Murder Must Advertise

A sprawling spider-web of a mystery that begins by encasing you in layers of murkiness.
Who? What? Why? For the longest time you can't even get a grip on what exactly the problem seems to be.
Seemingly erratic behavior by Lord Peter leads to eventual elucidation. This is a clever book and it tells a complex story.
And, as an intriguing bonus, it's set in a 1930s advertising agency so sharply detailed that it comes as no surprise that Dorothy Sayers is speaking from her own job experience. There's a lot of interesting stuff here, but (and maybe this is just me) I found it too long this time through.
Also, the resolution is pretty sad

This is my second favorite LPW behind Gaudy Night, and that's saying something. It's just fantastic in so many ways... and my burning question is simply: how tall is LPW if he's under the regulation height for being a policeman LMAO????
this book is so much beyond just a murder mystery. LPW masquerading as Bredon and the Harlequin and social commentary through an advertisement office and an entire chapter dedicated to cricket (I read all of it and understood absolutely none of it). How does Sayers balance so many different characters with so many different motivations beside the social commentary I am truly fascinated. everyone in this book was so real to me and i unironically learned A Lot about newspaper advertising LMAOO

(the first show more time i read this i remember being down in Bethseda Maryland for my brother's soccer tourney and i recalled none of it rereading it so that was crazy. always good when you don't actually remember the solution to a murder mystery) show less

Wimsey Undercover
Review of the Hodder & Stoughton paperback (2016) reissue of the Victor Gollancz "Murder Must Advertise" (1933) original

There is a lot of fun to be had in this 1930's Golden Age mystery set in an advertising agency. Dorothy Sayers had the full background experience to write this as she herself had worked as an advertising copywriter for many years and builds an office full of quirky character types from it.

She puts her amateur detective character Lord Peter Wimsey into the mix playing his own invented cousin Death (pronounced as two syllables: De-ath) Bredon who joins the firm as a fledgling copywriter while secretly working to solve the mystery behind the death of his predecessor. On the way there are office secrets & show more politics, the charming recruitment of an office delivery boy as junior detective, some experimental stream of consciousness writing, an wild party orgy, a drugs gang, several more murders, a cricket match and more advertising jingles than you could ever imagine. show less

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L Sayers

This is the second Lord Peter Wimsey novel I have read and, as with the first, I find myself delighted with the writing of Dorothy L Sayers. There is a lot happening in [Murder Must Advertise] and the murder mystery and sleuthing around to identify the culprit are almost incidental.

I knew nothing about Dorothy L. Sayers before I read [The Nine Tailors] and from that book and the bits of background research I carried out I learned she was a fan of Gothic stories and in particular the stories of M.R. James, Josephs Sheridan Le Fanu, and Wilkie Collins. Having had that experience I approached Murder Must Advertise with heightened awareness for more than just a story. Sayers’s “Author’s show more Note” at the start of the book added to my anticipation as she made such an issue of pointing out that while this book was set in an advertising agency she was not implying that anything like the goings on that happen in the book actually happened in any particular, or indeed any, advertising agency. I felt the lady didst protest too much. I learnt from friends that Sayers had actually worked in an advertising agency and had been responsible for several well known campaigns. Also, she was responsible for The Mustard Club, the Tucan in the Guinness advertisements and the Guinness phrase, “Guinness is good for you!”, all details that get referenced in the novel.

I will say nothing of the murder mystery or its solution but will mention a few things that delighted me and that mean I will be reading more Dorothy L Sayers books.

Firstly, Sayers used her obvious professional knowledge of the workings of an advertising agency to inform the reader of the workings of such an establishment. She also added in the petty jealousies, idiosyncrasies and internal politics that exist in any business, but especially a small to medium sized enterprise. Her characters ring true and I know I have come across many of them in my visits to different organisations.

At the start of Chapter 11, Sayers describes advertising from the view of Lord Peter Wimsey and presents his viewpoint as being independent of advertising as his being a rich person means he just buys something when he wants it and is not influenced by advertisements which he concludes are for the poorer people. He describes how the “comparatively poor” are influenced by advertisements that push them to acquired goods and services that will give them a fleeting experience of being well off, the feeling that people who are actually rich have all the time. In this two page socio-economic commentary on advertising, Sayers shows how, that if it were not for advertising, the comparatively poor would not spend the little money they have to buy goods and consequently drive the economy and keep people working and earning money. These two pages are filled with wonderful words and ideas but the essence of her comments are presented in the reaction of Lord Peter Wimsey to his thoughts on the matter.

”He had never before paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realised the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion.”

The amorality of advertising is presented in a discussion between Wimsey and the two principals of the agency when they are discussing how they will devise a campaign that will boost their cigarette manufacturing client’s sales. The principals are talking about boosting cigarette smoking amongst the populace and describe how they have to make smoking appeal to women more and how to get them off the milder cigarettes and on to the stronger ones. This discussion would be wildly anachronistic today, but was probably very real for the time setting of the story.

”No, but really. Suppose you push up the smoking of every man and woman in the Empire till they must either stop or die of nicotine poisoning?”

“We’re a long way off that,” replied Mr Pym seriously…

…This scheme should carry a strong appeal to women…We want to get women down to serious smoking. Too many of them play about with it. Take them off scented stuff and put them on the straightforward Virginia cigarette.”

I also found little axioms that are as true today as they were when this novel was written, e.g.

”Directors are the last people to hear anything about the staff. Otherwise,” said Miss Meteyard, “they wouldn’t be able to stand on their hind legs at the Staff Dinner and shoot off the speeches about co-operation, and all being one happy family.”

When describing how another firm paid its staff well to keep them from feeling the need to have a union, Sayers states of the firm’s management,

“They had merely discovered that comfortable and well-fed people are constitutionally disinclined for united action of any sort – a fact which explains the asinine meekness of the income-tax payer.”

I found Sayers’s commentary on the tendency of one character’s trousers and shirt to part company very amusing.

”…while Mr Tallboy, irreproachable in other respects, had an unfortunate tendency to come apart at the waist, for which his tailor and his shirt-maker were, no doubt, jointly responsible.”

All in all, a very entertaining book filled with good writing, wit and some intelligent presentation of ideas and considerations. As I said at the beginning of this piece, this is more than just a murder mystery. show less

I understand that Sayers herself worked in an advertising agency. It isn't surprising, given the detail and feeling for the place shown here. What is wonderful is that this takes place in the '30's, and the workings of a then-modern ad agency are fascinating from this distance. A touch of tightening might have benefitted the book but it is wonderful and I thoroughly enjoyed it--language, wit, situation, whimsey, Wimsey, and all.

Two casual snipes at Chinese in passing for absolutely no reason. Also distressing: Our Hero comes up with a new advertising campaign to gamify cigarette purchases and is terribly proud of putting it into practice. This is 1933 so I guess he and the author didn't know how much ill health and death this will cause? Though someone does mention nicotine poisoning so they can't be entirely ignorant. It's deeply ironic when the author spends much of the book being absolutely biting about the role of advertising in society, and Peter's brother-in-law waxes passionate on the subject of drug-runners killing many more people by getting them addicted to noxious substances than your petty axe-murderer.

Also once again Peter encourages the murderer show more to save everyone the bother of a trial, which is, as the murderer notes, a very public-school kind of morality. Times have changed I guess -- apart from advertising. show less

There's 2 levels to this - as a murder mystery and as a depiction of life in the advertising industry. The setting here is given much more prominence than it is in other murder mysteries and obviously reflects Sayers' own experience in it.

As a murder mystery it's *fine*. Something I noticed here that's also in Strong Poison and Have His Carcase is there's a surprisingly limited pool of suspects and barely any attempt to set up red herrings. Here there's *technically* lots of characters introduced who could have done it but there's only 2 that are developed to have any suspicion or motive attached to them, really.

The advertising setting though... the actual key contrast in the book is between the evils of the cocaine trade and the show more slightly less evil but still pretty grubby world of the advertising industry. It's clear that Sayers is a bit vague on the drug stuff but the advertising industry is clearly deeply personal to her. A small but important subplot is Lord Peter coming up with a highly successful advertising campaign for a brand of cigarettes that gets people smoking more and gets new people into smoking The precise health effects of cigarette smoking were I assume not widely known but it's still clearly taken as read that they're not great (mention is made of the risks of people being struck down by nicotine poisoning). The parallel is extremely obvious, although it's not really tackled - the detective got rid of one murderer and helped break up a drug gang but at the same time promoted a major takeup of drugs, the only difference being it was perfectly legal. Especially knowing what we know today it's hard not to see him as morally culpable for tens of thousands of deaths show less