Murder Must Advertise

 

I am losing my mind -- or it's true that e-books don't stick in the memory like physical books! Because it wasn't till I'd bought and re-read this copy of Murder Must Advertise that I discovered that I'd bought it on the Kindle and read it about five years ago. For proof, see here. And I still couldn't really remember who dunnit! So maybe my mind is going, after all.

Murder Must Advertise is one of my favourite Sayers novels. I enjoy the breezy, gossipy workplace setting, with people darting in and out of each other's offices and perching on desks chatting (certainly that was very like my last job), and all the fascinating period minutiae of preparing ads in the 1930s. Sayers was ahead of her time in bemoaning the commercialisation and shallow greed of modern society; the sentiment of those rants hasn't dated at all, though the content of the ads might have (it's all "Whifflets" and "Crunchlets" for Pym's Publicity!) 

Also, there's the superb cricket match at the end of the novel, one of the best in fiction, and pertinent to the plot, too. As I lay in bed listening to Ben Stokes cut loose on the final day of the Second Ashes Test last night, I couldn't help but be reminded of Lord Peter with his blood up, cutting and driving all over the ground. (That stopped me minding so much about the runs Stokes was accumulating -- and then we won anyway, so that was okay.) There's no Harriet, so that's a bummer, but I can overlook that just this once.

The only aspect that is, as the kids say, cringe, is Wimsey leaping around in a harlequin costume. Yeah, no thanks. I prefer his disguise as mild-mannered copy-writer, Death Bredon.