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Title: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Leigh Sayers ISBN: 0-15-665899-2 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: September, 1966 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.55 (22 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Best of All Time
Comment: I would agree with some others that this is the best mystery of all time. It indeed is a book best to be read in the winter, in a big comfortable easy chair, in front of a roaring fire.
I have several copies, but am always on the lookout for another one. Sayers has her ace detective and consumate English gentleman Lord Peter Wimsey in an absolutely engrossing rural landscape. Like many traditional country areas, this one is dominated by a massive church. And the parish has some strong bell ringers, but also some members with dark secrets. The plot develops slowly, like fine wine.
I am sorry that the Masterpiece Theater version is not yet out in video. Then I could read the book and watch the video throughout the long, freezing winters we have in my home in Arctic Alaska. Enjoy this book. Cherish it and buy a few extra copies, including a few for very close friends. It is a book you will want to keep handy on your bookshelf for the rest of your days! Earl Finkler in Barrow, Alaska
Rating: 5
Summary: Review
Comment: This novel, Dorothy L. Sayers' best-known, is, without doubt, one of her best-if not the best. Sayers takes the customary English village, and makes something new of it, by setting it in the Fen country, and by giving to it a church, which, as the well-drawn rector describes, "East Anglia is famous for the size and splendour of its parish churches. Still, we flatter ourselves we are almost unique, even in this part of the world." The church services show great feeling and power, and neatly tie in with the theme of religion. The church possesses bells, the book being best-known for the bell-ringing, described in such powerfully beautiful descriptions as:
"Out over the flat, white wastes of fen, over the spear-straight, steel-dark dykes and the wind-bent, groaning poplar trees, bursting from the snow-choked louvres of the belfry, whirled away southward and westward in gusty blasts of clamour to the sleeping counties went the music of the bells-little Gaude, silver Sabaoth, strong John and Jericho, glad Jubilee, sweet Dimity and old Batty Thomas, with great Tailor Paul bawling and striding like a giant in the midst of them. Up and down went the shadows of the ringers upon the walls, up and down went the shadows of the ringers upon the walls, up and down went the scarlet sallies flickering roofwards and floorwards, and up and down, hunting in their courses, went the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul."
The bells are also eerily threatening-"Bells are like cats and mirrors-they're always queer, and it doesn't do to think too much about them."-which is fitting, as the plot hinges on bells: both an ingenious cryptogram (again, to quote the rector, "I should never have thought of the possibility that one might make a cipher out of change-ringing. Most ingenious."), and an ingenious murder method.
The whodunit aspect of the story is not neglected; for once, it is a genuine problem. The body is buried in a grave, and involves a complicated problem of identity, and an unknown method. The victim, as Wimsey describes, is "a perfect nuisance, dead or alive, and whoever killed him was a public benefactor. I wish I'd killed him myself." Wimsey is engaging here, and not the parody of Bertie Wooster he sometimes is-he is a human being, without being the equally obnoxious creature found in Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon. The detection is excellent, and, as was to be the trend in nearly every detective story following (especially Nicholas Blake's), the detective "felt depressed. So far as he could see, his interference had done no good to anybody and only made extra trouble. It was a thousand pities that the body of Deacon had ever come to light at all. Nobody wanted it." These tie in with the burden of guilt and innocence, redemption and repentance.
Finally, the book comes to its powerful climax in a flooded village, "with an aching and intolerable melancholy, like the noise of the bells of a drowned city pushing up through the overwhelming sea."
This is not a detective story-this is, if anything, a novel.
Rating: 5
Summary: Identity Quest
Comment: Change ringing is an ancient craft. Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter have been held up at four A.M. New Years Eve. A snow storm and a bridge cause their car to be upended in a ditch. The rector of the parish offers to put them up for the night. Wimsey thinks the church is impressive. He calls it a young cathedral. The rector claims that East Anglia is famous for the size and splendor of its parish churches.
The term tailors refers to bell ringing. Wimsey is solicited to engage in a very great task of nine hours duration, that of change ringing. It seems that additional manpower is needed since many of the men of the village have been felled by influenza.
Subsequently, at the death of Sir Henry, the local lord, nine tailors and forty six strokes are rung. Making plans for the burial, an unknown body is discovered. To clear up the mystery, Lord Peter's help is sought. The man is between forty five and fifty years of age. The face has been battered and the ankles may have been tightly bound. On the arms there are pressure marks. The cause of death is suffocation.
Wimsey speaks with the heir, Hilary, and learns that the body may have been placed in the crypt at the time of her mother's death. There is already a local mystery of considerable importance. Emeralds were stolen and have never been recovered.
The setting of the story is fictitious. Nonetheless the area in the vicinity of Cambridge and the inhabitants there receive compelling descriptions by Dorothy Sayers. A Frenchwoman, Suzanne Legros, writes her husband a letter using the English pseudonym of Paul Taylor. It is addressed to one of the village post offices in the fens, poste restante. Bunter comes into possession of it. It is passed on through Wimsey and the authorities and provides the basis for the unraveling of the mystery.
Another factor leading to the solution is an experience undergone by Wimsey, that of remaining in the bell tower at the time the bells are rung. There is additional excitement in fourteen days of flooding resulting in the death of one of the main actors of this tale.
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Title: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers ISBN: 0061043540 Publisher: HarperTorch Pub. Date: 01 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers ISBN: 0061043532 Publisher: HarperTorch Pub. Date: 01 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers ISBN: 0061043583 Publisher: HarperTorch Pub. Date: 01 August, 1995 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers ISBN: 0061043516 Publisher: HarperTorch Pub. Date: 01 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers ISBN: 006104363X Publisher: HarperTorch Pub. Date: 01 October, 1995 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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