Is it you, Nick Fuller, who proposed this as one of the top detective/locked-room mystery stories (I went searching for prior posts but didn't find it here or on GAM)? Anyway, it, apart from "Gaudy Night" was one of the only Sayers books I'd never read because their descriptions turned my stomach. Now I'm doing it, because somebody recommended it. I can see why now, only halfway through "Busmans's Honeymoon" which chronicles, in tedious detail, the marriage of Lord Peter with Harriet Vane, complete with 'my turtledove, my dearest' at every opportunity. Yuch!
With that going on, even though Sayers explains it in her preface that this is a love story with incidental detection of a mystery and doesn't really apologize -- take it or leave it, she says to mystery fans. I wish she would just have said 'they fucked their brains out' rather than going on and on about nuptial beds and having to put up with Lord Peter spouting off obscure things in Latin and French when his butler Bunter can't get the cook to serve the breakfast eggs boiled properly. This is an AWFUL book. The murder itself isn't revealed until page 125 or so (although it is hinted at) after you have waded through loads of crap. Very mawkish claptrap that almost made me want to toss the book into the rubbish bin.
I will grant that there is some nice stuff that points out the mores of the times, such as we now have never been privileged enough to enjoy, as exemplified by Bunter telling the milkman to go back to the village and get the latest edition of the Times for Lord Peter. Some very funny bits, a la Wodehouse, involving a chimney-sweep who goes on and on about 'corroded sut', a vicar who shoots a shotgun up the cmimney to clear it out out (disastrously), and idiotic rustics of various sorts including the police who just tug their forelocks and say yes'm and no, m'lord.
A nice comedy of manners based on the times, but hardly a great mystery novel. Read the book as a bit of Social History, even ignoring the fact that that life-style was pretty much gone even in Sayers's times. This is basically an updated Regency Romance, and it really suck sucks, if you will pardon my Englsh.
BTW, nobody has replied to my question why Peter Wimsey is called Lord Peter, since he doesn't have a title. Also there is the protocol, which was pointed out here, that Harriet Wimsey (nee Vane) should be addressed as Lady Peter. How silly can this sort of thing be and still be readable? A very dumb detective story, even if it has historical and social interest. Wimsey in this story is worse of an ass than he was in his first ("Whose Body?"), even though he is shown to have 'matured' about human passions, etc. and occasionally acts like a real human being.
I have to say, that apart from slogging through the revoltingly romantic bits*, that this book works very well as a 'Village Cosy' that points out, as Sherlock Holmes remarked, and I'll put it rather mildly based on what he actually said, that sin is not confined to the City.
(* I will never now highly regard that nice song 'Auprès de ma blonde', which Wimsey keeps warbling at every opportunity with all its detailed and incomprehensible, to me, verses in French while interspersing stuff in Latin and from obscure Elizabethan authors, all of which are totally irrelevant even in the circumstances. What an incredible twit he is, even worse in this later book than he was in the earlier ones! His wife Harriet seems to have a lot more presence of mind and sense of reality.)
The village stuff is actually quite good, as are the presentations of the minor characters such as Supt. Kirk of the local police, who reads Tennyson so as not to limit his mind just to cop stuff, and tries to protect his foolish constable when he comes under suspicion and admits to dereliction of duty. Well done presentation defining what your local chief of police SHOULD be, rather than a Gestapo agent as you get presented with in more 'realistic' mysteries in the modern Procedurals. And the great scene where Wimsey's butler Bunter really reveals himself, a classic comic moment that occurs when the pro-tem housekeeper, Mrs Ruddle (who is one of those nasty people you'd like to squash down like an insect), decides to clean up (shake and dust) Lord Peter's bottles of Cockburn '96 port:
"Gawdstruth!" cried Bunter. The mask came off him all in one piece, and nature, red in tooth and claw, leapt like a tiger from ambush. "Gawdstruth, would you believe it? All his lordship's vintage port!" He lifted shaking hands to heaven. "You lousy old nosey-parking bitch! You ignorant, interfering old bizzom! Who told you to go poking your long nose into my pantry?"
Also, the murderer is sympathetically and realistically presented, and there is a hidden agenda opposing the death penalty in this book. God knows, in modern times we consider the death penalty barbaric -- in most cases (NOT ALL, especially terrorists) -- but GAD-era had to put up with the fact that the sort of homicide that would now get somebody 10 years in prison then meant hanging them. But that's by the way, by the 1930s they had at least abolished the hanging of forgers and kids who pickpocketed a watch worth more than 30 shillings.
So I have to say that Sayers was a good mystery writer (even if this book doesn't really involve any detection to speak of). Just get rid of the nonsense about Lord Peter and his bride! The book is 400 pages of which a good editor, or 'digest' expert, could easily cut out 150 or so of the yucky parts.
I did find it interesting that at the end of this book, when Wimsey has solved the case (and condemned the culprit to an undeserved execution -- even though the solution involves pure malice aforethought, and also has a clever alibi scheme) that he goes out of his way to hire the 'best' defense lawyer in Britain to defend him, and actually shows that he isn't such a total ass as he'd appear to be from his blitherings with his bride by breaking down in tears at the end when the execution takes place. The victim was in fact, as revealed throughout the book, a totally obnoxious person who had messed up a lot of lives, and in fact Lord Peter SHOULD feel guilty as otherwise the crime would have gone unsolved, regardless of Harriet's point that if it had a cloud would have clung over the heads of the other suspects for the rest of their lives. It is amazing how good a writer Sayers was, even given her obsession with Lord Peter Wimsey.
(Still, nobody has replied to my question about why he is Lord Peter, since he hasn't got a title.)
PS. I have to apologize for saying they'd have been better off 'fucking their brains out' instead of spouting quotations at each other. But this is not a kiddy web site. Sometimes you have to be vulgar to make a point. An opposite example of the same principle, where being vulgar just wouldn't have worked, is when Shakespeare had Macbeth say 'She should have died hereafter' on learning of the death of his wife, when what he really means is 'I can't deal with this shit right now'.