Gaudy Night

"This is a really good example of how your relationship with a book changes over time. When I first read Gaudy Night , I thought, ‘Why am I reading this? There’s no murder in it. It’s people fannying about in Oxford. There’s a poison pen aspect to it and not much happens.’ Then I read it again. I love rereading crime books—it’s part of that comfort thing we were talking about—and I just fell in love with it. I’ve probably read Gaudy Night five or six times since then. What I love about it is that it’s beautifully written. And I really love the two central characters. There’s a love story. If you look back, in the 1920s people used to write rules for detective fiction. It was a very formulaic, very structured genre back then. And one of the rules written by one man was, ‘Never have a love interest in a detective story. It ruins it.’ I think that’s complete rubbish—as you can tell from my book, which has a love interest at its heart. “In a very messy world of no real resolution…here is a problem and here is a solution” Gaudy Night is a beautiful love story. I love the relationship between Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. I just think it’s magnificent. I love the fact that he’s this damaged man who some people dismiss as a posh twit. He suffered during the First World War, he has post-traumatic stress syndrome, and is in love with this woman who he once saved from being hanged for murder in an earlier book. It’s part of a series and that’s important. The setting in Oxford is brilliantly done. It’s charming. It’s very restful in parts. Nothing that bad happens for large chunks of it, so it’s quite soothing in that regard. All these things together epitomize what I love in the crime genre. Yes, I think I’ve read most of her books and I’ve certainly read all the Peter Wimsey books. The series was continued by another author, Jill Paton Walsh, and I’ve read all of those as well. Often when a series is continued after the author dies the books are rubbish, but these ones by Jill Paton Walsh are brilliant. So if you like the Wimsey/Vane books, the series goes on for another four books after Dorothy Sayers dies, and they’re also really good. Some people will say not enough happens in it, but I think that’s part of its charm. I do think it is her best. The other one I think is brilliant is Murder Must Advertise . It’s also part of the Peter Wimsey series. There’s no love interest in it. He goes undercover in a London ad agency, which is where Dorothy Sayers worked for a time herself. So what it’s like to be in a London ad agency in the 1920s is just brilliantly revealed. That’s a really good one as well. Yes, and that must have been what it was like for Dorothy Sayers. She was a great intellectual and you can sense her personal experience in the book. That’s what makes Harriet Vane so brilliant. In the book, she’s a novelist. She doesn’t take any nonsense. She’s very conscious of the world she’s moving in and the limitations of it—what happens if you constantly dismiss women, if you put them in one part of the university and ask them to live by themselves. She’s very honest about the downside of that as well. The female college is very brilliantly done, and not everyone in it is a heroine."