Title: Busman’s
Honeymoon
Author: Dorothy Sayers
Date: 1937
Publisher: Harper & Row
ISBN: 0-06-080823-3
Length: 370 pages
Quote: “Peter Wimsey is married—yes, actually married—to that extraordinary young
woman...Peter must be forty-five if he’s a day.”
A “busman’s holiday” was a leisure trip in the
bus. In this volume of their adventures Lord and Lady Peter Wimsey find
themselves solving a murder mystery on their honeymoon.
Sayers had already explained the rule under which,
upon marriage to Lord Peter, Harriet Vane acquired the title “Lady Peter”
rather than, more logically, Lady Harriet. Possibly the off-putting sound of
this title has something to do with the fact that she remains plain Harriet to
herself and her friends.
Anyway, she’d helped Lord Peter solve a few other
cases since he proved her innocent of the murder of her ex-boyfriend, and now
they’re full partners in crime—solving them, that is. Those who’ve found
Partners-for-Life will appreciate this fictional rendition of something rare
and wonderful. This couple’s passion for each other is matched only by their
passion for solving murder mysteries. If it makes them the most eccentric
aristocrats in England, it may make them the happiest. The joy they feel at
this time in their lives would probably have sustained them if their first
detective adventure as a married couple had involved gruesome murders, but,
perhaps out of compassion for readers, Sayers gives them a case distinguished
by its cleanness.
Sayers, a Christian, never gave Lord Peter Wimsey
the emotional comfort of religion. (He’s had a Christian education, has
clergymen as friends, and goes around quoting Christian literature, but he lost
any faith in a “personal” God in the trenches in the 1914 war.) In her mind the
only really religious, as distinct from cultural, Christian element in her
detective stories was that she refused to “cheapen life” by inventing unlovable
stick figures who exist only to be murdered. In her novels Lord Peter’s
whimsical mind, always dredging up quotes and fun facts, always guarantees a
Comedy element; his empathy for the victims always guarantees a Tragedy
element; and his relationship with unaccountably coy Harriet—who didn’t want to
be accused of marrying him for his money, but in this volume we learn that her
ex-boyfriend had also conditioned her not to like sex—added a Romance.
We have
here, therefore, a Tragedy, a Comedy, a Romance, and a Mystery, all in one
volume, and the last thing Sayers would have wanted was for anyone to mistake
this four-genre triumph for a Christian Novel as well. She thought of her
detective stories as potboilers that subsidized the relatively smaller stack of
religious writing she found time to do. Nevertheless she worked them out with
all the joy of duty and pleasure that she described in The Mind of the Maker, and that she gives to Peter and Harriet—and
it shows. If you like novels at all, you just about have to like Busman’s Honeymoon.
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