Yes, there's no murder, but the dread that comes to afflict Harriet's college is just as threatening as a homicidal maniac, and is undermining the community of scholars in ways that a maniac probably would not.

Harriet was somewhat more rounded from the start, but she reflects more and more in later novels, building a relationship with Peter despite her harrowing doubts. The sculpting gets remarkably fully completed in Busman's Honeymoon. Sayers takes Peter Wimsey, who in her first few books was more laughable and less realistic than Sherlock Holmes, and sculpts him over time into an almost human multidimensional character. Sayers proclaims the mutual supportiveness of a faculty that evidently is harpying itself to shreds.Īnd yet. Peter deduces pretty early who the culprit is, but tells no one for the flimsiest of reasons and puts several people into predictable and predicted danger The style is overblown and the cultural assumptions do grate or nauseate.

Harriet is supposed to be exercising independence but the mystery plot makes her totally dependent on Peter. It is indeed fatally flawed in many ways. James and Jill Paton Walsh about Gaudy Night. And when the mystery is finally solved, she is faced with an agonising decision: should she, after five years of rejecting his proposals, finally agree to marry Lord Peter? This release includes a special interview with top crime novelists P. As his investigation draws near to uncovering the culprit, Harriet s life comes under threat.

But which of the apparently rational, respectable dons could be committing such crazed acts? When a desperate undergraduate, at her wits end after receiving a series of particularly savage letters, attempts to drown herself, Harriet decides that it is time to ask Lord Peter Wimsey for help. Some of the notes threaten murder and one of them involves a long Latin quotation, which makes Harriet suspect that the perpetrator is probably a member of the Senior Common Room. A full-cast dramatisation specially recorded for BBC Audiobooks, starring Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the Gaudy, the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies and poison-pen letters including one that says, Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup.

Gaudy night bbc