I remember finding out about the upgrading of BA to MA with regard to a clerical gentleman (?) in our first Ofsted team, who specialised in reducing women to tears. The team had not complied with the requirement to give the school CVs. Our caretaker found out he was a clergyman (he asked about the small cross in his lapel) and I went off to the library to read him up in Crockfords. He had no teacher training or experience, and an Oxford MA. It was somewhat satisfying to think he had done no work for his higher degree.
I must find a copy of the book - I heard it the other year on the radio. It's a long time since I read it.
I believe the As My Wimsey Takes Me podcast had gotten up to Have His Carcase before going on hiatus. I am really looking forward to their return and hope they don't give up on it.
...actually, having read it, I seem to be innocent of that crime, at least. @BrendaClough (ooh, she did make it to the new Ship) was quite vocal which, as a novellist herself, and with a background wildy alien to anything Sayers would have known, kept the pot boiling nicely.
I’ve just started reading it again, with an eye to business this time, and really appreciate the care and attention given to setting up the main characters.
@BrendaClough did make it to the New Ship IIRC, but disembarked some while ago IIRC.
I have to confess that I didn't particularly enjoy Gaudy Night, for what reason I cannot say (not enough Blood, perhaps? ).
My favourite Wimsey novel is undoubtedly The Nine Tailors, and I shall now hie me back to Ye Olde Auncient Threade to see if I had anything useful to say. Probably not, but hey...
/tangentially, I do like Sayers' short stories, especially those featuring the commercial traveller, Montague Egg/
, but you're welcome to join in on the discussion of GN even if it wasn't a favourite -- after all, book discussions are more interesting when we have a variety of opinions.
(text hidden to conceal an incredibly vague spoiler for NT).
@BrendaClough did make it to the New Ship IIRC, but disembarked some while ago IIRC.
I've just realized she's in the Wimsey Facebook group that I often read and occasionally post in, which is why I have the vague impression of her still being around -- she is, just not in the same place.
There are probably several, but the one I'm in is called The Lord Peter Wimsey Appreciation Society, which is a fairly active and pleasant group for discussion of all thigns LPW-related. There's also a Dorothy L. Sayers society group which I find good as well. Facebook groups are a mixed bag but both of these seem to promote fun, informative, and civil discussion.
There are Facebook discussion groups for just about any moderately-popular author and book series you can think of ... but some are better than others. I'm in a couple of Sayers groups and couple of Dorothy Dunnett groups and I've found the level of discussion excellent in both.
/tangentially, I do like Sayers' short stories, especially those featuring the commercial traveller, Montague Egg/
I like Monty also. He is not well-educated and he is completely satisfied with his job, which many people would look down on. However he is at least as thoughtful and observant as most highly-educated people.
Having read through the Nine Tailors thread, can I restart the Wimsey v Wooster discussion?
Of course, Sayers and Wodehouse's books are very different, but they're broadly set in the same world - London's clubland between the wars. And what I take from this is that Wimsey is maybe half a generation older than Wooster: Wimsey and his contemporaries fought in the war and in various ways are trying to recover from it, while Wooster and his chums are almost manic in their efforts to not be depressed by what had happened.
Ok, both series are fiction, which means that everything is rather heightened compared to real life, but I do wonder if they tell us something useful about how things were for the upper classes in interwar London.
It's such an interesting comparison. I think for most of Whose Body, a reader might feel that Lord Peter is a more intelligent Bertie Wooster with talent for detection -- and that impression holds right up until his breakdown near the end, when it becomes apparent both that Peter (unlike Bertie, as @Fawkes Cat points out) is a war veteran, and also that we are in the hands of an author who is writing, even at this very early stage in the series, not a light comedy like Wodehouse or even a pure detective novel like Agatha Christie, but a detective novel about a detective who is at least on his way to becoming a fully rounded character.
Somewhere in the interwebs, there's a thesis (maybe formal, maybe not), that the early Wooster books do have quite obvious signs of shell-shocked young men, that the people reading the books at the time would have recognised. If Bertie was 24 in 1924 he was too young to have served in WW1 without giving a false age, but was of an age to have served in WW2. Unlike my grandfather, who was born in 1896 and served through WW1 until 1942, which was half way through WW2, as a career soldier.
There are other indications in the Wimsey books where it's made clear he's very scarred by WW1 - bits of Busman's Holiday and one of the books where he's involved with Harriet Vane when Lord Peter is unable to do something after a nasty case has caused flashbacks, not that it's said in those terms.
I can't recall where this is to be found, or how Bunter came to know he was needed - was it through the good offices of the Dowager Duchess?
I rather think I read somewhere that Bunter reported for duty after being demobbed "as arranged" with Major Wimsey - the inference I took was that at some point in their service together, the Major had promised Sgt Bunter a place with him after all this was over, and nothing more needed to be said.
The Dowager Duchess certainly writes about how grateful she was when Bunter appeared, in the snippets of her correspondence that we get in some of the books.
Wimsey and his contemporaries fought in the war and in various ways are trying to recover from it, while Wooster and his chums are almost manic in their efforts to not be depressed by what had happened.
I was pondering this, or something like it, the other day, and thinking about when Harriet's years at Shrewsbury would have been. I have read, and I'm damned if I can remember where, that the first couple of post-WW1 intakes at Oxford were young men whose education had been interrupted or prevented by the war, and it was a very serious bunch who were determined to make up for lost time, whereas as they moved on the subsequent intakes were the Brideshead Revisited era young men, determined to have fun and sod the shortages and hardships they'd grown up with.
What, I wonder, was the situation for women entrants? Although I think Harriet would have been too young to be there during WW1 or immediately after, I'm thinking she would have graduated about 1924-5? Did they continue to enter and be educated as before, or were they all doing essential war work, and thus in a similar situation to the male entrants of 1919-20?
Wasn't Wimsey dug out of a collapsed trench in spring 1918? Hence the flashbacks - I've no doubt at all that Sayers would have been very familiar with men still suffering mentally, especially as her husband was a Captain, so presumably had seen service.
I can't recall where this is to be found, or how Bunter came to know he was needed - was it through the good offices of the Dowager Duchess?
I rather think I read somewhere that Bunter reported for duty after being demobbed "as arranged" with Major Wimsey - the inference I took was that at some point in their service together, the Major had promised Sgt Bunter a place with him after all this was over, and nothing more needed to be said.
The Dowager Duchess certainly writes about how grateful she was when Bunter appeared, in the snippets of her correspondence that we get in some of the books.
The detail about Bunter coming to Peter Wimsey is given in a conversation between the Dowager Duchess and Harriet recorded in a diary entry at the beginning of Busman’s Honeymoon.
Peter Wimsey was born in 1890, so is 45-ish in Gaudy Night (which is set in 1935). Harriet is said to be returning to Oxford after an absence of ten years, suggesting that she graduated in 1925. That makes her about 31 when Gaudy Night is set, and 26 or 27 when she and Peter Wimsey (then 39 or 40) first meet in Strong Poison.
Dorothy Sayers husband “Mac” Fleming was badly gassed during the war, and his health deteriorated after they were married, and he died in 1950.
And the aftermath of that sort of thing is still shadowing people. My friend's mother's father was similarly gassed. He became a strong atheist, and then developed TB in his damaged lungs and died in '33, leaving his 10 year old daughter to be brought up higgledy piggledy by her mother and grandmother on not very much money, even though her mother had to go to work. (She also had an accidental head injury in '33, which didn't help, and wasn't treated.)
I think, but have not yet verified, that you find in Gaudy Night that this is Padgett, the Shrewsbury Porter. You also find some of the details of Bunter’s relationship with Lord Peter in “Clouds of Witness”.
Hmm. I was wrong about where in Busman’s Honeymoon the explanation is given by the Dowager Duchess it is in the Epithalamion at the end, in the Dukes Denver chapter.
As @Cathscats says, Padgett (Corporal at the time) was among those who dug Wimsey out, but there is some indication that (Sergeant) Bunter was too - though I can’t track down anything specific.
Several of my books (New English Library edition) have a postscript purportedly written by Uncle Paul, which covers some of Wimsey's history. All it says is that he was blown up and buried in a shell-hole, had a bad nervous breakdown, then set himself up in a flat in Piccadilly with Bunter, who had been his sergeant.
My memory is still scarred by the recollection of seeing (by accident, on daytime TV on a wet afternoon during a family holiday in Cornwall) an old 1940s film version of Busman's Honeymoon, with a rather chubby American actor taking the part of Lord Peter. Not very convincingly, I'm afraid.
As @Cathscats says, Padgett (Corporal at the time) was among those who dug Wimsey out, but there is some indication that (Sergeant) Bunter was too - though I can’t track down anything specific.
Yes, because Padgett referes to Wimsey as "Eyeglass", because of the monocle. I wonder whether, as his batman, Bunter was similarly entombed?
I quite enjoyed the film of Busman's Honeymoon. It was originally a stage play and a lot of the things that happen would work better on stage than they do in a novel. From what I remembered of the film, there were lots of very unconvincing sets. I think despite all that, it might be my favourite of the Peter + Harriet books. I think my favourite Wimsey on his own novel is Murder must Advertise.
Incidentally, if anyone feels that Padgett runnning into Wimsey again is a somewhat unlikely event, once you've been in Oxford for a while you cease to be in the slightest bit surprised by who knows/knew who any more - eg I have a Facebook friend, who I would be on first name terms with in the flesh, who has dined with the President of (I think) Malaysia. It's no fun playing the Kevin Bacon game in Oxford!
Don't forget that the current Prime Minister of Pakistan played cricket for the University... I've played on the same pitch (and as Bradman, the 3 Ws, in short the gods of the game) - it's a very small, yet global, village.
There are probably several, but the one I'm in is called The Lord Peter Wimsey Appreciation Society, which is a fairly active and pleasant group for discussion of all things LPW-related. There's also a Dorothy L. Sayers society group which I find good as well. Facebook groups are a mixed bag but both of these seem to promote fun, informative, and civil discussion.
I'm in the LPW Facebook one too!
On the subject of TV adaptations, the Gaudy Night one is the weakest: it focuses on the crime and mauls the relationship development that is so important to the book.
His shell shock also surfaces towards the end of Busman's Honeymoon, with the dream and the final bit where it's a question of him running off or coming home.
mmm - I was trying not to spoiler when I mentioned Busman's Honeymoon and shell shock above, for anyone who hasn't read it.
I have a facsimile of one of Wilfred Owen's army medical records, from when I was teaching GCSE English and a WW1 poetry unit. The typed description of findings of the Board referring him to Craiglockhart on 25.6.17 found that:
in March 1917 he fell down a well at Bouchoir, and was momentarily stunned. He was under medical treatment for 3 weeks, and then resumed duty. about the middle of April he was blown up by a shell explosion while he was asleep. On May 1st, he was observed to be shaky and tremulous, and his conduct and manner were pecular, and his memory was confused. The R.M.O. sent him to No. 41 Sty.H.Gailly where he was under observation and treatment by Capt. Brown R'.A.M.C. Neurological Specialist for a month. On 7/6/17 he was transferred to No. 1 G.F. Etretat, and on 16/6/17 to the Welsh Hospital Netley. There is little abnormality to be observed but he seems to be of a highly strung temperement. He has slept well while here. He leaves Hospital to-day transferred to Craig Lockart War Hospital, Edinburgh for special observation and treatment.
The form signs him off from general service for 6 months, from home service and light duty at home for 3 months and requiring indoor treatment, it also says that his disability was contracted in the service, under circumstances over which he had no control and caused by military service.
For anyone who doesn't know, Owen returned to the Front in September 1918, after treatment and a period of limited action at home. He was killed in action on 4 November 1918. Most of his poems were composed from August 1917, when he was being treated at Craiglockhart, until his death.
As @Cathscats says, Padgett (Corporal at the time) was among those who dug Wimsey out, but there is some indication that (Sergeant) Bunter was too - though I can’t track down anything specific.
Yes, because Padgett referes to Wimsey as "Eyeglass", because of the monocle. I wonder whether, as his batman, Bunter was similarly entombed?
I'm greatly enjoying it. Rather nostalgic (I was at Girton in the early 1970s, so much is familiar), and since I later became an academic I find the debates about heart and head do ring true. Even in the 1970s they were more relevant than now; women were mostly expected to withdraw from their professions at least temporarily if they had children, though some managed to combine the two.
I liked the archeologist/paleontologist(?) in the story who commented that she liked raising kids more when they became more mature and more interesting than toddlers. Evidently she and her husband continued to travel and do their work. She noted with approval that her off-spring took to excavating the "middens" behind their house.
Great! I'll be posting discussion questions tomorrow. Anyone who's still reading the book for the first time and doesn't want spoilers about the ending can avoid this thread until you've finished, then jump into the conversation.
All right! Here are a LOT of questions to discuss -- as always, feel free to answer whichever ones spark some response from you and ignore the rest. Also, please add your own comments on anything I didn't cover in the questions, and questions you might like to ask other readers. Note that there are spoilers in the questions, so if you haven't finished reading, go away and come back when you have!
I'll post some of my own replies later today.
1. How well did this book work for you as a mystery novel? Were you engaged with the mystery? Surprised and satisfied by the resolution? What worked and what didn’t, for you – evaluating this primarily as a mystery novel?
2. Some readers find this book frustrating because it doesn’t seem to them to be primarily a mystery novel. Did you find the Peter/Harriet romance plot more central than the mystery – and how did it work for you as a love story?
3. Much of both the external and internal conflict in this novel turns on the question of whether personal loyalties should be allowed to supersede professional ones – this conflict drives both the mystery and the romance plots, in different ways. How good a job do you think the novel does of addressing (and resolving?) this conflict?
4. The novel is now 85 years old. What parts of it feel dated to you?
5. As well as being written in 1935, the novel is very deeply rooted in the culture of Oxford at that time. Did you feel like there were aspects of the story you didn’t quite get, or important references that were obscure to you, because of details of time and place that you didn’t understand? (And if so, is there anything you’d like to ask other readers about, to see if they can add to your understanding?)
6. Sayers has sometimes been accused (perhaps unfairly) of falling in love with her own detective character, and creating Harriet Vane as a sort of self-insert character to fall in love with and marry Lord Peter. What do you think of Harriet as a character – especially as the main point-of-view character, as so much of the novel takes place in her head?
7. Is Peter’s pursuit of Harriet over the last 5 years (as summarized in this novel, or as depicted in Strong Poison and Have His Carcase, if you’ve read those) fair and respectful? Or is he an entitled man who refuses to take No for an answer and doesn’t fully understand the concept of consent?
8. What about the other characters, other than Peter and Harriet? This novel has a large cast – do you have a favourite?
9. Is Annie a believable villain? Do you think Sayers sympathizes with her, and/or expects the reader to? Did you have sympathy for her?
10. If you have read Sayers’ other Lord Peter Wimsey novels, where does this fit into the canon for you? Is it one of your favourites, or otherwise? Why?
11. If this was your first time reading this novel, how did you feel about it in general? Do you want to go back and read the earlier Wimsey books, or read on to Busman’s Honeymoon to find out what happens next?
12. If this was a reread for you – particularly if it’s an old favourite you’ve read more than once – how was the experience of coming back to it different from a first read? Has your perception of the story and the characters changed over time?
As a random aside, DLS refers to the Bodleian Library as "Bodley" through much of the book. I'd never heard this, I'd always heard it referred to as "The Bod".
On Saturday morning we were chatting with a friend we hadn't seen for ages and, yes, she referred to it as "Bodley". Whale oil beef hooked! Time and change run at different places in Oxford and, after 20+ years, it still sometimes surprises me.
I like this book, one of my favourites. It works for me as a mystery novel, because the puzzle is the plot and the puzzle is on more than one level. There is the puzzle of the goings on at Shrewsbury and the puzzle of the various characters. (Not just the Wimsey/Vane relationship.) This is the character-driven mystery par excellence.
Yes, there are things which could be explained no non-Oxonians. I had read the novel several times at various periods of my life before I read somewhere else that the “bulldogs” hunting with the Proctor are actually human, not real dogs. Didn’t make much difference to the way I enjoyed the book.
I think that Annie is one of the best villains because she is very believable. So believable that I have never thought of her as a villain, but as a victim. And certainly I have some sympathy with her. Does Sayers? Perhaps, as she has her medically dealt with, not arrested and charged at the end. But Sayers is very strong on the truth being the most important thing (maybe she is right and we have lost that in this relativistic age in which we live) so I think she would always side with Miss De. Vine in the end.
My favourite character is Miss Martin, the Dean. I would like to be her!
How does this fit in the cannon for me? I like it very much, but I think my favourite is “Clouds of Witness” because in it we see the author beginning to make her detective a real person and not just a 1920s cipher of a silly man about town. And yet he is still that at this stage: the book answers the question what would Bertie Wooster be like if he ever encountered a real problem? (Having your brother accused of murder and wondering if it should be your sister.)
Comments
I must find a copy of the book - I heard it the other year on the radio. It's a long time since I read it.
edited to correct the month
I believe the As My Wimsey Takes Me podcast had gotten up to Have His Carcase before going on hiatus. I am really looking forward to their return and hope they don't give up on it.
I have to confess that I didn't particularly enjoy Gaudy Night, for what reason I cannot say (not enough Blood, perhaps?
My favourite Wimsey novel is undoubtedly The Nine Tailors, and I shall now hie me back to Ye Olde Auncient Threade to see if I had anything useful to say. Probably not, but hey...
/tangentially, I do like Sayers' short stories, especially those featuring the commercial traveller, Montague Egg/
(text hidden to conceal an incredibly vague spoiler for NT).
I've just realized she's in the Wimsey Facebook group that I often read and occasionally post in, which is why I have the vague impression of her still being around -- she is, just not in the same place.
I like Monty also. He is not well-educated and he is completely satisfied with his job, which many people would look down on. However he is at least as thoughtful and observant as most highly-educated people.
Dorothy Sayers was not a snob.
Of course, Sayers and Wodehouse's books are very different, but they're broadly set in the same world - London's clubland between the wars. And what I take from this is that Wimsey is maybe half a generation older than Wooster: Wimsey and his contemporaries fought in the war and in various ways are trying to recover from it, while Wooster and his chums are almost manic in their efforts to not be depressed by what had happened.
Ok, both series are fiction, which means that everything is rather heightened compared to real life, but I do wonder if they tell us something useful about how things were for the upper classes in interwar London.
There are other indications in the Wimsey books where it's made clear he's very scarred by WW1 - bits of Busman's Holiday and one of the books where he's involved with Harriet Vane when Lord Peter is unable to do something after a nasty case has caused flashbacks, not that it's said in those terms.
I can't recall where this is to be found, or how Bunter came to know he was needed - was it through the good offices of the Dowager Duchess?
I rather think I read somewhere that Bunter reported for duty after being demobbed "as arranged" with Major Wimsey - the inference I took was that at some point in their service together, the Major had promised Sgt Bunter a place with him after all this was over, and nothing more needed to be said.
The Dowager Duchess certainly writes about how grateful she was when Bunter appeared, in the snippets of her correspondence that we get in some of the books.
I was pondering this, or something like it, the other day, and thinking about when Harriet's years at Shrewsbury would have been. I have read, and I'm damned if I can remember where, that the first couple of post-WW1 intakes at Oxford were young men whose education had been interrupted or prevented by the war, and it was a very serious bunch who were determined to make up for lost time, whereas as they moved on the subsequent intakes were the Brideshead Revisited era young men, determined to have fun and sod the shortages and hardships they'd grown up with.
What, I wonder, was the situation for women entrants? Although I think Harriet would have been too young to be there during WW1 or immediately after, I'm thinking she would have graduated about 1924-5? Did they continue to enter and be educated as before, or were they all doing essential war work, and thus in a similar situation to the male entrants of 1919-20?
Wasn't Wimsey dug out of a collapsed trench in spring 1918? Hence the flashbacks - I've no doubt at all that Sayers would have been very familiar with men still suffering mentally, especially as her husband was a Captain, so presumably had seen service.
The first bit of Busman's Honeymoon.
Peter Wimsey was born in 1890, so is 45-ish in Gaudy Night (which is set in 1935). Harriet is said to be returning to Oxford after an absence of ten years, suggesting that she graduated in 1925. That makes her about 31 when Gaudy Night is set, and 26 or 27 when she and Peter Wimsey (then 39 or 40) first meet in Strong Poison.
Dorothy Sayers husband “Mac” Fleming was badly gassed during the war, and his health deteriorated after they were married, and he died in 1950.
As @Cathscats says, Padgett (Corporal at the time) was among those who dug Wimsey out, but there is some indication that (Sergeant) Bunter was too - though I can’t track down anything specific.
Yes, because Padgett referes to Wimsey as "Eyeglass", because of the monocle. I wonder whether, as his batman, Bunter was similarly entombed?
Don't forget that the current Prime Minister of Pakistan played cricket for the University... I've played on the same pitch (and as Bradman, the 3 Ws, in short the gods of the game) - it's a very small, yet global, village.
I'm in the LPW Facebook one too!
On the subject of TV adaptations, the Gaudy Night one is the weakest: it focuses on the crime and mauls the relationship development that is so important to the book.
His shell shock also surfaces towards the end of Busman's Honeymoon, with the dream and the final bit where it's a question of him running off or coming home.
I have a facsimile of one of Wilfred Owen's army medical records, from when I was teaching GCSE English and a WW1 poetry unit. The typed description of findings of the Board referring him to Craiglockhart on 25.6.17 found that:
The form signs him off from general service for 6 months, from home service and light duty at home for 3 months and requiring indoor treatment, it also says that his disability was contracted in the service, under circumstances over which he had no control and caused by military service.
For anyone who doesn't know, Owen returned to the Front in September 1918, after treatment and a period of limited action at home. He was killed in action on 4 November 1918. Most of his poems were composed from August 1917, when he was being treated at Craiglockhart, until his death.
Wasn't it "Winderpane"?
I'll post some of my own replies later today.
1. How well did this book work for you as a mystery novel? Were you engaged with the mystery? Surprised and satisfied by the resolution? What worked and what didn’t, for you – evaluating this primarily as a mystery novel?
2. Some readers find this book frustrating because it doesn’t seem to them to be primarily a mystery novel. Did you find the Peter/Harriet romance plot more central than the mystery – and how did it work for you as a love story?
3. Much of both the external and internal conflict in this novel turns on the question of whether personal loyalties should be allowed to supersede professional ones – this conflict drives both the mystery and the romance plots, in different ways. How good a job do you think the novel does of addressing (and resolving?) this conflict?
4. The novel is now 85 years old. What parts of it feel dated to you?
5. As well as being written in 1935, the novel is very deeply rooted in the culture of Oxford at that time. Did you feel like there were aspects of the story you didn’t quite get, or important references that were obscure to you, because of details of time and place that you didn’t understand? (And if so, is there anything you’d like to ask other readers about, to see if they can add to your understanding?)
6. Sayers has sometimes been accused (perhaps unfairly) of falling in love with her own detective character, and creating Harriet Vane as a sort of self-insert character to fall in love with and marry Lord Peter. What do you think of Harriet as a character – especially as the main point-of-view character, as so much of the novel takes place in her head?
7. Is Peter’s pursuit of Harriet over the last 5 years (as summarized in this novel, or as depicted in Strong Poison and Have His Carcase, if you’ve read those) fair and respectful? Or is he an entitled man who refuses to take No for an answer and doesn’t fully understand the concept of consent?
8. What about the other characters, other than Peter and Harriet? This novel has a large cast – do you have a favourite?
9. Is Annie a believable villain? Do you think Sayers sympathizes with her, and/or expects the reader to? Did you have sympathy for her?
10. If you have read Sayers’ other Lord Peter Wimsey novels, where does this fit into the canon for you? Is it one of your favourites, or otherwise? Why?
11. If this was your first time reading this novel, how did you feel about it in general? Do you want to go back and read the earlier Wimsey books, or read on to Busman’s Honeymoon to find out what happens next?
12. If this was a reread for you – particularly if it’s an old favourite you’ve read more than once – how was the experience of coming back to it different from a first read? Has your perception of the story and the characters changed over time?
On Saturday morning we were chatting with a friend we hadn't seen for ages and, yes, she referred to it as "Bodley". Whale oil beef hooked! Time and change run at different places in Oxford and, after 20+ years, it still sometimes surprises me.
Yes, there are things which could be explained no non-Oxonians. I had read the novel several times at various periods of my life before I read somewhere else that the “bulldogs” hunting with the Proctor are actually human, not real dogs. Didn’t make much difference to the way I enjoyed the book.
I think that Annie is one of the best villains because she is very believable. So believable that I have never thought of her as a villain, but as a victim. And certainly I have some sympathy with her. Does Sayers? Perhaps, as she has her medically dealt with, not arrested and charged at the end. But Sayers is very strong on the truth being the most important thing (maybe she is right and we have lost that in this relativistic age in which we live) so I think she would always side with Miss De. Vine in the end.
My favourite character is Miss Martin, the Dean. I would like to be her!
How does this fit in the cannon for me? I like it very much, but I think my favourite is “Clouds of Witness” because in it we see the author beginning to make her detective a real person and not just a 1920s cipher of a silly man about town. And yet he is still that at this stage: the book answers the question what would Bertie Wooster be like if he ever encountered a real problem? (Having your brother accused of murder and wondering if it should be your sister.)