Double jeopardy

Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Billed on the front of the first edition as “A love story with detective interruptions”, Busman’s Honeymoon is the eleventh and final Lord Peter Wimsey novel and was published in 1937.

It charts Wimsey’s marriage to crime novelist Harriet Vane, rescued by him from the gallows (three books previous), and their unconventional honeymoon at Talboys, an old farmhouse in Harriet’s native Hertfordshire, impetuously purchased as a nostalgic wedding gift by Wimsey.

Fleeing their reception to avoid the paparazzi – and arriving after dark to find Talboys locked and barred – the new couple finally gain entry with the help of mystified neighbours and retire to bed. Next morning they discover former owner William Noakes dead in the cellar with his head bashed in.

Detective interruptions ensue.

The crime proves to be from the Agatha Christie School of Complicated and Improbable Murders. As one contemporary notice stated, if the killer needed that much help from Providence, he was in the wrong business!

The majority of the narrative concerns the relationship between Wimsey and Harriet – both suffer feelings of inadequacy, and the novel charts their troubled journey through their insecurities by the vehicle of the plot.

There is a rather disjointed ending, when the newlyweds travel to the Wimsey country seat in Norfolk, modelled I should say on Holkham Hall. Eccentric characters enter the tale for no obvious reason, and it rather fizzles out with Lord Peter casting doubts over his future as a sleuth.

While I largely enjoyed the book, I felt it suffered from the very claim made on the cover; that is to say, the two quite disparate strands did not comfortably interweave and maybe were stories worthy of independent telling.




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