The Science of Mysteries

[kennyc]

Physics With a Twist
Cocktail Party Physics
The Science of Mysteries: For Whom the Bells Toll

By Jennifer Ouellette | December 21, 2011 | Comments3


A Twitter exchange recently revealed that certain members of the small subset of science writers who were humanities majors, also have a shared taste for classic mysteries. They thought they would co-post, on their respective blogs, some nice literary analyses (“the epistolary opening of Busman’s Honeymoon …”), but then realized that readers were no doubt bored by the overuse of epistolary openings in the science blogosphere. So they decided to write about the science of classical mystery writers instead. Links to other posts in the series by Deborah Blum, and Ann Finkbeiner – plus me at Discovery News on Jane Langton’s Dark Nantucket Noon, and an earlier post of mine on singing sands, in honor of Josephine Tey’s mystery The Singing Sands — can be found at the end of this post.

Gentleman-detective Lord Peter Wimsey is stranded in a small English village due to car trouble on New Year’s Eve at the start of Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors. This being a holiday, and one of the change-ringers being absent, he finds himself sitting in on a record-breaking, nine-hour ringing of the changes for the parish. He made an impression, so much so that a few months later, he gets dragged back to the village to help solve the mystery of a body that has turned up in the cemetery, which may or may not be connected somehow with a robbery of a pricey emerald necklace some 15 years before.

....

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...he-bells-toll/

[Victoria]

Thanks. As a fan of Sayer's novels, i found this very interesting.