Have His Carcass

[sawyl]

Back to the Dorothy L Sayers re-read and Have His Carcass, which takes up the threads of Harriet Vane's story following the events of Strong Poison.

Changing on the body of a suicide on a deserted beach, Harriet Vane takes a few photos before heading off to call the police. Unable to find a nearby phone it is several hours before she returns with the police, by which time the corpse has been claimed by the rising tide. Although the police are able to identify the man in the photos as Paul Alexis Goldschmitt, a professional dancer at a nearby hotel, they're unable to hold an inquest due to the lack of a body. Concerned about Harriet's position and suspicious of the circumstances of the case, Peter Wimsey rushes down from town and starts investigating just why Paul Alexis — a man with a full beard and phobia of blood — should have cut his throat with a razor after travelling to a remote beach on a return ticket.

While generally rather good, Have His Carcass suffers from an excess of details in some places. By making Harriet the main character for much of the book, it becomes possible to get a much strong feeling for her personality and to start to understand why Peter is attracted to her. She's strong, independent and clever. She's also charming and capable: she vamps Henry Weldon with elan and successfully extricates herself when things look like they might go too far, she quickly becomes a confident of Weldon's mother, and has an easy facility with M. Antoine and the rest of the professional dancers.

Of the other characters, the oafish Henry Weldon is particularly good. His bumptious and obvious attempts to get Peter to drop the case are wonderfully mis-judged exercises in failed bonhomie. His view of Harriet is clearly coloured by his knowledge of the events of Strong Poison, and consequently misreads her flirtatiousness as promiscuity, only to be thrown when she rejects his groping overtures.

The plot is largely successfully but for an extended section in which Peter and Harriet crack a Playfair cypher belonging to Paul Alexis. Although admirably clear on the techniques used to crack the encryption, the whole episode is rather too long and reads a little bit like a description of two people trying to solve a sudoku! More successfully, Sayers pokes fun at the traditional whodunit problem of the time of the death by having Harriet struggle with the time of death in her own novel, and the key revelation about death, when it comes, turns out to have been skillfully foreshadowed.