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OK, where to start?
I've never read any Sayers before. I'd heard people praising these books but I'm not a big mystery fan so I might never have read this if not for this club. That said due to the general impression of these books being classics of the genre I was hopeful I'd enjoy it.
On that basis I was slightly disappointed. It was OK but not great. I understand this is not the best of the series though I probably wouldn't have liked to dive in part way through.
This one I think suffers from the criticism that Agatha Christie gets - that the "puzzle" element of the murder is all and that the final solution is overly complicated. Worse than that Sayers indulges in that trope where she has characters say how unbelievable certain aspects of detective novels are.
It's maybe worth a word about Lord Peter Wimsey. I understand that a large part of the appeal of these books is him. If you don't find him charming and funny then you won't get a lot from them. I sort of didn't and then did. There were times early on when I just wanted to slap him. Later I just recognised it as a point where others would find him funny and shrugged. Humour is subjective and has probably changed a lot since 1923.
Speaking of which - this book is horribly anti-semitic, which may have been just the times but if you're sensitive to that then avoid this book. If you can hold your nose until about half way through it becomes less of an issue.
The other attitude-of-its-time I struggled with was a class one. This whole paternalistic aristocracy with servants thing, where Lord Peter is a good egg and always treats "his man" Bunter fairly, is somewhat hard to swallow. The fact that he creates long days with little sleep for Bunter, by the fact of his "hobby" of being a detective is brushed over. And of course we have no idea of Bunter's inner life or even his concerns outside his relationship to Wimsey.
I say this is "of its time" but of course people still quite like this whole thing - see Downton Abbey.
In the end it was the wanting to see how/who dunnit that pulled me through. I guessed correctly on the how early on, the who was more of a surprise.
Another stray observation - did anyone else stumble over who Parker was? I actually skipped the preface in case of spoilers but in skimming over I caught the fact that Parker was a detective with the Police who was also Wimsey's friend. If I hadn't read that I would have been confused about the detective part. When he first appears Wimsey greets him clearly as a friend and he's hoping he's "full of crime" (i.e. has a case for them to investigate) but it's not clear that Parker's a detective. I kept waiting for this to be made clear. Then I went back and double-checked, but still couldn't find any explicit references. For my reading, from the text alone, Parker is a friend who is another amateur detective. I found it odd.
Overall it was a decent read but not an amazing one.
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