I really liked the first Wimsey/Vane book ("Strong Poison"), but this one was a bit tedious by comparison. I picked it up to keep reading about the characters, but it turned into long slog to puzzle out a murder with much discussion of train times and ciphers. Figuring out the mystery with 75 pages to go didn't help matters. ( )

Far too many uses of the word "dago" for my liking. Otherwise it's a pretty solid and very clever golden age mystery but doesn't have that special something to lift it higher. The final twist is both logical and also made me go "come ON" at the book and start giggling hysterically. ( )

(37) I loved the way this one started with Harriet Vane finding the body atop a big rock on a stretch of lonely beach while on a 'walking tour' vacation. (I guess this was a thing.) Not able to move the body to prevent the tide from coming in and washing it away - she sleuths around taking pictures of the slit throat, and the razor blade found in the water, and walks on to report it to the police in the next little town she comes to. Before long the police and Lord Peter are involved and the dead man is identified as a 'gigolo' at a seaside hotel, who dances with rich old ladies. And apparently sometimes convinces them to marry. The mystery gets incredibly convoluted and as the body has been washed away - its hard to prove murder or suicide.

I do like the interplay between Harriet and Peter and enjoyed all the hashing out of the details of the alibis. Who was telling the truth? The pages devoted to guessing the cipher were a bit much, though I did like the Romanov family tree twist. All in all it was definitely a good installment. Probably my biggest complaint is that they finally cooked up a story that made sense and then the novel just ... ended. Harriet and Peter literally say - lets go have lunch in Piccadilly square and leave this little town. I think a bit of a description of the aftermath and corroborating the theory was in order. ( )

paperback

Many murder mysteries have been given odds titles, but “Have His Carcase” (1932) by Dorothy L. Sayers must be one of the oddest, at least for American readers. Yet for its time and place it is actually a very good title. Under British law, the Have-His-Carcase Act, you cannot hold an inquest into a death until you have a body.

In this clever, always interesting novel, there is photographic evidence of a death, yet the body is swept out to sea by the tide, so for about half the book the sleuths, both professional and amateur, can only speculate.

Mystery writer Harriet Vane, herself a murder suspect until cleared after the intervention of Lord Peter Wimsey in a previous novel, discovers a young man with his throat cut along the coast. She finds fresh blood and a razor, but no footprints in the sand other than hers and the victim's. Realizing the tide is coming in, she takes a few photographs and then leaves to summon help

The body soon disappears, but Wimsey arrives, still trying to get Harriet to marry him. He believes it's a murder case, even through the local police and, eventually, the inquest say it's a suicide.

The victim had supported himself by dancing with wealthy older women at a nearby hotel. One of these women says the man had promised to marry her.

Other than the missing body, the case's other major complication is that two men, including this woman's son, had been behaving suspiciously, but both have ironclad alibis for the time of the murder. But if they didn't murder the man, who did?

When I devoured the Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, I considered “Have His Carcase” my favorite. This rereading doesn't change my opinion. ( )