The Nine Tailors (1934)
N.E.L. blurb:
It was a corpse, disfigured and unrecognisable. The sexton found it, and appropriately it was in the churchyard.
The Nine Tailors with its evocative portrait of Fenchurch St. Paul, its unforgettable villagers and its magnificent church, is one of Dorothy L. Sayers' finest books of detection.
My review:
Although coming before the abominable Gaudy Night and the mediocre Busman's Honeymoon, this is one of Sayers' best novels. The Fen country village, with its church, is magnificently drawn, and the church services show as much feeling and power as the powerful bells, at once beautiful and menacing. This book obviously inspired H.C. Bailey's The Bishop's Crime (1940), an interesting although somewhat over-rated Reggie Fortune, and Gladys Mitchell's Dead Men's Morris (1936) and St. Peter's Finger (1938). The plot indeed hinges on bells: there is an ingenious cryptogram and an ingenious murder method, both of which concern bells. Despite the excellence of setting and writing, the detective plot is not neglected; Wimsey, who is neither a Wodehousian twit or an effete Philo Vance, does a brilliant job of discovering the identity of the body in the churchyard, and how it relates to an equally long-buried crime in the past. The book comes to its climax in the flooded village, "with an aching and intolerable melancholy, like the noise of the bells of a drowned city pushing up through the overwhelming sea."