(20) The 10th I think in the Lord Peter Wimsey series. I did not love this one. Wimsey goes undercover at a London ad agency hired by the owner as one of his recently deceased employees wrote a letter implying there was a game afoot at the company. Wimsey is aghast ... a working man. Working 9-5 writing inane slogans for products no one really needs. He suspects the dear departed copy editor did not just trip and fall down the staircase as initially suspected. And so this caper begins.

Neither Harriet Vane nor Bunter feature in this installment. Detective Parker plays a smaller role as well. Instead the narrative is filled with endless Brittish-icisms that fell flat for me. An entire chapter narrating a cricket match! A lot of advertising copy as contextual detail or red herring, I dunno but I found it tiresome. In the end the detecting and the whole dope-peddling scheme was not even very clever. The novel kept my interest but was definitely not amongst my favorites in this series. Either that or I am tiring of the whole schtick.

I will continue the series but I can't say that I love them. In this instance I much prefer the more modern Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series for a British mystery. Perhaps I will go back to Inspector Wexford to continue my summer mystery fix. ( )

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 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 ( )

This is Lord Peter Wimsey at his most sparkling when he is requested to investigate a death at an advertising agency. In order to do his investigation, he goes to work there undercover. ( )

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 ( )

In this addition to the Lord Peter series we find the protagonist working undercover at an advertising agency. The reader not only gets a thoroughly entertaining story but also an insider's look at the advertising industry of the 1920s. Included is a secondary plot involving illicit drug culture and smuggling which I found interesting. While I remembered some details from my last read, 35 or so years ago, I still enjoyed the characters and the plot. Definitely recommended, even as a standalone.