Episode 242: “Murder Must Advertise” by Dorothy L. Sayers, Intro and Ch. 1-5
Welcome back to The Literary Life podcast and the beginning of our series on Dorothy L. Sayers’ classic detective novel, Murder Must Advertise. Beginning with the Golden Age of the detective novel and the backdrop of World War I, Angelina and Thomas give some historical background to provide a setting for this novel. Angelina also shares some biographical information about Dorothy Sayers and her literary education and advertising work. As they dig into the opening chapters of this novel, our hosts talk about Lord Peter Wimsey, his name and character. They also talk at some length about the “Bright Young Things” circle and their place in society during the post-WWI era.
In October the House of Humane Letters will be bringing you a new mini-class with Querida Thompson, “How to Read a Symphony: Revealing the Ingenuity of Haydn’s Symphony 42 in D. Major.”
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Commonplace Quotes:
And it ceased, and God granted them all things for which they had striven,
And the heart of beast in the place of a man’s heart was given.
Ruyard Kipling, from “The City of Brass”
In the nineteenth century the vast, unexplored limits of the world began to shrink at an amazing and unprecedented rate. The electric telegraph circled the globe; railways brought remote villages into touch with civilization; photographs made known to the stay-at-homes the marvels of foreign landscapes, customs, and animals; science reduced seeming miracle to mechanicals marvels; popular education and improved policing made town and country safer for the common man than they had ever been. In place of the adventurer and the knight errant, popular imagination hailed the doctor, the scientist, and the policeman as saviors and protectors. But if one could no longer hunt the manticora, on could still hunt the murdered; if the armed escort had grown less necessary, yet one still needed the analyst to frustrate the wiles of the poisoner; from this point of view, the detective steps into his right place at the protector of the weak–the latest of the popular hero, the true successor of Roland and Lancelot.
Dorothy L. Sayers, from The Omnibus of Crime
Portrait of a Barmaid
by Dame Edith Sitwell
Metallic waves of people jar
Through crackling green toward the bar
Where on the tables chattering-white
The sharp drinks quarrel with the light.
Those coloured muslin blinds the smiles,
Shroud wooden faces in their wiles —
Sometimes they splash like water (you
Yourself reflected in their hue).
The conversation loud and bright
Seems spinal bars of shunting light
In firework-spurting greenery.
O complicate machinery
For building Babel, iron crane
Beneath your hair, that blue-ribbed mane
In noise and murder like the sea
Without its mutability!
Outside the bar where jangling heat
Seems out of tune and off the beat —
A concertina's glycerine
Exudes, and mirrors in the green
Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints
Of tentative and half-soiled tints.
Book List:
(Amazon Affiliate Links are included in this post.)
Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
The Song of Roland trans. by Dorothy Sayers
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
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