The Body in The Cellar

Ok..so this post really belonged to the month of March. But like I keep saying March was a brilliant glittering vacation and lot of unexpected readings, so this kind of went in the back burner! But Dorothy Sayers is Dorothy Sayers and her talent cannot lie hidden for long and I was soon hooked till I reached the finishing line! Busman’s Honeymoon (Lord Peter Wimsy #13 by Dorothy Sayers was my  third Reading England Book for the year, focusing on Hertfordshire and my first ever Dorothy Sayers! Yes! I know! I know! I have spent all my adult years without reading a Dorothy Sayers mystery and you have no idea on which planet I was living in and all that! But what can I say? I just never got around to it! Anyhow lets get on with the book!

Busman’s Honeymoon begins with the wedding of Lord Peter Wimsy to his long standing inamorata Miss Harriet Vane and departing for his honeymoon accompanied by his faithful valet Bunter to a farmhouse in Hertfordshire, a long cherished place of Harriets. However on arriving to the farmhouse, they find the scene quite chaotic, the owner, Noakes, from whom the farmhouse had been bought, is missing and no one, including his niece are even aware that the farmhouse had been sold. As the Wimsy’s try an settle in, they discover creditors looking for Noakes for money that he has not returned and other less savory sides to his character like his borrowing and never returning sums of money from his niece and the gardener and his miser like behavior towards everyone including the upkeep of the farmhouse! Soon all these discoveries are held in suspension, when the body of Noakes is found in the cellar and an investigation is launched to find the killer! The Wimsy’s are unwillingly drawn into the search for the criminal, all the while realizing that the murdered man was a blackmailer, miser and a crook himself and there is more than one person with reasons for hating the former owner of the farmhouse!

Dorothy Sayers in the very introduction of the book says that this is not a murder mystery but a romance, where a murder just happens! Well, it is true, it is a romance, but it also a mystery and it a well knit plot that caters to readers of both genre’s without the mush or the gore, respectively.  Her character’s drawn from a small village hamlet are created to perfection, with a scholarly kindly Vicar, a Superintend of Police trying to do what is best and the gossiping servant. Without playing to the cliche’s Ms. Sayer’s puts together an ensemble that is as brilliant as its life like! The plot is exciting with new twists and turns at every page and an absolutely ingenuous solution in the end!But more than the usual play of great characters and a wonderful plot line, there are some unique factors to this novel, that made it a outstanding read! The book is filled with literary allusions, from Shakespeare to Marlowe to Arnold, all of the greats of English Literature come into play and a marvelously knitted into the dialogues of the book. There are so many authors and poets I recognized and then so many I did not. This literary guessing game, added a whole new layer to the book! Even the title of the book is a colloquial assertion to a bus driver’s holiday – it refers to a  busman, to go off on a holiday, would take an excursion by bus, thereby engaging in a similar activity to his work. I quote directly from my trusty source Wikipedia. We do not rush into the mystery, but are treated to a long prologue of how the marriage happened, how did the relatives react and how the press was decoyed! Similarly, we do not rush out of the book after the culprit is caught, but rather, we are exposed to a human and moving experience of how Wimsey deals with the post investigative time, with allusions to his World War I trauma. The ending especially makes the book sensitive and absolutely unlike any other detective novel series!

In the end, I loved the book and have bought a couple of more Dorothy Sayer’s already. If you are looking for a hard boiled crime whodunit, this may not be the book for you. But if you are looking for a crime fiction, which looks at many other things and has relationships, and literature and fun, this IS the book for you!

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