Strong Poison: A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery by Dorothy L. SayersMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
"Upholding the highest standards in ebook production" - HarperCollins, nobody is fooled. You scanned a print book that probably had a number of typesetting errors already, and did your usual poor job of taking out the resulting OCR glitches. HC is consistently the worst of the major publishers when it comes to copy editing, and I don't recommend getting the HarperPerennial ebook edition if you have a choice (I didn't, since I got it from my library).
Setting that aside, this is a solid but, to me, not stellar entry in the series. In art as in life, Sayers was a paradoxical combination of High Church Anglicanism with a bohemian attitude to sexual morality, and we see both sides here. The High Church side comes in the form of the wonderful character of Miss Climpson, with her emphatic and digressive manner of speaking and writing, a completely different kind of digression from Lord Peter's mother, by the way, though they are both highly capable women under the apparent wooliness, and after all, isn't that what counts? Miss Climpson, who Lord Peter employs as an inquiry agent of the type that can go places and ask questions that a man couldn't, fakes several seances in order to get some key information, and that whole part of the book is, for me, the most delightful.
Representing the bohemian side is Harriet Vane. She, after some resistance, had yielded to the persuasions of her lover and gone to live with him without marrying him first, and was then furious when, after a while, he offered her marriage "as a kind of good-conduct prize". She then left him. On the night that he went to her seeking reconciliation, he fell seriously ill, and subsequently died, from arsenic poisoning - something she had been researching for one of her detective novels. There were also some coincidences between when she had bought poison under false names (for purposes of research) and when he had previously fallen ill with what was thought to be his old gastric trouble. These coincidences of date are never fully explained, and may just be coincidences, since they come about a month or so apart. She is now on trial, accused of his murder. Fortunately, Miss Climpson is on the jury, and is convinced she didn't do it, a conclusion with which Lord Peter agrees - and Lord Peter is (suddenly, and not completely convincingly) in love with her and determined to prove her innocence.
He has a tough job ahead of him, and a limited time to do it in. Initially, a lot of blind alleys and red herrings present themselves. But between Miss Climpson and another middle-aged lady who gets a job as a typist at the office of Wimsey's chief suspect, they do manage to find the evidence they're looking for, and it turns out the crime was carefully planned and boldly executed in a surprising way.
Sayers thought that the question of how a murder had been done was often more interesting than who had done it, and that's what we get here, though it isn't quite the "reverse mystery" pioneered by R. Austin Freeman. And indeed, the journey is enjoyable, and while we don't get quite the level of character development in Lord Peter that we've seen in earlier books, despite the powerful influence of love on his psyche, Miss Climpson more than makes up for that as far as I'm concerned.
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