Lord Peter Wimsey Novels 1-5

One of my goals for 2021 was to read through Dorothy Sayer's novels about aristocrat-turned-detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. I've loved the books so far, but haven't felt the need to review each one separately. Here are my thoughts on the first five.

Whose Body? - Sayers introduces her fascinating amateur detective with his perfect sidekick: Bunter, the butler. To make things more interesting, Lord Peter suffers from PTSD due to his participation in WWI.

Clouds of Witness (I'm sorry the Kindle version has a horrible cover.) A murder mystery involving Peter's brother and sister. The wonderful detective Parker begins to fall in love with one of the principal characters in the book. 

Unnatural Death - The story takes place in 1927, but my copy came with a "biography" written by Wimsey's uncle that goes through 1935 and included spoilers. Still, I appreciated some of the background info because it helped to explain why Wimsey's brother was such a cad in the previous book. This was my favorite so far because we know early on who did it, but it takes ages to discover HOW. And Miss Climpson is adorable. At right is my favorite quote when Wimsey finds her a little worse for wear.

Lord Peter Views the Body - A delightful collection of short stories, showing Lord Peter from many different angles. I especially enjoyed the mystery he solved with his 10-year old nephew tagging along.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club - This murder mystery had some really delightful twists. I enjoyed the brief but hilarious discussion about whether sinfulness was actually a glandular problem.

Please note that there is light swearing throughout these books, but it never seems gratuitous. Also, several of these titles are quite pricey, so I hope you are able to get them through your local library like I did.

Blessings,

The Value of Nonsense Poetry

Many people have a hard time finding the point of poetry, much less poetry that boasts of its nonsensical content, but poetry is the literature of compacted significance. Where the novelist uses a whole plot to unfold a few different ideas, the poet can bring whole traditions of thought into a few lines because of his freedom to assume that every poetic choice has great significance, only limited by the history of language and the reader’s imagination. Therefore, a poet takes great pains to find the perfect word and the perfect place for that word in the poem.

But, unlike the standard poet, the nonsense poet's style is much less laborious. His process is free and easy because, as a writer of nonsense, he reserves the right to assume readers don't fully comprehend every aspect of his meaning. Out of the inability to articulate an exact interpretation, we have the freedom to confidently assert truths about its objective meaning. Readers, then - especially young ones seeing it for the first time - get lost in wonderment at the ambiguous, foreign loveliness of the words and their success at communicating a story of good winning over evil through courage, perseverance, and skill.

So is that really the whole point? Just surprise at the nonsense of the words? Well, yes. We use the word “wonder” when we do not know something and would like to know it—a simple quotidian example. To expand it, wonder is the action of the mind, soul, and body when it encounters something it does not and cannot comprehend. It is a suspension of rational thought, a moment—brief or long—when we behold something of great beauty or horror, and through that encounter, grasp at truth. Wonder leads us to the eternal. 

From an article by Amanda Gehrke at The Federalist. Read full post here.

Blessings,