Lord Peter Wimsey marries Harriet Vane - Oct 08, 1937 - HISTORY.com Lord Peter Wimsey marries Harriet Vane Share this: Lord Peter Wimsey marries Harriet Vane Author Lord Peter Wimsey marries Harriet Vane URL Publisher A+E Networks Fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey finally marries Harriet Vane, a prickly mystery writer he has pursued through several novels, on this day in 1937 in the novel Busman’s Honeymoon. The novel, by Dorothy Sayers, was one of the last featuring the two English sleuths. Sayers, whose father was an Oxford teacher and minister, became one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford. Although the family moved to the country when Sayers was 4, she received an excellent education in Latin, French, history, and mathematics from her father and won a scholarship to Oxford. She received highest honors on her final exams in 1915. Although women at the time were not granted degrees, the rules changed retroactively in 1920. After Oxford, Sayers worked as a poetry editor in Oxford and a teacher in France.

She returned to London to work as a freelance editor and advertising copywriter for England’s largest ad agency. She later turned her experiences at the agency to comic fodder in Murder Must Advertise (1933). She began writing detective fiction in the early 1920s, and her first novel, Whose Body?, was published in 1923. It introduced the educated and fanciful Lord Peter Wimsey, who over the course of some dozen novels and many short stories emerged as a complex, intriguing character, comic and lighthearted at times but plagued with nightmares and nervous disorders from his service in World War I. In Strong Poison (1930), Wimsey solves a mysterious poisoning and wins freedom for the wrongly accused mystery novelist Harriet Vane, with whom he falls in love. In Gaudy Night (1935), set at an Oxford reunion, Vane finally accepts Wimsey. The pair are married and set off on a comical honeymoon, accompanied by Wimsey’s faithful butler, Bunter, in Busman’s Honeymoon (1937).

Sayers herself had an unhappy romance in the early 1920s and had a child in 1924. Two years later, she married Scottish journalist Oswald Atherton Fleming, who became an invalid soon afterward. She spent the next 25 years caring for him, until his death in 1950. With G.K. Chesterton, Sayers founded the Detection Club, a group of mystery writers. She edited an important anthology called Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horrors from 1928 to 1934. After the late 1930s, she wearied of detective fiction, and having won enough financial independence to write what she liked, she returned to her academic roots and wrote scholarly treatises on aesthetics and theology, as well as translations of Dante and others. Related Videos October 08, 1937 : Lord Peter Wimsey marries Harriet Vane Introduction Fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey finally marries Harriet Vane, a prickly mystery writer he has pursued through several novels, on this day in 1937 in the novel Busman’s Honeymoon.

The novel, by Dorothy Sayers, was one of the last featuring the two English sleuths. Sayers, whose father was an Oxford teacher and minister, became one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford. Although the family moved to the country when Sayers was 4, she received an excellent education in Latin, French, history, and mathematics from her father and won a scholarship to Oxford. She received highest honors on her final exams in 1915. Although women at the time were not granted degrees, the rules changed retroactively in 1920. After Oxford, Sayers worked as a poetry editor in Oxford and a teacher in France. She returned to London to work as a freelance editor and advertising copywriter for England’s largest ad agency. She later turned her experiences at the agency to comic fodder in Murder Must Advertise (1933). She began writing detective fiction in the early 1920s, and her first novel, Whose Body?, was published in 1923.

It introduced the educated and fanciful Lord Peter Wimsey, who over the course of some dozen novels and many short stories emerged as a complex, intriguing character, comic and lighthearted at times but plagued with nightmares and nervous disorders from his service in World War I. In Strong Poison (1930), Wimsey solves a mysterious poisoning and wins freedom for the wrongly accused mystery novelist Harriet Vane, with whom he falls in love. In Gaudy Night (1935), set at an Oxford reunion, Vane finally accepts Wimsey. The pair are married and set off on a comical honeymoon, accompanied by Wimsey’s faithful butler, Bunter, in Busman’s Honeymoon (1937). Sayers herself had an unhappy romance in the early 1920s and had a child in 1924. Two years later, she married Scottish journalist Oswald Atherton Fleming, who became an invalid soon afterward. She spent the next 25 years caring for him, until his death in 1950. With G.K. Chesterton, Sayers founded the Detection Club, a group of mystery writers.

She edited an important anthology called Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horrors from 1928 to 1934. After the late 1930s, she wearied of detective fiction, and having won enough financial independence to write what she liked, she returned to her academic roots and wrote scholarly treatises on aesthetics and theology, as well as translations of Dante and others. Article Details: October 08, 1937 : Lord Peter Wimsey marries Harriet Vane Author October 08, 1937 : Lord Peter Wimsey marries Harriet Vane URL Have His Carcase - Dorothy L. Sayers - Google Books Dorothy L. Sayers “The Wimsey books are literate and delightful mysteries.” —Chicago Tribune The great Dorothy L. Sayers is considered by many to be the premier detective novelist of the Golden Age, and her dashing sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, one of mystery fiction’s most enduring and endearing protagonists. Acclaimed author Ruth Rendell has expressed her admiration for Sayers’s work, praising her “great fertility of invention, ingenuity, and wonderful eye for detail.” The second Dorothy L.

Sayers classic to feature mystery writer Harriet Vane, Have His Carcase is now back in print with an introduction by Elizabeth George, herself a crime fiction master. Harriet’s discovery of a murdered body on the beach before it is swept out to sea unites her once more with the indomitable Lord Peter, as together they attempt to solve a most lethal mystery, and find themselves become much closer than mere sleuthing partners in the process. What people are saying - Write a review User ratings LibraryThing Review User Review - pgchuis - LibraryThing Harriet Vane, on a walking holiday, discovers a body on a rock about to be washed away by the tide. She examines and photographs it. The police have to decide if it was suicide or murder (the body is ... Read full review LibraryThing Review User Review - wealhtheowwylfing - LibraryThing Whimsy and Harriet Vane work together to solve another murder she's stumbled upon. I love their conversations, which are both natural and incredibly witty. There are some misunderstandings between ...

Read full review Contents The Evidence of the Betrothed 58 The Evidence of the First Barber 69 The Evidence of the Gigolos 77 The Evidence of the Second Barber 86 The Evidence of the Third Barber 170 The Evidence of the Ladylove and the Landlady 179 The Evidence of the Sands 196 The Evidence of the Money 214 The Evidence of the Snake 227 The Evidence of the Disguised Motorist 238 The Evidence of the Lady in the Car 251 The Evidence at the Inquest 261 The Evidence of the FlatIron 94 The Evidence of the PoliceInspector 109 The Evidence of the Fisherman 120 The Evidence of the Brides Son 134 The Evidence of Trouble Somewhere 154 The Evidence of the Mannequin 282 The Evidence of the Theatrical Agent 294 The Evidence of the L C C Teacher 303 The Evidence of the Dictionary 312 View all » Common terms and phrases alibi Antoine asked asked Harriet beach beard blood boat body Bolshevik Bunter cipher corpse course Darley dead dear death Endicott

 evidence eyes fellow felt Flat-Iron gentleman girl Glaisher gold sovereigns Grinders hand Harriet Vane head Heathbury Henry Weldon Hinks's Lane horse Huntingdonshire Inspec Inspector Umpelty JUNE 18 key-word knew lady Lefranc Lesston Hoe letters look Lord Peter Wimsey mare married Martin matter mean miles mind minutes Miss Vane Morecambe morning mother murder never nice o'clock Ormond paper Paul Alexis Perkins photograph police Pollock Polwhistle poor pretty Rat-Iron razor remember road Robert Templeton rock round Scotland Yard Seahampton seemed seen shoe shore sort Soto story suicide suppose sure tell there's thing thought throat Thursday tide told took turned walked Wilvercombe Wimsey's woman wonder young About the author (1995) Dorothy L.

Sayers was born in 1893. She was one of the first women to be awarded a degree by Oxford University, and later she became a copywriter at an ad agency. In 1923 she published her first novel featuring the aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey, who became one of the world's most popular fictional heroes. She died in 1957. 10 Best Detectives in Books 10 Best Detectives in Books By Lucy Worsley | Oct 10, 2014 Lucy Worsley's The Art of the English Murder is a fascinating look at how the detective novel was born from crime reporting, and how, eventually, detective fiction gave way to the darker American-style thriller of the Cold War era. Here, Worsley picks the 10 best fictional detectives. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Britons were flooding from the countryside into towns and cities. Their lives were safer now from nature and its dangers — famine, wild animals, disease. Their thoughts turned instead to the stranger living next door. Who was he? What might he do? Could he be a murderer, like the criminals who filled the pages of the cheap newspapers they read?

And so crowded cities like London needed a new professional: the detective. He, or she, was a super-hero for the age. In their scary new urban world, the Victorians found it reassuring to read about crimes being solved and justice served, which is why so many of our great fictional detectives were birthed during that period. Here is a list of the best of them. 1. Catherine Morland (Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, 1817) - Could the boy-chasing, pleasure-seeking Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey —a young lady ‘in training for a heroine’ — really be described as a ‘detective’? But Miss Morland finds herself an amateur one when she is invited to stay in a country house (the spooky-sounding ‘abbey’ of the title) and finds herself suspecting that her host may have done away with his wife. She gathers clues, explores locked chests, seeks hidden passages. Ultimately, she fails to find any mystery at all. Silly, but lovable, Miss Morland!

Of course the brilliant Jane Austen was satirizing the genre of the Gothic novel, in which vulnerable but plucky heroines are threatened by cruel counts and escape from remote castles, facing danger and mystery. It was these Gothic novels that paved the way for the detective story. 2. Susan Hopley (The Adventures of Susan Hopley or Circumstantial Evidence by Catherine Crowe, 1841) - Unnoticed, unsuspected, the maidservant Susan Hopley goes about her daily tasks. And, like Catherine Morland, she finds time to solve crime — but Susan Hopley makes rather a better job of it. She follows excellent crime scene procedure: “Her most earnest desire … was to go over the house that had been the scene of the catastrophe, and inspect every part of it.” Not even the police were doing this consistently well in 1841. Susan Hopley was indeed a character ahead of her time. In fact, reviewers were baffled. “We hardly know what to say of this book,” wrote one.

“It perplexes us extremely … [Y]ou are struck with the trifling minutenesses [of the clues] yet find them not so trifling as you first supposed.” That could be a description of an Agatha Christie, yet Catherine Crowe wrote this domestic story full of tiny, telling detail eighty years before Christie began. 3. Inspector Bucket (Bleak House by Charles Dickens 1852) - Inspector Bucket is often named as the first ‘proper’ fictional detective, although his crime-solving strand is only one of many in Charles Dickens’s magnificent Bleak House. In real life, Dickens was friendly with Inspector Charles Field, one of the first members of the original ‘Detective Branch’ of Scotland Yard. Dickens put many of Field’s physical tics and quirks into his fictional counterpart. 4. Sergeant Cuff (The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins 1868) - Oh, the mysterious Sergeant Cuff. Like many of his fellow fictional detectives, he remains inscrutable and we don’t know what he’s thinking. He ultimately fails to solve the mystery of the stolen jewel that lies at the heart of Collins’s masterful ‘sensation novel,’ one of the most addictively readable books ever written.

Wilkie too was inspired by real life: in 1860, another Scotland Yard man — Inspector Jack Whicher —had failed to solve a notorious country house murder in a Wiltshire village. The ‘Rode Hill House’ murder must have been committed by one of the family in the house that night: exactly the same set-up as The Moonstone. 5. Mrs. Paschal (Revelations of a Lady Detective by William Stephens Hayward, 1864) - Mrs. Paschal was one of the very first professional female detectives, actually receiving payment for her services. Fretting that readers would find her independence rather racy, Hayward makes her a widow of slender means. She solved her crimes in the cheap, yellow-covered paperback books sold on Britain’s new railway stations. Paschal also takes an admirable relish in her work: ‘It was necessary to have nerve and strength, cunning and confidence, resources unlimited.’ At one point, needing to chase a criminal down a hatch into a cellar, Mrs. Paschal simply takes off her cumbersome crinoline and abandons it. Emancipation! 6.

Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle, 1888) - No list would be complete without the greatest detective who never lived. Holmes was perfectly up-to-date with forensic science techniques, and he had extensive medical knowledge and analytical skills. In the very first story, A Study in Scarlet (1887), he acts as a CSI, going over the room with his magnifying glass. And so the legend was born. Recruits to the French police were instructed to read Sherlock Holmes to learn good investigative techniques. 7. Hercule Poirot (The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie, 1920) - Sherlock Holmes was gallant, active, and unafraid to use violence to apprehend a criminal. Poirot was the first of the more sedentary sleuths of the Golden Age of detective fiction between the wars. Christie characters like Miss Marple and the pernickety Poirot (‘a speck of dust on his coat would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound’) became the heroes of plots containing very little violence. Solving crime became rather like doing a crossword puzzle.

That was because, after the horrors of World War One, no one wanted to spend their leisure time reading about blood. 8. Harriet Vane (Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers, 1930) - Harriet Vane is my own favorite sleuth. Sayers had already had great success with her aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey when Harriet Vane appeared in the dock in Strong Poison, accused of poisoning her ex-lover. Wimsey gets her exonerated, and they become partners in crime — and eventually in life as husband and wife. Sayers uses her character Harriet Vane (also a detective novelist) to express biting and striking views on questions like whether women should work, whether they should marry, and the importance of the life of the mind. Wonderful stuff. 9. Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, 1938) - ‘Cosy crime’ dominated the British publishing industry between the wars. Murders seemed to happen mainly in country house libraries, and the characters became clichéd. It all got a bit boring.

A breath of fresh air arrived in 1938 with Raymond Chandler’s amoral, laconic, ‘hard-boiled’ detective, Philip Marlowe. Although Chandler was educated at Dulwich College in London, he ended up on America’s west coast. His short, sharp novels brought violence back into crime fiction. 10. Ida Arnold (Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, 1938) - It’s hardly doing justice to Brighton Rock to describe it as genre fiction, but a killing and a murderer are the heart of this book about faith and God. The good-hearted but blowsy heroine Ida Arnold, our detective figure, goes after a killer with a truly modern mind. Pinkie, the young anti-hero, lacks motive apart from a nihilistic passion for violence and death. With its seamy, seaside-resort setting, its lonely and hopeless characters and its bleak outlook on life, Brighton Rock has much in common with the hard-edged noir fiction soon to come. ADVERTISEMENT Strong Poison - Dorothy L. Sayers - Google Books Dorothy L. Sayers “A model detective story…Fascinating.” —New York Times The great Dorothy L.

Sayers is considered by many to be the premier detective novelist of the Golden Age, and her dashing sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, one of mystery fiction’s most enduring and endearing protagonists. Acclaimed author Ruth Rendell has expressed her admiration for Sayers’s work, praising her “great fertility of invention, ingenuity, and wonderful eye for detail.” The Dorothy L. Sayers classic, Strong Poison, is now back in print with an introduction by Elizabeth George, herself a crime fiction master. In Strong Poison, Sayers introduces Harriet Vane, a mystery writer who is accused of poisoning her fianc� and must now join forces with Lord Peter to escape a murder conviction and the hangman’s noose. What people are saying - Write a review User ratings LibraryThing Review User Review - quiBee - LibraryThing Nicely written Golden Age mystery where Harriet Vane is first introduced into Peter Wimsey's world. It seems quite obvious that she's guilty of having murdered her former lover, but Lord Peter is not ...

Read full review LibraryThing Review User Review - antiquary - LibraryThing This of course is the Wimsey novel in which he meets his future wife Harriet Vane by seeing her on trial for the murder of her former lover. There is some quite good dialog between them, but the story ...

Read full review Contents View all » Common terms and phrases afraid Arbuthnot arsenic believe better Bill bottle Bulfinch Bunter Chief-Inspector Parker coffee course Cremorna Crofts damned dear Lord Peter dinner door Dorothy L Duke of Denver eggs Eiluned evidence eyes fact feel Freddy gastritis girl give glad Guilford Street hair hand Hannah Westlock happen Harriet Vane Hodges idea jury kind lady live look Lord Peter Wimsey lordship Marjorie married mean Megatherium mind Miss Booth Miss Climpson Miss Murchison Miss Vane murder nate young never Norman Urquhart nurse omelette packet perhaps person Pettican Philip Boyes poison police Pond Pongo powder round Sir Impey Biggs sitting solicitor sorry sort STRONG POISON suppose sure Sylvia talking taxi tell Thank there's thing thought tion told took turned Vane's Vaughan Windle Woburn Square woman wonder Wrayburn young About the author (1995) Dorothy L. Sayers was born in 1893. She was one of the first women to be awarded a degree by Oxford University, and later she became a copywriter at an ad agency.

In 1923 she published her first novel featuring the aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey, who became one of the world's most popular fictional heroes. She died in 1957. Crime-Solving Couples—How Novel! by Corrina Lawson Corrina Lawson The fun of reading mysteries laced with romance is the double plot: 1) solve the crime; and 2) watch the characters banter while solving the crime. Romance is often about how they compromise and learn to trust. There’s no better way learn that than if you’re working together to stay alive. Note: I left Nick and Nora Charles off this list, even though they originated in Dashiell Hammett’s books, because their movie counterparts are so well known. 1. Eve Dallas and Roarke Eve and Roarke are not only one of my favorite couples but Eve is simply one of my favorite fictional characters ever. The “In Death” series by J.D. Robb (aka Nora Roberts) is set in the latter half of the 21st century in a New York City that’s still recovering from the scars of urban warfare.

Holding the line is Homicide Lieutenant Eve Dallas: fiercely dedicated, intelligent, and disdainful of rank and privilege. Roarke is her opposite number, a charming, handsome former criminal who has turned straight to run his (mostly) legitimate business empire. Their romance is not an easy road, especially as Roarke becomes a suspect in the murder that begins the series. Favorite: Glory in Death. Excellent mystery wrapped around a sometimes heartbreaking courtship. 2. Amelia Peabody and Radcliffe Emerson Created by Elizabeth Peters, one-time spinster Amelia Peabody has one of the most unique voices in crime fiction. Intelligent, reserved, wry and sometimes clueless but always fascinating. Emerson, an Egyptologist has a fierce temper that often gives voice to strong opinions. The pair meet in 1884 in Crocodile on the Sandbank. Over the next eighteen novels, their union encompasses marriage, children, and the solving of numerous crimes. Favorite: Crocodile on the Sandbank because it’s such a pleasure to get to know Amelia and Emerson for the first time. 3. Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell Where are Holmes and Watson? They don’t qualify.

This list is for romantic couples and I’m of the firm opinion that Doyle’s Holmes is asexual. Not so Laurie R. King’s version of Holmes. Restless in his retirement, Holmes meets a teenage girl who turns out to be his intellectual equal. It’s a relationship that shouldn’t work but it does because of the slow, careful almost not-courtship between the pair, which, naturally, involves solving mysteries. Favorite: A Monstrous Regime of Women in which Russell finally realizes she views Holmes as more than her mentor and his past comes back to haunt him. 4. Albert Campion and Amanda Filton Another turn-of-the-century sleuth, Campion is the protagonist of seventeen novels and more than twenty short stories by Margery Allingham. He’s a self-professed “professional adventurer,” while she is the daughter of an earl with a real talent for machinery. Amanda, then only seventeen, makes her first appearance in Sweet Danger. Their courtship takes place over several stories and it’s not until Traitor’s Purse that they make a firm commitment to each other. She appears as his wife in several later novels.

Favorite: While I have some fondness for the fake marriage plot of Fashion in Shrouds, it’s Traitor’s Purse where they almost lose each other that I love. 5. Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane The gold-standard. Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter is the archetypical British gentleman and Harriet is a woman struggling for personal freedom in a time when women were not supposed to be ambitious for themselves. They first meet when Harriet is on trial for murdering her lover in Strong Poison. It’s a long slow burn as societal mores of the time and their own reserve and Harriet’s need to have her own place in the world keep them apart for some time. Favorite: Gaudy Night in which Harriet struggles with issues of independence at her former college while Peter struggles with how to prove he loves her without smothering her. And in which they, naturally, must solve a mystery. Corrina Lawson is a writer, mom, geek, and superhero, thought not always all four on the same day. She is a senior editor of the GeekMom Blog on Wired.com ( and the author of a superhero romance series and an alternate history series featuring Romans and Vikings in ancient North America .

She has been a comic book geek all her life and often dreamed of growing up to be Lois Lane. On Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey: An Essay with Personal Interruptions - The Toast On Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey: An Essay with Personal Interruptions Email Mo Moulton’s previous work for The Toast can be found here . “Peter, what did you mean when you said that anybody could have harmony if they would leave us the counterpoint?’” “Why,’” he said, shaking his head, ‘that I like my music polyphonic. If you think I meant anything else, you know what I meant.’” This conversation between Lord Peter Wimsey, the hero of Dorothy L. Sayers’ detective fiction, and Harriet Vane, Sayers’ fictional alter-ego, takes place toward the end of Gaudy Night (1935). If he sounds a little prickly, perhaps it’s only fair. He’s spent five years dismantling and rebuilding his sense of self in order to be worthy of Harriet’s love, and at this point he still doesn’t know if she will reject him in favor of a life dedicated to literature.

Of course he did mean something else, and not only Harriet but the reader understands exactly what: that his ideal relationship, like his ideal music, is produced by the combination of equals rather than the hierarchy of melody and harmony, or man and wife. In March of last year, my partner and I celebrated twenty years together. We had both recently discovered Sayers, and my anniversary gift to her was a complete set of the Wimsey novels—mostly hardbacks from the 1940s; I wanted to echo Wimsey’s book-collecting hobby, but my finances are rather more modest than his. (Thrillingly, the books arrived from a second-hand shop in the UK to my Massachusetts office in a huge blue bag stamped “Royal Mail.”) I read many of the books out loud to her over the following months, and it struck me that the entire Wimsey-Vane courtship can be read as an extended meditation on the question: how does one build an egalitarian relationship in an unequal, indeed misogynist, world? I should say here that I don’t know what Sayers thought about homosexuality, and I suspect I don’t really want to know.

An early Wimsey novel, Unnatural Death (1927), is the only one that deals at length with homosexuality. There’s a moving description of a butch-femme couple, beloved by their rural community, but on the other hand, several key plot points hinge on the most vile stereotypes about the seductive, amoral lesbian. The fact that Sayers’s initial title for the novel was The Singular Case of the Three Spinsters gives the flavor. Sayers was fond, too, of offering up crude stereotypes about money-grubbing Jews and Scots; the Scottish jokes seem quaintly bizarre now, while the anti-Semitism is nearly unbearable. The wisdom is mixed in with damaging foolishness. But especially in a world of limited representation of queer relationships, I’ve learned to be a magpie. In the slowly unfolding dynamic between Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey, I found a representation, not of a queer relationship exactly, but one in which the partners don’t take their gender roles for granted and must therefore work out for themselves how to love in an ethical fashion. Any kind of relationship raises inescapable existential dilemmas, and the more intimate the relationship, the higher the stakes.

Harriet is keenly aware of the predicament faced by women, particularly, in navigating choices around marriage and intimacy. She describes a ‘predatory hag’ waiting for her ‘gigolo’ in a seaside hotel, then notices the wedding-ring: “Marriage did not save one, apparently. Single, married, widowed, divorced, one came to the same end.” But in the next room, she finds “three stout women … engaged in an interminable conversation about illnesses, children and servants.” “ ‘And these,’ thought Harriet, ‘are the happy ones, I suppose.’” She turns away from these depressing options and returns to her writing table. But is work, however satisfying, an adequate alternative to intimacy? Harriet spends much of Gaudy Night in residence at a fictional women’s college in Oxford University. The question of marriage and its effects on women recur here in multiple guises. Early on, for example, Harriet encounters an old classmate who has forsaken her brilliant intellectual potential for a life of hard physical labor as a farmer’s wife: “a Derby winner making shift with a coal-cart,” as Sayers puts it.

But the woman is adamant that her role is to support her husband’s work, one of many restatements of the novel’s central problem: which should prevail, brain or heart? As Harriet later thinks to herself: “To subdue oneself to one’s own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one’s self to other people’s ends was dust and ashes. … Could there ever be any alliance between the intellect and the flesh?” Most of the women at the College have chosen the life of the mind. The historian Helen De Vine is perhaps the most striking example, a brilliant scholar whose incisive commentary on those around her captivates Harriet from the start. Miss De Vine’s name sounds a lot like “Miss Vane,” and that, of course, is a clue, and not only in the mystery-novel sense. Miss De Vine is what Harriet both longs and fears to be: dedicated to her excellent work and able to detach herself from human entanglements. Harriet dreams of being an individualist. So she takes seriously Miss De Vine’s warning that even a marriage between equals is no guarantee of happiness: “A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.

You can hurt one another so dreadfully.” On one level, this is a familiar problem. Harriet is a professional writer and an independent woman; can she nevertheless marry and ‘have it all’, to use an anachronistic phrase? If the books stayed on this level, they might be interesting, but they wouldn’t have the compelling power that turns readers into devotees. Instead, Sayers lifts the lid of the problem and shows us the strange human mechanisms working underneath. She does this in a brilliant series of moves that prevent Peter and Harriet from being “Everyman” and “Everywoman” acting out a standard script of gendered power. Partly this is a result of Peter’s character. Unlike Harriet, he’s never an individualist. In the very first Wimsey novel, Whose Body? (1923), Peter divines the identity and motive of the murderer in a late-night session alone in his library. But the process so unmoors him that his shell-shock is reactivated; he wakes up his faithful valet and former Army comrade Bunter in the midst of a hallucinatory flashback.

The next day, blank and drained, he’s bundled off for a weekend in the country by his mother and Bunter, leaving the next stages of the case to his Scotland Yard friend Parker. In an ending sequence shadowed by trauma, friendship and love are the bulwarks against despair and self-destruction. Where Dr. Watson is Sherlock Holmes’s foil and straight man, Bunter and Parker are Wimsey’s mainstays and anchors. So it’s not surprising that it’s Peter who first falls for Harriet, Peter who instantly proposes all manner of connection, Peter who is bewildered by Harriet’s need for distance following her own traumatic experience. For Peter, salvation has always been through connection. The problem, though, is that the sort of connection Harriet and Peter would require is no easy thing. In Strong Poison (1930) he falls in love from afar, watching her testify while on trial for the murder of her lover, and comes crashing confidently forward. But his precipitous proposal is rebuffed with Harriet’s deathless reply: “Oh, are you another of them? That makes forty-seven.” Made notorious by her trial, she’s become the target of bizarre attention, like so many women in the public eye.

And so Harriet, despite her imprisonment, is no princess in a tower. In classic babbling fashion, Peter immediately seeks to reassure Harriet that he, too, is no typical sexist: “I wish you wouldn’t sound as though you thought it was rather funny. I know I’ve got a silly face, but I can’t help that. As a matter of fact, I’d like somebody I could talk sensibly to, who would make life interesting. And I could give you a lot of plots for your books, if that’s any inducement.” “But you wouldn’t want a wife who wrote books, would you?” “But I should; it would be great fun. So much more interesting than the ordinary kind that is only keen on clothes and people. Though, of course, clothes and people are all right too, in moderation. I don’t mean to say I object to clothes.” Well, alright, then. It’s a clear enough statement of the basic feminist principle that animates Gaudy Night, too: a woman must be permitted to pursue something other than the work of supporting her husband’s endeavors. But it’s hardly a satisfying exchange.

For one thing, Harriet is literally imprisoned; for another, Peter’s reference to ‘the ordinary kind’ of wife interested only in clothes and people is still a bit dismissive of women in general. And perhaps most of all, it’s entirely about what Peter wants: though he offers ‘plots for your books,’ it’s plain he hasn’t yet thought at all about what the world might look like from Harriet’s perspective. My sweetheart and I fell in love as teenagers. Are there any greater egotists than teenagers? There’s something miraculous about teenage love. There you are, at the height of absolutely crucial self-centeredness, the ego-engine that’s going to propel you into adulthood, and you are also jumping right into romantic love, which at its core demands a partial surrender of ego and the profound, sincere attention to another person’s point of view. Being in love at sixteen boils the struggle of intimate love, the balance between self and other, down to its purest essence. And being in love and in the closet at sixteen only adds the vertiginous sense that there is nothing, really, but self and desire, in infinite recursion.

It’s not really a spoiler to reveal that, through Peter’s dogged investigation, Harriet is not hanged for murder at the end of Strong Poison. This brings us to the next of Sayers’s brilliant moves. Rather than having Peter and Harriet merely rehearse issues of gendered power imbalances, Sayers displaces the imbalance onto another issue entirely: the circumstances of the start of their relationship. In another prison interview, Harriet pleads with Peter not to propose marriage again, and he backs off: “I won’t worry you. Not fair. Abusing my privilege and so on. You can’t say ‘Pig’ and sweep out, under the circs., so I won’t offend again.” The prison regulations stand in for the restrictions of patriarchal society here. Released after her acquittal, Harriet doesn’t fall into Peter’s arms. Instead, she’s greeted by her two best friends, Eiluned and Sylvia, who explain that Peter is far too decent to impose himself on Harriet at this juncture. It’s a potent bit of realism and a reminder that, even while narrating a love story, Sayers continues to recognize the significance of friendship and of female community.

So Peter has saved Harriet’s life: must her gratitude, now, overshadow everything else between them? How can they embark as equals, if she owes her very life to him, to his intelligence, his influence and his power? Five years elapse between Strong Poison and Gaudy Night, mirroring the gap in publication. In between, Sayers wrote three full Wimsey novels, only one of which, the spiny, argumentative Have His Carcase (1932), featured Harriet Vane. Murder Must Advertise (1933) makes only a single coy allusion to Wimsey’s private life, while The Nine Tailors (1934) retains its focus entirely on the mystery unfolding in the watery fens. It’s surely not accident that these are two of Sayers’s best novels. I imagine her spinning these tales while at the same time slowing down to work out what a genuine relationship between two characters endowed with ‘independent and equally irritable intelligences’ might look like.

In Have His Carcase, Harriet finds herself in another awkward position, this time as a result of discovering a corpse on the beach while on a walking holiday (a far better remedy for a bruised heart, Sayers remarks, than “repose upon a manly bosom”). Once again, Peter swoops in to sort things out. There are some sweetly romantic moments as Peter and Harriet work together to solve the mystery, but their interactions are repeatedly poisoned by the recollection that Harriet owes something to Peter—that, indeed, his presence is due to Harriet’s needing saving yet again, this time from negative publicity at being associated with yet another possible murder. As Harriet puts it: “Of course everybody will say, ‘Look at what he did for that woman—isn’t it marvellous of him!’ Isn’t that nice for you? … I suppose every man thinks he’s only got to go on being superior and any woman will come tumbling into his arms. It’s disgusting.” By transferring the power imbalance in this way, Sayers disables her readers’ preconceptions. We must confront this dilemma as the particular human problem than it is, rather than having it already freighted with all of our own notions about gender roles.

Harriet and Peter must navigate an uneven topography, but they do it as two people, rather than as a Man and a Woman. Sayers explained her approach in the wonderful essay “Are Women Human?” , which describes, in part, her answer to a man who asked how she possibly managed to write such convincing dialogue between men. I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to ourselves, talk very much like human beings also. They think like human beings, too, which brings me to another way Sayers subverts the traditional gender narrative. The conflict thus far has been framed as brain versus heart, but it’s also, of course, mind versus body. Extraordinarily, Harriet is identified with the mind, and Peter with the body. If you’ve read the novels, ask yourself quickly: what does Peter look like? How about Harriet?

The first question is much easier to answer, and not just because he features in more of the novels than she does. The Wimsey/Vane novels revel in the straight female gaze, commenting at length on Peter’s appearance and only glancingly on Harriet’s. In their first meeting, despite having just deprecated wives who think only of clothes, Peter displays a rather girlish anxiety to be pleasing in appearance: “Any minor alterations, like parting the old man, or growing a toothbrush, or cashiering the eye-glass, you know, I should be happy to undertake, if it suited your ideas. … I’ll come in a different set of garments each time, so as to give you a good all-round idea of the subject.” In Have His Carcase, Peter’s deep knowledge of the finer points of masculine attire and grooming, including an extremely exclusive barbershop, are pivotal to the solution of the mystery. When they go swimming together, Harriet appraises Peter’s body coolly. “And he strips better than I should have expected,’ she admitted candidly to herself.

‘Better shoulders than I realised, and, thank Heaven, calves to his legs.” Wimsey, who was rather proud of his figure, would hardly have been flattered could he have heard this modified rapture, but for the moment he was happily unconcerned about himself. The examples could be multiplied: whether it’s his straw-colored hair, his unfortunate nose, or his elegant hands, Peter’s looks are fair game for all sorts of use in the novels, while Harriet remains supremely unobjectified, an intellect and a spirit whose physical appearance is more or less irrelevant. On the rare occasions when Harriet’s looks are described, it’s usually in the terms offered by Peter’s mother: “so interesting and a really remarkable face, though perhaps not strictly good-looking, and all the more interesting for that, because good-looking people are so often cows.” One of the pleasures of detective novels is that they offer a portal into an improved world. It’s a recognizable, realistic world, but the mystery is solved and the heroes are never in really mortal danger; the train timetables and alibis might be complicated, but the moral compass is generally less complex than in real life.

Lord Peter Wimsey offers us a world of rare books, black-and-primrose libraries, and endless care from a butler who makes splendid coffee and draws hot baths in the morning. This is a world where things really are cricket, or at least they end up that way. And here, Peter’s body is the one on display, and the relationship proceeds at Harriet’s pleasure. But ultimately Sayers is describing the real world, or something close to it, not writing feminist utopian fiction. (Though it’s tempting to fantasize about what she might have written in that vein, as a kind of counterbalance to Margaret Atwood’s dystopias.) Even though the narrative structure deflects our attention onto other sources of power imbalance, Peter and Harriet still move through a gendered world. Indeed, at times they seem to be haunted by the very gendered stereotypes that they’re both trying to transcend. Sayers loves doubling: Harriet herself is Sayers’s own double, the vehicle for many a humorous aside on the foibles of life as a detective novelist. But she creates a variety of alter-egos, or perhaps Jungian shadoow-selves, for her characters, too.

In Have His Carcase, Peter and Harriet are shadowed by the hateful Mr. Weldon, “a gentleman-farmer, who was not quite a gentleman and not much of a farmer.” The brawny, chauvinist, stupid Weldon is the opposite of the brainy, feminist, intelligent Wimsey, yet he threatens to supplant him. First, in the obvious way: Harriet affects a flirtation with Weldon (for detective purposes, of course), and Weldon gets the kiss that a reader might have expected would be Wimsey’s. For Weldon, Harriet produces “a latent strain of sweet womanliness” quite at odds with the “curious inhibitions which caused her to be abrupt, harsh, and irritating with Lord Peter.” In fact, she and Weldon even laugh at Peter together—his affectations, his famous monocle: “Oh!” Harriet wriggled her shoulders. “If you mean Lord Peter—he’s all right, of course, but he’s a little—you know what I mean.” “La-di-dah!” said Mr. Weldon. “What’s he want to wear that silly thing in his eye for?” “That’s just what I feel.

It isn’t manly, is it?” But even more interesting, Weldon also seems to affect Wimsey, transforming him, briefly, into exactly what he loathes. Quizzing Weldon later in the book Wimsey rebukes him for calling Harriet a “little hussy”: “Manners, please!” said Wimsey. “You will kindly refer to Miss Vane in a proper way and spare me the boring nuisance of pushing your teeth out at the back of your neck.” “Oh, all right, just as you like. But I’d like to see you try.” “You wouldn’t see it. It would happen, that’s all. But I’ve no time to waste in comparative physiology.” It’s something out of a macho spy novel or adventure tale, James Bond avant la lettre. Has he been reading too much Rider Haggard? As satisfying as it is, in one way, to see Harriet’s honor defended, Peter’s threat is as ludicrous as Harriet’s wriggle. Analyzing the dynamic between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in the classic film Adam’s Rib (1949), Michael Wood writes of Tracy: “He was always going to win, sooner or later.

That is what gendered power is about.” As a child I remember hating the movie, with its ritual scenes of putting Hepburn back in her place. Yet as an adult I found myself on the opposite side of the equation. My butch masculinity causes me plenty of trouble and occasional terrifying moments, but it also gives me enormous privilege. I don’t know which street corners are bad for sexual harassment until my partner tells me; my expertise is overrated and hers is undervalued; my shoes are warm and comfortable and my graying hair earns me jokes about becoming a ‘silver fox’, not recommendations for colorists. Like many of our friends, we have a partnership that is homosexual but heterogendered. There is no magic pass to a world free of misogyny; in our world, the landscape of gender is the landscape of power. It used to be fashionable to accuse butch-femme couples of ‘aping’ heterosexuality. (I trust it is no longer fashionable to do so, though maybe I just hang out with better folks now.) I love Harriet and Peter for capturing the way that we all end up ‘aping’ our genders.

Trying to relate as gendered human beings, they ditch again and again into being parodies of themselves—not only in the Weldon subplot in Have His Carcase, but also in connection with Reggie Pomfret in Gaudy Night. It is very pleasant to dance together, she in a claret dress of my choosing, my arms around her; as Harriet and Peter know, these are erotic identities. It’s easy to assume that Peter will ‘win’, just as Spencer Tracy did in Adam’s Rib. He does win Harriet’s hand, but only by not ‘winning’ in the traditional sense. As my partner put it in her comments on this essay, “the radical bit is how he doesn’t do it—he works himself over into consciously giving up that privilege.” Sayers enacts, not the ritual humiliation of a woman, but a remaking of masculinity that allows us to envision a marriage of equal intelligences and different genders in an unequal world. In Gaudy Night, Peter admits that his initial proposal smacked of entitlement. In the intervening five years, he has been forced to undertake the work of setting aside his own ego and coming to understand the world from the perspective of his beloved.

When Harriet and Peter first dine together again at the start of Gaudy Night, Peter is literally bandaged around the heart; having cracked his ribs, he is unable to retrieve what Harriet has dropped at the dinner table. What better metaphor could there be for the need to restrain the egotism of love and allow the beloved the space to remain an autonomous being? Suffering, in other words, has improved Peter Wimsey. The romantic climax of Gaudy Night happens, of course, in a punt on the river. “Would you now prefer to be independent and take the pole? I admit it is better fun to punt than to be punted, and that a desire to have all the fun is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.” “Is it possible you have a just and generous mind? I will not be outdone in generosity. I will sit like a perfect lady and watch you do the work. It’s nice to see things well done.” “If you say that, I shall get conceited and do something silly.” He was, in fact, a pretty punter to watch, easy in action and quite remarkably quick.

And just like that, Sayers tugs at the knots of gender, power, and inequality, and they come loose. Honesty and a competition for generosity make a reasonable recipe for interpersonal happiness. And Harriet, though playing the ‘perfect lady’, is no passive object of desire, but the consumer of her pretty punter: balance through subversion. We got married, for the first time, before it was legal. (Like many queer people, we’ve married each other a few times now, once you add in the domestic partnership and the legal form-signing.) We didn’t write our own vows; we took them, with minor adaptations, from the Book of Common Prayer. In an old-fashioned Unitarian sanctuary in Boston, I said: “With this ring I thee wed; with my body I thee worship; with my worldly goods I thee endow.” I still love the layers of meaning in this line: symbolic unity, sex, and practicalities. We were young, and we wanted to build a bulwark against the world. What I didn’t know was that being married (or being in an intimate, long-term relationship) would change me so profoundly.

In her excellent biography of Samuel Pepys, The Unequalled Self (2002), Claire Tomalin writes about Pepys’s wife, Elizabeth, as one of the pieces of “grit” that caused him to produce his pearl, the great diary. Marrying a beloved seems like a consummation of desire, but it’s also, and perhaps more centrally, an embarkation on a journey that will forever change both parties. I have altered my life’s trajectory, again and again, to fit her evolving dreams and desires, and she has done the same; I have expanded my imagination to make space for her perspective, and in the process my own sense of self has been reshaped into something more grounded and empathetic. We are individuals, as Harriet knew, but we are formed and sustained in relationship, as Peter always sensed.

After their first meeting, in the prison in Strong Poison, Peter fantasizes about marriage: “one would wake up and there’d be a whole day for jolly things to happen in—and then one would come home and go to bed—that would be jolly, too—and while she was writing, I could go out and mess round, so we shouldn’t either of us be dull…” As the reader of the last Wimsey-Vane novel, Busman’s Honeymoon: A Love Story with Detective Interruptions (1937) learns, it’s just like that, with more misunderstandings, compromises, chimney sweeps, unexpected guests, social obligations, and personal transformation. And it’s always polyphonic. Tags: Dynamic Duos: Dorothy Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane by Victoria Janssen Victoria Janssen This post includes spoilers, but if you haven’t read this classic series yet, what are you waiting for? I read my first Dorothy Sayers mystery– most of them, in fact–when I was in middle school.

I enjoyed them quite a bit, but it wasn’t until I began rereading them in high school and college, and again years later, that I understood exactly how wonderful this series is and how deep my love for it runs, especially the romantic pairing of aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey and novelist Harriet Vane. There are eleven Wimsey novels, twelve if you count the unfinished Thrones, Dominations (later completed by Jill Paton Walsh ), and a variety of short stories. However, discounting the latter, Harriet appears in only four novels, with only slight reference to her in a fifth, not discussed here. The big four are Strong Poison (1930), Have His Carcase (1932), Gaudy Night (1936), and Busman’s Honeymoon (1937). If you don’t want to commit to the whole series, those four novels more than satisfy. The main reason I love these four in particular is because they’re about more than mystery. I consider them feminist novels. Before the advent of Harriet, Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey was already a great character.

After Harriet’s falsely accused of murder, and Lord Peter decides to prove her innocence, he attains significantly more depth and humanity. The complexity of the books burgeons towards the end of the series. There is always, of course, the mystery. But there’s also the growing and deepening relationship between Peter and Harriet, and there are feminist and class issues, explored through Harriet’s point of view about herself in comparison to Lord Peter. Here are the basics: Lord Peter wants to marry Harriet almost immediately after meeting then exonerating her. Harriet, however, feels she cannot, simply because he saved her from being convicted of murder. Aside from that, he is a wealthy aristocrat, and she is a middle-class writer of detective fiction. Lord Peter is persistent, both in seeing her and in proposing marriage. They go on to solve more mysteries together. Gradually, they begin to realize exactly how much they have in common and how much they are attracted to each other, but the reasons to resist marriage, at least on Harriet’s part, continue. In Harriet’s first appearance, Strong Poison, she’s accused of having murdered her lover, Philip Boyes.

Given that the book was published in 1930, it’s socially significant that Harriet has a lover to whom she isn’t married, that she supports herself through writing, and that she is subject to public opinion while on trial for murder. She’s not a typical woman of her time, but the novel shows her as someone to be admired. From a Romance standpoint, though not rich or virginal, she also gets the aristocrat’s marriage proposal. . .which she refuses. Harriet’s refusal establishes her as a character equal to Lord Peter, perhaps even stronger, since she comes from a weaker position in society. Harriet is not in very many scenes in Strong Poison, and her point of view isn’t given. What we-the-readers get is Peter’s view of her, a woman outside of social norms. Through his opinions, we not only learn about Harriet, but we learn more about Peter than we’ve ever known before. It’s new, it’s exciting, it’s fascinating. We have to know what happens to them.

Have His Carcase is the first time we’re given Harriet’s point of view, and it’s also the point when her attraction to Peter becomes very clear, as does her own self-doubt, and her fears about what would happen to her if she married him. She begins to see Peter as a person in this novel, and so do we, the readers. Peter shows that he sees her, too, as a specific person whom he thinks about romantically, for instance when he suggests she should buy a wine-colored frock because “It suits people with honey-colored skin.” Harriet demands to know if the wine should be the color of port or sherry. He promptly responds, “Claret. . .Chateau Margaux 1893 or thereabouts.” Gaudy Night is my favorite of Sayers novels, and I also feel it’s the best from a literary standpoint. Just as Harriet is barely present in Strong Poison, Peter appears very little in Gaudy Night, yet the deepest questions of how he and Harriet would negotiate a marriage together are constantly discussed from different angles, most notably by academic women commenting upon women who give up careers for marriage and the ways Harriet might escape that fate.

Love isn’t enough to convince Harriet. Before she can marry Lord Peter, she has to know she can remain herself while being a partner to him. It isn’t until the very end of Gaudy Night that she’s able to accept his proposal. In the end, Peter doesn’t convince her to marry him at all. She convinces herself that she can. Busman’s Honeymoonbegins with their marriage and honeymoon, and is very satisfying indeed after all the emotional struggles of the previous three novels. It only deepens the emotional issues the couple faces now that they’ve committed to each other. To me, Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane represent the greatest couple within a mystery series, but if you have other suggestions. . .I always love investigating a new romance. Victoria Janssen is the author of three erotic novels and numerous short stories. Her latest novel is The Duke and The Pirate Queen from Harlequin Spice. Follow her on Twitter: @victoriajanssen or find out more at victoriajanssen.com .

Thrones, Dominations - Books on Google Play Thrones, Dominations ( 7) Description Deemed "one of the greatest mystery writers of this century" by the Los Angeles Times, Dorothy L. Sayers first captivated readers nearly seventy years ago with her beloved sleuths Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane in the novel Stong Poison. In Busmans's Honeymoon, her last completed Wimsey/Vane novel, Lord Peter and Harriet culminated their partnership with marriage. Now Thrones, Dominations, Sayers' uncompleted last novel, satisfies the vast readership hungry to know what happened after the honeymoon. Here award-winning author Jill Paton Walsh picks up where Sayers left off, bringing Wimsey and Vane brilliantly to life in Sayers' unmistakable voice. Readers and reviewers are rejoicing at the return of this delightful sleuthing couple--as adept at solving a baffling murder mystery as they are a balancing the delicate demands of their loving union. About the authors Dorothy L. Sayers, the greatest of the golden age detective novelists, was born in Oxford in 1893.

Her aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, became one of the most popular fictional heroes of the twentieth century. She devoted the last 20 years of her life to playwriting, Christian scholarship, and a new translation of Dante. She died in 1957. Jill Paton Walsh is the author of books for adults, young adults and children. Her novel Knowledge of Angels was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Her crime novels and mystery novels include The Attenbury Emeralds, A Presumption of Death, The Wyndham Case and A Piece of Justice, which was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Her novels for children and young adults include The Green Book and A Parcel of Patterns. She lives in Cambridge, England. My review 9780061043512: Busman's Honeymoon - AbeBooks - Sayers, Dorothy L.: 0061043516 Sayers, Dorothy L.

ISBN 10: 0061043516 ISBN 13: 9780061043512 Publisher: HarTorch, 1995 “Busman’s Honeymoon has everything—mystery, comedy, love, and drama—all served up in Dorothy Sayers’s best style.” —New York Times The great Dorothy L. Sayers is considered by many to be the premier detective novelist of the Golden Age, and her dashing sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, one of mystery fiction’s most enduring and endearing protagonists. Acclaimed author Ruth Rendell has expressed her admiration for Sayers’s work, praising her “great fertility of invention, ingenuity, and wonderful eye for detail.” The fourth Dorothy L. Sayers classic to feature mystery writer Harriet Vane, Busman’s Honeymoon is now back in print with an introduction by Elizabeth George, herself a crime fiction master. Harriet and her love, Lord Peter, have finally tied the knot but begin their married life together on an expectedly sour note when a body is discovered in the cellar of their romantic country estate. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Product Description: Murder is hardly the best way for Lord Peter and his bride, the famous mystery writer Harriet Vane, to start their honeymoon. It all begins when the former owner of their newly acquired estate is found quite nastily dead in the cellar. All too quickly, what Lord Peter had hoped would be a very private and romantic stay in the country has turned into a most baffling case, with a misspelled "notise" to the milkman at its center and a dead man who's been discovered in a most intriguing condition: with not a spot of blood on his smashed skull and not a penny less than six hundred pounds in his pocket. From the Publisher: What Lord Peter and his bride, the famous mystery writer Harriet Vane, hoped would be a quiet and romantic honeymoon turns into a baffling case of murder when the former owner of their newly acquired estate is found dead in the cellar. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Question: Which fictional detective married author Harriet Vane?
Answer: Lord Peter Wimsey