— Mystery & Crime —
The Nine Tailors
Dorothy L. Sayers
— 1934 —
“
Lord Peter Wimsey gets snowed in at a village church during a New Year's bell-ringing marathon and stumbles into an old crime.
Decide its fate
⚖The case for it
Sayers takes her time, and she means to. Before anything resembling a plot kicks in, she wants you steeped in the geography of a low, flood-threatened country, its water and its slow rural work, and readers hunting a quick puzzle will lose patience. Real cost, worth naming. But the final chapters gather up everything the early ones planted so quietly you missed it, and small things you shrugged off turn out to carry the whole weight. The payoff earns back the plodding hours.
— the honest librarian
✕The case against
Be honest with yourself about how much change-ringing you want. Sayers explains Kent Treble Bob Major with a scholar's thoroughness, and the fen-drainage and parish subplots move at parish speed. The solution is genuinely lovely, but it arrives after long stretches in which Wimsey investigates nothing in particular while the bells get described.
— the honest librarian
beyond the verdict
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