Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night

By Dorothy Sayers

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."

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. 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. And when the mystery is finally solved, she is faced with an agonizing decision: Should she, after five years of rejecting his proposals, finally agree to marry Lord Peter?

This is the first Sayers I've read, and not for lack of recommendations.  I tried once, earlier in my life, and just... couldn't.. get... into... it, and I have avoided carefully ever since all efforts to get me to enjoy her Wimsey series.  (In this way, I treat Sayers like I do Georgette Heyer - often recommended based on the types of books I enjoy, but no matter how much I try, I simply do not like these authors, and to avoid further wastes of time, I don't even bother with any of their books anymore).  

Anyway, I chose this because someone on Goodreads said it has Latin in it, which it does, factually speaking, but I think it's a bit of a waffle to say that this has two languages in it.  That being said, Sayers did that even more annoying thing of using two languages and then not even bothering to translate.  [Fun sidebar, when I was in second grade, I took Latin [Minier sidebar: can you believe a public school teaches Latin to second graders??] and the only thing I retained was what I later realized was a drinking song for young collegiates. So maybe I would have fit right in at Oxford in the 30s.  We also put on a play about the death of Iphigenia - very educational].   Which fine, one passage is about harpies (not in favor, I assume, based on context) and then the last bit, I'd already been familiar with, since I read Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is really why I was interested in Gaudy Night to begin with (something Willis took so much inspiration from couldn't be all bad, could it?) and anyway, now I'm re-reading To Say Nothing of the Dog and enjoying it quite a bit more than Gaudy Night, so maybe it's not a waste.  Gaudy Night doesn't have any sense of humor about itself, and maybe that's why I can't get behind Sayers. Everyone is such a caricature, but no one recognizes it.  At least in Christie, Poirot knows he is ridiculous, and uses it to great effect. Sayers feels snobby, all the academic elitism that's going on,  like rich, aristocratic people who wear terrible clothes because they can afford not to care what other people think.  The poor are crazy, the rich merely eccentric.   

Anyway if you want a very wordy, "highfaultin'" mystery, by all means, read Gaudy Night, or perhaps The Name of the Rose, which also has the distinction of being more literary than mystery and thus failing at both being a good mystery or fun to read.  Not that I thought that the Gaudy Night mystery was nearly as bad as Name of the Rose, it just felt like supremely low stakes (a somewhat indiscriminate poison pen whose main threat for most of the book, is bad publicity), and easily solvable (and not to rag on myself, but if I know who it is and the main character is being told "You mean you still haven't figured it out? Apply a little thought to the problem", then what's to enjoy?), and for a 460 page book, those are both grave sins.  

Anyway, I would recommend this book to people who want to appear smart, or for those who want to spend endless agonies debating whether educating women makes them unfit for family life, an idea which (I think) we're meant to assume is absurd, given that it's a cherished notion of the clearly insane person at the heart of the criminal activity, and yet we spend an enormous amount of time going over and over it.  To be fair, Harriet also seems to think that smart women are wasted as wives and mothers, so maybe it was just one of those funny 1930s ideas which were all the rage at the time, like Hitler.  And yes, it is always so weird to me how books from the 1930s foreshadow WWII unintentionally.  It's hard to get a sense here whether Sayers was pro- or anti-Hitler, which seems damning in retrospect, but also explains why there were so many goddamned British nazis.  

Also, I had a similar problem as other readers, which is to say that I really couldn't distinguish between any of the academic suspects, except that one of them was bad at writing a book, and another had a similar name to Harriet (a key plot point, as it turned out!).  And that's okay, since I didn't have to, but seriously, 460 pages and the suspects are almost entirely interchangeable?  Using two languages here myself: No bueno.

42: A Book That Features Two Languages