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Tag: Dorothy Sayers

Review: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Dorothy Sayers

Published 22 Mar 2011 by Gin Jenny

Tra-la, tra-la, I am jonesing so hard for Dorothy Sayers right now I don’t even know what to say about it. My clever-but-not-always-right friend tim stopped me from buying several other Dorothy Sayers mysteries or else it would be a Dorothy Sayers Festival all up in here. I want to read all her books. And then I want to travel to an alternate universe where she wrote more books than Agatha Christie, and read all those additional books. Many of them would feature Harriet Vane. Sigh. In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, an old guy dies in the club…

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The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, ed. Barbara Reynolds

Published 9 Oct 2009 by Gin Jenny

This is the first volume of Dorothy Sayers’s letters, actually. It’s properly called, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899 – 1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist.  I am displeased at having two colons in the title.   You know what was most satisfying about this book?  How when I got all through with it, I kept remembering bits of it and thinking, Darn, wish I’d marked that passage, and then glancing back through the book and finding that I had.  Hurrah for me! Dorothy Sayers was an interesting lady, and this book covers the period of her life with…

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Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers

Published 4 Oct 2009 by Gin Jenny

A few days ago, my friend tim mentioned Gaudy Night, and I realized that I wanted nothing in the world more than to read Gaudy Night.  I know I refused to read it or even think about it earlier this year when I was reading Strong Poison, but I have rarely enjoyed a reread as much as I did this one.  Reading Gaudy Night this time was like eating cilantro – you know what it’s going to be like, and you are thinking, man, this is going to be great, but no matter how high your expectations are, you find…

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Have His Carcase, Dorothy Sayers

Published 10 May 2009 by Gin Jenny

Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, together again, hooray!  Harriet Vane has gone off for a vacation in a watering-place (watering-place.  Brits are so weird.), and she happens upon a dead body, all throat-cut and bloody.  The corpse is dancer Paul Alexis, who is engaged (slightly sordidly) to an extremely rich older woman called Mrs. Weldon, and appears to have been part of a strange Bolshevik type plot.  All of the possible suspects have unbreakable alibis.  Harriet will still not marry Peter, but he carries on badgering her to marry him anyway. I am mildly bothered by Peter’s continual badgering of…

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Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Sayers

Published 9 May 2009 by Gin Jenny

So apparently?  Dorothy Sayers did not write her Harriet Vane books all in a row.  Murder Must Advertise happens after Peter has already met Harriet, but Harriet doesn’t feature in it at all.  In between wooing Harriet and solving mysteries with her (and getting woefully rejected), Peter still finds time to gallivant around infiltrating advertising agencies to sort out other problems.  I didn’t know this.  I thought that the books with Harriet just came one after another in direct sequence. This makes me feel better about Peter and Harriet.  You know how the Doctor asks Donna to come traveling with…

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Strong Poison, Dorothy Sayers

Published 3 May 2009 by Gin Jenny

Strong Poison is a comfort book of mine.  I bought it at Bongs & Noodles one time on the way back from a doctor’s appointment regarding my tendonitis.  It was a very trying year – I was doing four AP courses and two honors ones, and I was very stressed about getting good grades so I could get into college – and anyway, we stopped by Bongs & Noodles and my mother suggested Strong Poison if I was after a new book.  I read it under my desk in calculus (bad, I know, but trust me, nobody was learning anything…

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The Case of Madeleine Smith, Rick Geary

Published 27 Apr 2009 by Gin Jenny

Oh, dear, the plight of women throughout history has been really dreadful.  The Case of Madeleine Smith is a graphic novel (graphic history, I guess) about real-life Victorian lady Madeleine Smith, who may or may not have murdered her lover Emile L’Anglier (though she probably did murder him, the book strongly implies).  It’s a straightforward, fairly impersonal depiction of the story – could just as well be the Classic Comics version!  The book deliberately (I assume) sets the reader at one remove from the players in the story, so it’s more of a history than a story.  I would have…

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