Without abandoning her obsession with detail, Dorothy L. Sayers follows the borderline unreadable “Five Red Herrings” with one of her elite novels, “Have His Carcase” (1932). The success comes in the mysterious vibe she cultivates and nurtures throughout, along with slightly less emphasis on time and a little more on character creation.
Picnicking on a cliffside, Harriet Vane is awoken by a sound (A seagull’s squawk? A scream?) and finds a fresh corpse of an unidentified man (eventually revealed to be dancer and potential Russian royal heir Paul Alexis) on a large seabound rock known as the Flat Iron. She gathers all the physical and pictorial evidence she can, and is unable to draw the attention of a boat slightly out of range, then heads off in search of a phone to call the police.
From the start, we have urgency and intrigue, as the body will be washed off the rock at high tide, and she starts to meet people along the cliffside road. They claim shock at her discovery, but of course we must file them away as suspects.
“Have His Carcase” (1932)
Author: Dorthy L. Sayers
Genre: Mystery
Series: Lord Peter Wimsey novel No. 7 (second with Harriet Vane)
Setting: Wilvercombe, rural coastal England; summer 1932
The seaside villages and encampments are well-drawn, and we learn about the lifestyle of itinerant workers, such as hairdressers (interestingly, Sayers says the term “barber” is outdated). They go from town to town looking for work, and stay in hostels. In the pre-“show me your papers” era, it’s easier for people who change jobs a lot to also change their identities.
Characters have sharp personalities and strange backgrounds, and although he is dead, Alexis grows as a person as we learn more about him. So while this is of course a Golden Age mystery that operates as a fun puzzle, the wrongness of a human life being snuffed out increases in weightiness.
Razor-sharp mystery crafting
The title comes from an old British legal principle that the carcass (the title uses an old spelling) must be found before a case can proceed. The official detectives – along with the respected Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet, plus Wimsey’s assistant Bunter – proceed among many fascinating information-gathering routes as the recovery and identification of the corpse hovers as an additional enticement.
While we get Sayers’ usual hyper-fixation on timing (along with Wimsey’s notion that perfectly timed alibis are made to be debunked) – the author also takes us down a side path of decoding a cipher for the sake of reading one of Alexis’ letters. That’s a small step in the solving of the crime, as is the tracing of the movements of the murder weapon (a shaving razor), but every small step is essential in “Have His Carcase.”
It’s delightful to see Wimsey and Harriet working together on the code, which Wimsey explains and Harriet quickly picks up. Throughout the book, Wimsey – who met Harriet when clearing her of a murder charge in “Strong Poison” – peppers in marriage proposals, which she brushes off. If this were an Agatha Christie relationship, Harriet would’ve accepted at the end of their first adventure.
But Sayers takes the opposite tack, one favored by future TV shows: Keep them apart as long as possible. In the world of TV, it’s for the sake of keeping viewers around. Sayers might be aiming to draw readers back for future books, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and guess she’s aiming for a believable building of the relationship.
Next up is “Gaudy Night,” and then “Busman’s Honeymoon” concludes the Wimsey-Vane quartet, apparently with more emphasis on romance than on mystery. In “Have His Carcase,” I enjoy their interplay, but it’s a credit to Sayers’ craftsmanship that the mystery remains at the forefront – and stays mysterious until the satisfying and fair solution.
Sleuthing Sunday reviews the works of Agatha Christie, along with other new and old classics of the mystery genre.