Busman's Honeymoon (1936)
1982 N.E.L. blurb:
Variously described as a love story with detective interruptions, and a detective story with romantic interruptions, Busman's Honeymoon lives up to both these descriptions with style and ease.
In this, the last of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels (though he did appear again in short stories), the intolerable Miss Sayers has married him off to his beloved Harriet, but this has in no way diminished Lord Peter's determination to see a case through to the very, very end...
My review:
The ludicrously over-rated account of the Wimsey honeymoon, which irritates by the emphasis on the romance between Lord Peter and Harriet, a device much admired by the modern perpetrators of Mills & Boon mysteries (often with cats—this has the Dowager Duchess’ cat, which should fade away very quickly, grin & all), but to this reader, it is ghastly—and an insult to Donne; indeed, one wishes that the only line quoted from the Dean of St. Paul’s was “Divorce mee,’untie, or breake that knot againe.” Quotations play much too large a part in the business: witness the quotation competition between Supt. Kirk and Wimsey, which surfaces at all the wrong moments. Bunter, too, has become as intolerable as his neurotic master, and one suffers from a hearty desire to throw him down the cellar stairs—in his defence, it must be said that the Cockburn ’96 scene is excellent. So much for the comedy. The detective business (introduced much too tardily—more than 100 pp. pass by with neither head nor hair of a corpse, before Bunter and the charwoman find the corpse of the house’s previous owner in the cellar) suffers from the surrounding saccharine: there is some good detection, but it is done by Supt. Kirk rather than by the Wimseys, who are too busy billing and cooing to Donne the detective mantle. It is, however, Wimsey who discovers the solution to the crime, which is as brilliant as the methods used to bring about Unnatural Death, or the Strong Poison that led to the Wimsey marriage. This feat is then spoilt by the superfluous Epithalamion, a piece of writing which ought to be burnt in order to preserve Sayers’ memory.