Have His Carcase

"This is one of her Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane stories, which is a sub-series within her work. All of Sayers’ mysteries feature Wimsey, but starting with 1930’s Strong Poison , she wrote books featuring Harriet Vane, who acts as his sparring partner and—spoiler—eventual wife. In Strong Poison, Harriet is a detective novelist on trial for murder. She has been researching methods of murder for a book she’s writing, and ends up accused of the murder of her ex-lover. Wimsey investigates and eventually extricates her from that situation. In this book, she’s trying to get away from it all after having been at the centre of that terrible media maelstrom and the court case. She’s taken herself off on a solo walking tour of the south coast of England. She wants to get away from murder, death, the press, everything. She stops to have her lunch on a beach one day when she’s walking, and she sees a rock out in the low tide zone, and is a bit confused by what she sees. She goes to investigate, and finds a man lying dead on the rock with his throat cut. It is a locked room or impossible crime mystery in as much as she was sitting there the whole time, she could see the whole beach, and no one approached either by sea or by land. Yet here is this man lying there, still warm, blood still flowing. It’s impossible. How can it happen? “The classic ingredient—a closed circle of suspects—can be easier to create in a holiday setting” It all unfolds from there, really. She walks to the nearest town to tell the police. And because she is eminently practical, she realises this is going to be a huge story: detective novelist just cleared of murder discovers newly-murdered man. She calls the papers herself and sells the story—she can at least profit from it. Then Lord Peter Wimsey turns up to help investigate what has happened. The title, in true Dorothy L. Sayers fashion, is an obscure reference to the writ of habeas corpus , which says that you can only hold an inquest for a body if the body is present. If there’s no body there, you can’t proceed with the prosecution of a crime. The tide has come in and gone out again, taking the body with it. If Harriet hadn’t been there to take notes and photographs—because she had her little camera with her for her holiday—the police probably wouldn’t even have believed anything had happened. Most of the novel takes place in this interim period, where they can’t find a body but know that a murder has been committed. Not really, compared with the likes of Agatha Christie , or Ngaio Marsh . I think she wrote 15 books in total, starting in the early 1920s and finishing, I think, in 1937. Then she completely pivoted away from detective fiction, and had two subsequent careers. She got very involved with religious writing during the war—she was an ardent Anglican—and she did a lot of broadcasting for the BBC on the subject. Then, after the war, she got very involved in translation. She started and nearly completed what was, for most of the 20th century, a very highly thought of translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy . She remained a fan of detective fiction and a critic, but didn’t publish any of her own novels after the late 1930s. She died in 1957."