower classes). Definitely cocaine was the drug of choice for the so-called “Bright Young Things.” See also Christie’s Peril at End House for another look at hard drug use among the rich and bored.

  66. 66.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @J: I adore Josephine Tey and her writing, but the actual mysteries aren’t all that great in most of the books. Character description, and creation of a world are great but don’t read her expecting Agatha Christie-like murder solutions.

    I adore Agatha Christie also, and have never read a DLS book. Which book does the BJ hive mind recommend if I’m only  going to read one? Or conversely, which book will turn me into a DLS fan so I go on to read others?

  69. 69.

    JoyceH

    @A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):

    My feeling is that it’s a feature of the Golden Age mystery writers that the mysteries are rather unrealistic and implausible – I read them for the characters and sense of scene/time. Too often the actual mysteries feature an Ingenious Device or a Crafty Alibi.

  70. 70.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @JoyceH: That’s the one that started me on both Tey, and my fascination with British history. I am looking forward to seeing the movie The Lost King.

  72. 72.

    H.E.Wolf

    @SiubhanDuinne:”I used to skip over the cricket match, but I’ve learned to love it (even if I don’t understand it).”​
     It had the word “smote” in it; I was smitten.

  73. 73.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Steeplejack:

    I think you’d like Tey. Her prose rivals Sayers when they’re both top of their form, and as a non-binary person herself, she occasionally addressed issues we might call LGBTQI-adjacent. Also religious cults, identity theft, and the evil that can lurk in the most innocent young people.

  75. 75.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @JoyceH: I hear you, but the improbabilities in a Christie plot are all about the plot. Tey, however, just doesn’t have a lot of detail in the plot. She’s much more interested in the people as characters, and their world.

  77. 77.

    LiminalOwl

    @H.E.Wolf: My friend who makes buttons has one to the effect that people who mispronounce words tend to be avid readers who have never encountered the words outside of books. (She words it better than that.  I can’t remember,)

  78. 78.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Annie:

    It’s such fun to meet young Gerald (the Viscount Saint George) as a little boy in the short story, and then years later in Gaudy Night as an irresponsible (though charming) 20-year-old Oxford undergraduate.

  79. 79.

    M31

    a good book about poison science in the early years of the 20th C is “The Poisoner’s Handbook” by Deborah Blum, which is about the evolution of the medical examiner’s office in NYC from a useless sinecure (drunk buddies of the mayor were previous holders) into a real scientific office, and the development of ways to detect poisons

    it’s very interesting and really well-written book

  80. 80.

    J

    @A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Glad to see there is so much interest in Josephine Tey, a great favorite of mine. Not sure what the other enthusiasts contributing here will say, but the novel presently under discussion, Murder Must Advertise would be a great place to begin DLS. Alternatively, I’d recommend Strong Poison, because, apart from being a terrific read, it introduces Harriet Vane.

    Participants in this thread may enjoy Martin Edwards’ book The Golden Age of Murder: the Mystery of the Writers who invented the Modern Detective Story (2015).

  81. 81.

    JoyceH

    @Annie:

    I think Unnatural Death would be a good starter. It also introduces Miss Climpson.

    A good choice. Another nominee would be Clouds of Witness – introduces the reader to Peter’s whole family all at once. And the Unpleasantness At The Bellona Club introduces Peter’s London environs, the stuffy upper class clubs and fine dining, etc. But I’d say to read one or two of those before Strong Poison, to get a sense of Peter Before Harriet.

  83. 83.

    LiminalOwl

    Definitely another vote for Josephine Tey. I’ve only read a few Allingham mysteries and, alas, none by Marsh though I keep meaning to.

    Tangent from the Tey: The first I read was The Daughter of Time. To anyone else who loves that book, I recommend the recent film The Lost King, which my spouse and I watched with great enjoyment last week.

  84. 84.

    Steeplejack

    As I said above, I have finished reading all of Sayers’s Wimsey novels. I think at the last “Medium Cool” I was in the middle of Murder Must Advertise. That turned out to be one of my favorites, along with Gaudy Night and, um—hard to pick a third at this close juncture—probably The Nine Tailors. The latter is the darkest of the novels, what with the murder and its entwined branches, along with the entire community being threatened by a natural disaster.

    The first two succeed almost in spite of being mysteries. They are that, of course, but they’re also closely observed comedies of manners. All of the people at the advertising agency are colorful and well drawn, and Gaudy Night is like reading a slightly more sinister version of Barbara Pym (a sadly underrated writer). It’s almost not a Peter Wimsey novel, since it’s told from Harriet Vane’s perspective and he makes a somewhat late entrance on stage.

    Busman’s Honeymoon was a nice coda, mostly for the apotheosis of Peter and Harriet’s relationship and the filled-in details on various characters’ backgrounds. I particularly liked the excerpts from the Dowager Duchess’s journal and her full acceptance of Harriet (and vice versa).

    I wonder if Sayers ever felt constrained by her chosen genre. She dropped a lot of the “timetable murder” mechanisms (thanks for that phrase, S.D.) as she went on, but she never fully stepped out of the genre. Gaudy Night comes close, for slightly spoilerish reasons.

  86. 86.

    Annie

    @JoyceH:

    Definitely.  Peter’s relationship with Harriet makes a lot more sense, and has much more emotional zing, if you meet him on his own first.  I discovered the books through the Ian Carmichael Wimsey series in the 1970s and they never did the Harriet Vane books.

  87. 87.

    LiminalOwl

    Definitely another vote for Josephine Tey. I’ve only read a few Allingham mysteries and, alas, none by Marsh though I keep meaning to.

    Also seconding the adoration of Murder Must Advertise and Gaudy Night. Siubhan Duinne, did you name the third favorite?

    Tangent from the Tey: The first I read was The Daughter of Time. To anyone else who loves that book, I recommend the recent film The Lost King, which my spouse and I watched with great enjoyment last week.

  88. 88.

    karen marie

    I was so put off by the antisemitism and racism in Sayers’ first book, I can’t bring myself to read any others.

    Did her attitude change at some point or did it just become a nonissue because she simply ignored non-Christians and non-whites?

  89. 89.

    Steeplejack

    @Annie:

    Lord Peter’s nephew—what an ass! He deserved a kick in the balls, despite his rakish good looks and charming demeanor.

  90. 90.

    Miss Bianca

    @Steeplejack: I dunno…I don’t think I’d ever read any Margery Allingham before, till someone on of these previous Sayers/Christie threads mentioned one called The Tiger in the Smoke – maybe it was even you! – which I have just read and found extremely well-written, just from a technical POV, and also indulging in some of the finer character work and atmospheric description that I cherish in Sayers. (I’m not sure that I would say “characterization” was one of Christie’s stronger suits, btw – but man, could she plot a story.)

    All that to say, I wouldn’t call her a lightweight, just based on this one book.

  91. 91.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @J:

    Ive always felt rather sorry for the readers of the time who read the books as they were published and had to wait years to find out what happened with Peter and Harriet. I mean, we can go from Strong Poison to Have His Carcase to Gaudy Night to Busman’s Honeymoon and just binge on them. If we care to, we can continue with the four books by Jill Paton Walsh.

  92. 92.

    Splitting Image

    I think that one of the things which informed Christie’s work was her interest in archeology, which was then still relatively new. The excavations at Troy and Knossos happened in the late nineteenth century, and Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened in the 1920s, when Christie was just hitting her stride. Many of Christie’s books have an element of uncovering the long-buried past, such as Elephants Can Remember and Sleeping Murder. Often the solution to the immediate problem at hand is revealed by investigating long-ago crimes, such as Cards on the Table and Murder on the Orient Express. Christie actually worked on excavations herself. Murder in Mesopotamia takes place on an archeological dig.

    Another thing that interested Christie was the science of profiling criminals. At least one of her novels is built around the idea that different types of people are more likely to commit different kinds of crimes, and the solution is derived from the fact that the main suspect in a murder case is the wrong type of person to have committed that particular crime, not that he was not on the scene to have done it.

  93. 93.

    Annie

    @Splitting Image:

    This is a very big part of the Miss Marple stories — she’s always figuring out who did it because they remind her of somebody in St. Mary Mead who did something similar, or behaved in a similar way.

  94. 94.

    Steeplejack

    @JoyceH:

    I know the loglines for her big novels*, and they have always interested me, but none of them ever made it from the TBR (“to be read”) stack to the ADR (“actually did read”) stack. I look forward to them.

    * The others that I know are The Singing Sands and Miss Pym Disposes.

  96. 96.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Annie:

    Carmichael never did any of the Vane books, but the first three of them were adapted and starred Edward Petherbridge (who is perfect as the older, more thoughtful Wimsey) and the utterly brilliant Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane. They are wonderful together. Have His Carcase is, IMHO, the best of the lot, and Strong Poison is also very well done. Unfortunately, the TV adaptation of Gaudy Night is a hot mess and misses all the main themes and plot points of the book. The Oxford setting is pretty, though.

  99. 99.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @JoyceH: Yes! When I first read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and there was a side issue of heroin sniffing, I was amazed, since in my 50s childhood heroin users were the dregs of society, unless they were jazz musicians.

  100. 100.

    kalakal

     

    @Miss Bianca:

    someone on of these previous Sayers/Christie threads mentioned one called The Tiger in the Smoke 

    I think that was moi, it’s a great book, and I do remember recommending it

  105. 105.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @J: Did you ever figure out exactly how the murder was done in Brat Farrar? It angered me she never explained and I wasn’t sure. Christie always did those great explanatory speeches by the sleuth in the last chapter.

  107. 107.

    Steeplejack

    @Miss Bianca:

    Lightweight of that foursome, in relative terms. Albert Campion was almost a caricature in the early going—some thought that he was an actual caricature of Peter Wimsey—and those novels can be tough sledding. The Tiger in the Smoke is from the early ’50s, when both Campion and Allingham had improved a lot.

  109. 109.

    Steeplejack

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    I’ve always felt rather sorry for the readers of the time who read the books as they were published and had to wait years to find out what happened with Peter and Harriet.

    LOL. I was thinking exactly that as I binge-read my way through the series.

    ETA: What’s your opinion of the Jill Paton Walsh books? I don’t usually like “someone takes over the franchise” novels.

  110. 110.

    Elizabelle

    @Baud: I know.  She would be here if she could.

    I shall read these Dorothy Sayers books in her honor, over the next year.  Confess I have not finished a one, yet.

  112. 112.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Baud:

    It’s so worrying when people just up and disappear. We’ve had a few over the years, and this jackal community can be so tight that it really does feel like losing a family member or close friend. 😢

  113. 113.

    Steeplejack

    @Baud:

    He’s not a “Medium Cool” guy, but I was wondering about Martin the other day. Haven’t seen him in a long time.

  116. 116.

    PaulB

    I don’t remember much in Christie that used technology, particularly. The technique for reading the burned paper in Murder On the Orient Express was particularly ingenious, and was one of the more effective bits in the first movie, but that’s about all that I can recall.

    I seem to recall one of Sayers’ stories that depended on the use of a telephone for an alibi, although the details are currently eluding me. Something about someone placing a call from the manor and having the call picked up in a flat in London, in order to establish that the gentleman being called could not have committed the crime. The alibi, of course, did not hold.

  117. 117.

    Baud

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    I can’t complain because I haven’t set up a contingency alert system. I’ve said before that people should assume I’m dead or in prison if they haven’t heard from me in six months.

     

    @Steeplejack:

    Martin announced he was taking a break.

  118. 118.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Steeplejack:

    I have really valued your comments as a first-time reader of Sayers. Curious if you tried any of the short stories as well as the novels, and if you have any interest in reading the Jill Paton Walsh continuations.

  119. 119.

    Annie

    @Steeplejack:

    that’s how I feel about Ngaio Marsh — a weak imitation of Lord Peter.  And speaking of not doing research I’d be surprised if Marsh ever even met a police detective.  The best of her books are the ones set in the theater — I love Night at the Vulcan but Alleyn does not even appear til about halfway through the book.

  121. 121.

    Elizabelle

    @Miss Bianca: Well, glad to have you back.  Do wonder if giving up BJuice fits in the giving up a vice, or giving up a pleasure department.  An argument can be made for each.

  122. 122.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @PaulB:

    Yes, that’s Absolutely Elsewhere. It’s included in the short story collection In the Teeth of the Evidence.

    ETA: H.E.Wolf mentioned it up around comment #36.

  123. 123.

    Steeplejack

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    I have often thought of suggesting that longtime commenters have on hand some sort of “in the event of my demise” notice and someone entrusted to post it here. And if one decides to leave permanently, some sort of notice would probably also be appreciated. I seem to remember a good bit of turmoil around Mnemosyne’s sudden departure.

  124. 124.

    Steeplejack

    @Baud:

    Okay, thanks, I didn’t see that. Did he give a reason?

    ETA: “Contingency alert system” is good!

  125. 125.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Steeplejack:

    And if one decides to leave permanently, some sort of notice would probably also be appreciated.

    A pithy “GBCW” just doesn’t do it any more?

  126. 126.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @PaulB: Well, there was the dictaphone in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

    I’ve just reread a couple of her books on Kindle, and am enjoying looking up unfamiliar slang words in the dictionary. They are usually described as”outdated”.

  129. 129.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Steeplejack:

    True, but if he were otherwise, Harriet might have missed out on some important insights vis-à-vis her relationship with Wimsey.

    What did you think of the sonnet episode?

  130. 130.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Steeplejack: There was an argument over the latest Harry Potter game.  He was insisting that he had played it with his  daughter and it was unobjectionable.  Other people strongly disagreed on transphobic and antisemitic grounds (among other things).  It became a bit heated and Martin was accused of cis-splaining.  He left, saying he would be back in a few weeks.

  132. 132.

    PaulB

    @A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):  Well, there was the dictaphone in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

    Good point. I’ve also just thought of a story in the Mr. Quin series where a glass object was shattered by a sound.

    And another story where a woman believed her dead husband was communicating to her from beyond the grave through her wireless [radio]. Imagine: technology being used to spoof someone else’s identity. What will they think of next?

  133. 133.

    Steeplejack

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    The sonnet episode was quite good, although at one point I feared that it was teetering on the edge of sentimentality. But crisis averted!

  134. 134.

    Steeplejack

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Thanks for the back-story. I consider myself a pretty close reader of this blog (sometimes I think way too much!), and it’s amazing the amount of stuff I still manage to miss.

  135. 135.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @Steeplejack: You were asking for Christie recommendations in the last episode and I listed a few of my favorite books.  It occurred to me later that an easy way to get the flavor of  Poirot and Miss Marple was through her short stories.  The Tuesday Club Murders for Marple, and several collections for Poirot, starting with Poirot Investigates.

  136. 136.

    Shana

    @H.E.Wolf: I still cringe at my book report pronunciation of butte during high school English class while discussing Michener’s Centennial.

  137. 137.

    Suzanne

    @Steeplejack: I probably read 20% of the threads (damn job). I often feel like I miss the drama. I miss Martin, too. He’s one of my favorite commenters here.

  142. 142.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Steeplejack:

    So sorry, I missed those totally! I think the shorts are a lot of fun, though pretty insubstantial and in a couple of cases just baffling. They’re not going to provide any great insights into Peter’s character but they’re harmless and amusing. (And some of her stand-alone horror short stories, non-Wimsey, are chilling.)  Thd Montague Egg short stories display even more of her advertising copywriting skills.

    Jill Paton Walsh? The first two (Thrones Dominations and A Presumption of Death) are not bad, but clearly not DLS. In fact, Presumption is quite enjoyable, The Attenbury Emeralds is meh, and The Late Scholar is dreadful. IN MY OPINION. I do know people who think they’re wonderful.

  143. 143.

    Annie

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    I wouldn’t say the Paton Walsh books were wonderful, but they are better than nothing.  And there are nice glimpses of Peter and Harriet’s family.

  144. 144.

    Steeplejack

    @A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):

    Thanks! I will add them to the list that I made after the last “Medium Cool.” I arranged your suggestions with other people’s in chronological order (of publication) and made sure to include the first appearances of Poirot and Miss Marple. So I am about to start reading The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Slightly irritated because the formatting on the cheapo Kindle edition I bought from Amazon sucks bad.

  145. 145.

    SiubhanDuinne

    For anyone who’s still around, I thought next time (two weeks from tonight) we can do a kind of catch-all discussion. What haven’t we talked about yet? What, a century on, are the legacies of AC and DLS? We can also get more deeply into things like the radio, TV, and film adaptations; Christie’s The Mousetrap and her “straight” fiction (under the Mary Westmacott name); Sayers’ essays and her own magnum opus, the translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy; and a general summing-up.

    I’m WIDE OPEN to your suggestions. This thread is getting a little tired, but if you have other things you’d like to discuss in our next Medium Cool, I’ll come back and check the comments.

    THANKS, everybody!

  146. 146.

    Steeplejack

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    Thanks. Think I’ll give Jill Paton Walsh a miss for now. Ditto for the short stories, unless I get a hankering down the road. But for now I’ve got all of  Christie before me, not to mention Josephine Tey.

  148. 148.

    Andrya

    @karen marie:   I’m puzzled.  I’m assuming you are referring to “Whose Body?”.  Sayers shows, in dialog, the casual anti-Semitism of 1920s British (and American) society- but does not endorse it.  Her portrayal of the Jewish family of the murder victim, and the victim himself, is 100% positive.  The murderer is an upper-class Brit who is resentful that his love interest rejected him for the Jewish guy- and he is presented as seriously twisted.  One sees EXACTLY why the lady chose the Jewish guy over the twisted upper class doctor.

    Racism?  I don’t remember any POC in “Whose Body?”.  AFAIR, the only Sayers novel with a non-white character is “Unnatural Death”, in which the black protestant pastor, the Rev. Hallelujah  Dawson, is portrayed in a totally positive way.  On top of that, the psychopathic murderess attempts to frame Rev. Dawson for her murders, attempting to exploit racist tropes that had salience at the time: “brutal black man kidnaps innocent young white woman!”  It turns out that the black guy is entirely innocent and the “innocent young white woman” has committed three murders and two attempted murders by that point.

  149. 149.

    PaulB

    Didn’t Christie actually have sort of WMD in The Big Four? Of course, that novel was a real departure for her, and was not one of her better books.

    I don’t know if it warrants any discussion, but I found it interesting that Christie used fantasy elements in a few of her stories. The Quin stories, in particular, cross the line between fantasy and mystery, but she had a few others, as well.

  150. 150.

    Andrya

    A personal note about “Guinness is good for you”.  In 1948 (only a few decades after Dorothy Sayers’ advertising career) my mother miscarried her first pregnancy.  In 1949 she was pregnant with me.  She told her doctor “I really don’t want another miscarriage, what should I do?”  Her doctor recommended one bottle of Guinness stout each week as a miscarriage preventer!  My parents were quite poor at the time (the college my father taught at was going broke and payed irregularly) but they managed to come up with a weekly bottle of Guinness to usher me into the world.  I have no idea why anyone could possibly have thought this was medically effective…

  152. 152.

    Miss Bianca

    @Andrya:

    I have no idea why anyone could possibly have thought this was medically effective…

    Well, it worked, didn’t it?//

  157. 157.

    Elizabelle

    I would love if we would revisit this series in about six months.  For the stragglers.  (OK, moi.)

  159. 159.

    LiminalOwl

    @SiubhanDuinne: Thanks so much for leading the discussion!

    As I mentioned a while back, I have some interest in DLS’ essays.  Otherwise, whatever others here choose is certain to be interesting.

  160. 160.

    Andrya

    @Miss Bianca:   @Steeplejack:   @Mr. Bemused Senior:   I’m totally laughing, but there’s a logical fallacy here.

    “The sun will only rise tomorrow if I sacrifice a chicken to the sun god.  I sacrificed a chicken and the sun rose.  Therefore, the rising of the sun depends on the sacrifice of a chicken.”

    @kalakal: Thanks!  I had always thought this was just one totally out of touch doctor.  (My mother had also told me her doctor was elderly at the time- a doctor who was elderly in 1949 might have qualified c. 1910.)  I had not realized there was a social context for this.

  165. 165.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @Andrya: yes, fun. A Sufi story:

    …. there’s the incident of Nasruddin throwing handfuls of crumbs around his house. “What are you doing?” someone asked him. “Keeping the tigers away.” “But there are no tigers in these parts,” protested the someone. “That’s right. Effective, isn’t it?” answered Nasruddin.

  166. 166.

    AlaskaReader

    @LiminalOwl: I’m an avid reader, but I don’t imagine mispronunciations from reading would be any more prevalent than mispronunciations picked up from auditory sources.

    Mispronunciation can often become a dialectic norm and/or an integral part of a cultured ‘accent’.

  168. 168.

    karen marie

    @Andrya: To be fair, I didn’t stick around for the ending – life is too short.  It didn’t strike me as “showing” or that the attitude was restricted to the ultimate murderer.

  169. 169.

    Andrya

    @karen marie:  Please don’t think that I am minimizing or excusing the anti-Semitism that was pervasive in the US and the UK prior to World War II.  If there was one person whom I would take as a personal hero, it would have been Franklin D. Roosevelt- except that he turned back the ship St. Louis, sending hundreds of European Jews to their deaths in the holocaust.  I recently  considered hanging a photo of FDR in my living room- then I thought about the St. Louis, and I just couldn’t do it.

    I will never condone or justify anti-Semitism, anytime, anywhere.

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