Busman's Honeymoon: A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery with Harriet Vane (original 1937; edition 1995)

Busman's Honeymoon is much more about the characters than about the murder mystery. I don't recommend you read it without reading the rest of the series -- at least reading Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, to get to know Harriet and Peter and their romance.

There's some very fun banter, and some glorious romantic scenes, and a tad more of the story about Peter and Bunter. There was no sign of Lady Mary and Parker, really, which was disappointing, but the large quantities of Bunter rather made up for it.

For a reader who's in love with Lord Peter and Harriet Vane, this book is lovely. If you're just looking for a murder mystery, though, not this one. ( )

The end of the Wimsey stories, and again, Harriet 1, Peter 0. ( )

Always enjoyable. ( )

This novel is really much more of a love story than a mystery, as Dorothy L Sayers herself acknowledged. But for readers who followed the story of Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane through the three previous novels which featured both characters, it is a most satisfying love story and a welcome culmination to the years of Peter's patient courtship and Harriet's determined resistance. Tbere's enough of a mystery to make it worthy of being called a mystery novel, but no more than that. Apart from the love story and the mystery, Busman's Honeymoon is an interesting reflection of the era in which it was written, with its depiction of English attitudes to class and race (not critical, but descriptive and not the less interesting for that). There's a lot of French in it, which is ok for me because I am reasonably fluent in that language, but it must be a trial for readers who are not. I know how they feel, because there's a bit of Latin in there as well, the meaning of which I can only guess at. (I have an old edition of Busman's Honeymoon - probably printed in the 1970s - with no translations or notes: possibly more recent editions translate the bits which aren't in English?) Anyway, even if it could be considered pretentious by today's standards, I love the French and the Latin...and the poetry with which each chapter starts and which characters quote with abandon. They don't write mysteries like this anymore, more's the pity! ( )

Immediately before this I read a love story masquerading as a war novel; this was a love story masquerading (albeit not very stealthily) as a murder mystery.

Harriet and Peter's beautiful, complex, deeply human relationship pretty much steals the show; rather than a happily-ever-after, their romance is all about working through the past. The book is haunted - from the actual dead body in the basement of their honeymoon home (in Harriet's home village no less) to the brilliant ending which brings Peter back to his war experiences in a manner similar to the very first Wimsey novel, Whose Body.

Also there is a lot of Bunter! He's so important in this novel that I was beginning to find him a bit frustrating - he's so obviously a real person with a personal life, yet he accepts that it is for some reason his job, not Peter's, to deal with the muck of life. But by the end of this novel we completely understand why he has deigned Peter worthy of his awesomeness, and love him all the more for it.

The mystery was merely okay, the literary references perhaps a bit thick, but generally a great ending to a captivating series.

Oh! I should complain a bit, though, about the excessive use of French. Did Sayers actually expect her readers to know the language? She used it in previous novels, but not to the extent she did in this one, since whenever the characters start to talk about sex in this one they switch into French (I'm honestly not joking). I think she (and the characters) were being intentionally silly, but I'm honestly not sure. Luckily I could understand at least some of it....

Finally there's merely a brief moment when Peter and Harriet allude to their statuses as corpse magnets, when in fact they should be completely amazed that this keeps happening to them... but whatever, it's a murder mystery. ( )