Sayers, Dorothy L - Have His Carcase (1932)

Review by Nick Fuller

5/5

No book better testifies to Sayers’ ability to handle the long form than these 450 pages of small print, for, despite only one murder (and that committed in the first chapter), the reader’s interest is kept throughout, Sayers engaging him with both clueing and character. The lore of tides and boats, horses, trains and motorcars is necessary to the construction — and explosion — of alibis for the murder of the gigolo found by Harriet Vane on a lonely beach, taken originally to be suicide (absence of footprints), until Lord Peter demonstrates otherwise. The play with the time of death is superb, both the way in which Wimsey destroys “cast-iron” alibis only to discover that they were faked for a time when the murder was not committed, and the haemophilia business. The ploy with Bolsheviks is especially good, although the Playfair cipher (borrowed from John Rhode) is too mathematical to sustain the reader’s interest in the way the codes of Murder Must Advertise or The Nine Tailors do, and the reader may marvel at the sheer elaborateness of the crime.