Gaudy Night (1935)

"Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?"
"So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober."

I am trying really hard to become a critical reader and think rather than feel. And yet, the only response I had to Gaudy Night was a "HMMMPH" while I was engulfing it. ( )

Gaudy Night took me an awfully long time to read (in comparison to, say, The Nine Tailors). It had less Peter than I'd like, although Harriet's relationship with him develops most satisfactorily, and her character in general too, and it had no on screen Bunter, or Parker, or anyone like that. Some of the female academics were worth getting a little fond of, but not so much that I was bowled over by them.

The mystery itself, I actually spoilered myself on the criminal by the time I was one hundred pages in. Beware of wikipedia! Anyway, knowing what I knew, I could see the clues that lead there, but if I didn't, I don't know if I would have figured it out.

The whole plot rather seems to serve Harriet's character development and the development of her relationship with Lord Peter. On the other hand, there's some commentary about female academics and so on (that seems awfully outdated to a female academic at the end of her second year of university in this day and age), and the setting -- Oxford -- is lovely and the atmosphere well-rendered. ( )

I love this novel. The mystery is well-done, but other issues take precedence. The relationship between Peter and Harriet, the role of women, the conflict between the intellectual and the emotional life are all explored with skill and passion. I have read Gaudy Night a number of times over the years and I have appreciated it more with each reading. This is the book (along with Jude the Obscure!!) which first made me want to visit Oxford and which never fails to make me wish that I had attended university there! ( )

This was the first book I read in the series (after, I think, watching the BBC "Have His Carcase.") It was nice to read it again in the context of everything else. And after having visited Oxford!

This book contains so much awesome - Oxford in the thirties, romance, complexly drawn characters, feminism, extremely silly slang, humor, and oh yes, a mystery.

Sayers is wonderful because she allows her characters to have their own opinions and even to be wrong. Peter is allowed to be agnostic (even though Sayers wrote Christian theology), kind-hearted Padgett is allowed to be a Fascist, Harriet is allowed to write novels with flat characterization and not get on with old schoolfriends and be wrong about what kind of person Peter is.

Dear authors of the world - let your characters be wrong about all sorts of things. You'll like them better, I promise. ( )

Dorothy Sayers, recommended to me by the town librarian some 40ish years ago, got me back into reading mysteries. I'd stopped because of a real life tragedy involving a murder; for a long while the thought of reading books that hinged on death seemed, well, unhinged. But Sayers got me in again, with wit, and her beguiling characters, and soon I was as corrupt and insensitive as the next person. Well...maybe not all that, but I returned to the genre I had loved as a child. Before the murder. ( )