Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers. As noted in a previous entry, I've been promising Kate that I'd read this for quite a while now, and I finally did get around to it.

This is a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, and the series is one of those non-SF series that is much beloved of SF fandom, for whatever reason. Plenty of very smart people whose tastes I respect gush about these books, so I feel sort of bad that my first experience with them, reading The Nine Tailors in the pre-booklog days, wasn't especially good. (Some elements of the writing style were irritating to me, and the manner of one character's death was so obvious that I had trouble believing that it would stump a Great Detective.)

A number of the problems I had with the earlier book seem to have been restricted to that volume. The most irritating stylistic tics were confined to one particular character, and the obviousness problem was specific to that case. The murder here is much harder to figure out-- a case worthy of Nero Wolfe-- and the writing is much more... fun, for lack of a more concrete description.

The plot here centers around the suspicious death of an ad man, which Lord Peter has been hired to investigate. To this end, he has gone undercover as "Death Bredon," taking a job at the ad agency in question. A large chunk of the text is devoted to describing the workings of the agency, and the various campaigns they devise, and those bits are great fun. There's also a lengthy description of a cricket match toward the end, which is utterly incomprehensible to an American:

The innings opened briskly. Mr. Barrow, who was rather a showy bat, though tempermental, took the bowling at the factory end of the pitch and cheered the spirits of his side by producing a couple of twos in the first over. Mr. Garrett, canny and cautious, stonewalled perseveringly through five balls of the following over and then cut the leather through the slips for a useful three. A single off the next ball brought the bowling back to Mr. Barrow, who, having started favourably, exhibited a happy superiority complex and settled down to make runs.

Um. Yes. Quite. This goes on for page after baffling page, but it's weirdly entertaining.

On the whole, this was a much more agreeable reading experience than The Nine Tailors. It's not without its problems, though: Peter is altogether too good at, well, everything. He's like Miles Vorkosigan without the crippling lack of self-confidence. There are also a number of utterly daft plot contrivances-- the "No, I'm not Peter Wimsey. I'm.... his cousin. Yeah, that's the ticket..." device is just too silly for words.

Still, it was a fun read, and I can see why people find these enjoyable. In the end, it's perhaps a little more civilized than I'm looking for in a mystery novel (in some respects, you could compare it to a Nero Wolfe book written without Archie Goodwin to cut the Great Man down to size), but I enjoyed it, and I'll probably read another one at some point.

(Previously posted to The Library of Babel.)