Review: Busman's Honeymoon

Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The last of the Dorothy L. Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey novels (the series was continued after her death by another author, who started by finishing a book that was in very early draft; I plan to read at least that one to see if they're any good, even though such efforts rarely are). This one was adapted from a play, on which Sayers collaborated with another writer, and it shows; some of the dialog and the scene staging feels distinctly theatrical, though not necessarily in a detrimental way.

It's funny. There are moments of humour in the earlier books, too, but this one is hilarious, particularly at the beginning, which is a series of letters and diary entries surrounding Harriet and Peter's marriage. We get an extended contribution from the Dowager Duchess, who is, as always, simultaneously fluffy and incisive, and that alone was worth the price of admission to me. I don't know how much of the humour was Sayers' and how much was her collaborator's, but I enjoyed it.

Conventionally, romance stories stop before the wedding (perhaps because Jane Austen never married, and bestrides the genre like a colossus), but there's a great deal of juice to be squeezed from a couple's early married life, and this book demonstrates it. Peter and Harriet are two highly intelligent, independent people who are genuinely devoted to one another and must find a way to live together and create a partnership that works for both of them. They do this with plenty of mutual respect, and it's wonderful to watch. At the same time, they work away on solving the (as it turns out) ingenious locked-room murder of the unpleasant man who sold them their honeymoon getaway/future country home, while dealing with people who want to take the furniture in payment of the deceased's debts, his rather pathetic niece and heir, one of Sayers' good-hearted but vague vicars, a neighbour who helps out with the housework and whose treatment of the vintage port breaks Bunter's legendary calm and even makes him drop his aitches, a chimney sweep with many layers of jerseys, a capable but morally questionable gardener... Unlike in some other Sayers books, the cast doesn't become a mob of largely indistinguishable minor characters; each of them has something distinct and memorable about them, and there are no spares or duplicates, almost certainly because of the story's beginning as a play.

We do still get a lot of quotation from (mostly) English classic literature, though here it's highlighted as a feature, and partly interpreted to the reader, because the police superintendent is self-educated in the classics, and he and Lord Peter play a kind of game of apt quotations (with attribution). There is some untranslated Latin and a couple of letters in untranslated French, which always strikes me as an annoyingly elitist move whenever I see it in Golden Age British crime novels (Agatha Christie did it too); unlike educated British people of the 1930s, I don't read either French or Latin fluently. Fortunately, these days it's easy to find the translations online.

For me, the non-English portions were the only significant flaw in an otherwise excellent novel, which worked as the portrait of the beginning of a marriage between two admirable people trying hard to be good to one another, as well as a clever murder mystery. Not only does the romance get extended past the wedding, but the murder mystery gets extended past the trial, conviction, and execution of the criminal, and we get to see Peter's ambivalence about the consequences of his "hobby" of detection and the ways in which he tries to mitigate them. The emotional beats are sound, the writing assured and capable, and along with those elements, the depth of reflection the characters undertake on the events places it strongly in the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list.

The edition I read has a few typos in it, but they're the kind you get from a human typesetter (such as "Mrs Climpson" for "Miss Climpson"), rather than the kind you get from an OCR program, so that's something.

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