Review: Murder Must Advertise

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The previous book in the series, The Five Red Herrings , disappointed me because it was so busy being a complicated mystery novel it had no time to be anything more. This is a return to form; not only do we get a good deal of human observation, but it's a ferocious satire on advertising, the industry Sayers herself worked in until her books became successful enough to provide her with a living. I have to say, I'm glad I've never hated my job as much as Sayers clearly hated hers.

We also get more of Lord Peter Wimsey, though most of the time he's pretending to be his fictional illegitimate and disreputable cousin, Death Bredon. He's gone undercover in this identity at an advertising agency where there's been a mysterious death, but the murder investigation becomes entangled with the investigation his brother-in-law and close friend, Chief-Inspector Parker, is conducting into the drug trade in London. There are vivid (occasionally bordering on lurid, though it's kept tastefully vague) scenes of the night life of the rich and addicted, among the scenes of gossipy, back-biting ad-agency life (a lot of people seem to do very little work there), and assorted vignettes such as an inter-company cricket match. It's a box of chocolates, with something for most tastes.

I realised something about Wimsey in this book that I'd vaguely been aware of before. He's always kind to honest people, but can be fiercely unkind to the dishonest ones. Not always; if he feels sorry for someone, even if they're a criminal, he can be very sympathetic. He's also good with children and young people.

Favourite characters from previous books - the Dowager Duchess (Peter's mother), the impeccable manservant Bunter, and Peter's love-interest, Harriet Vane - are either only referred to or else appear very briefly. We do get to see the domestic life of Parker and his wife, Peter's sister Mary, but because Peter is incognito most of the time, his usual cast of backup characters is absent. To make up for this, we get plenty of new characters, vividly and succinctly drawn, in the advertising agency and the demimonde (and at the cricket match, where the elderly sponsor of the opposing team declares robustly and sincerely that he doesn't care who wins as long as they play the game).

The advertising-agency setting gives a fascinating glimpse into commerce as it flourished between the world wars, and among the insights it offers is that advertising is mainly aimed at people who don't have much money, but can be convinced to part with it easily, because their lives are mundane or miserable and they're vulnerable to pitches that suggest they can improve it by buying something.

There's a lot going on at once, and for me, it's well handled and well integrated. There are, perhaps, a few too many minor characters at the ad agency to be kept track of, but otherwise it's strong. The quality of the writing and the pointed satire on the advertising industry lift it into the Gold tier of my recommendation list; the author experiments, I think successfully, with techniques such as stream-of-consciousness narration and an omniscient viewpoint that understands things about characters that they are not themselves conscious of, but she does it judiciously, so it doesn't become tedious through overuse.

The edition I read has clearly been scanned from an earlier edition and set using OCR; there are tell-tale errors like "bell" for "hell" and "he" for "be," and a number of commas and full stops that are either missing, inserted, or substituted for each other. If you use OCR, you need to put in more proofreading than this to get a clean edition, and Hodders, characteristically, have not done so.

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