Lord Peter’s Early Years

I didn’t plan to revisit Dorothy L. Sayers this summer. But in a fit of summertime sadness, I got the whole series on audiobook to cheer myself up. I’ve read the whole series through once, and reread a few of the books on a select basis. This was my first time with the audiobooks. I sampled a few narrators and going with Ian Carmichael was a done deal the instant I heard him:  he’s really, really good at Lord Peter’s patter and prattling. I never liked the look of him as Wimsey in the show from the 70s (too old, too round), but he has the manner down wonderfully. These aren’t books to listen to on increased speed:  Carmichael already talks a mile a minute when in his Peter mode. I haven’t watched any of the screen adaptations of Sayers, but Carmichael seems to understand the character and have a very clear vision for him. It’s a wonderful performance, so good that it even made one of my least-loved of the series, Five Red Herrings, not only intelligible but actually enjoyable. (Not having to read phonetically written accents is a benefit of audiobooks that I forgot to mention in my post about them!)

Setting aside my strong positive feelings about the format, it’s odd to revisit Wimsey. I was a teenager when I first read Sayers, and now I’m about the same age as the characters. When I first read the books, I had absolutely no context for the character. I’d read maybe a third of Christie and all of Sherlock Holmes, but no other mystery writers contemporaneous to Sayers. Now, I almost feel as if I have too much context to meet these books with the same open-hearted love that they first inspired in me. Oh, I still love them, especially for Harriet Vane, but it's tempered. 

There’s knowledge of history and genre and biography rattling around as I listen to these books, but also knowledge of fandom. I saw someone on tumblr point out that Sayers’ relationship with Peter is very fannish:  he’s her blue-eyed boy, her blorbo, her disgusting slice of maggoty cheese. And once I knew the concept, it was unavoidable to consider Harriet as self-insert, a Mary Sue: she is a mystery writer who Our Hero just so happens to fall madly in love-at-first sight with?? And though I think the books are too well written to be dismissed for these elements, there’s no doubt that there is truth in them, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of Sayers’ feelings towards her characters on the books, especially as I round the bend of the turning point on Peter’s character. Even though I feel some critical way about Sayers and her relationship to her characters, characterization is one of the biggest draws to me as a reader, and character growth over a series is something I value. I think, but I’m not sure, that characters whose authors feel strongly about in one way or another are typically better than neutral characters. I’d rather a character that the author hates, or one that the author loves too much, than a neutral and dull detective! 

But I’m getting off track. Early Sayers! Young Peter! While most people fans celebrate the later, more literary novels, I do actually like both early Sayers and young Peter quite a lot. Lord Peter Wimsey is immediately more interesting to me than contemporary detectives because he is fragile. Young Peter is a World War I veteran and he suffers from shell-shock, now recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder, and this immediately charges all his relationships with interest in these early books. His cliche butler, Bunter, is elevated and differentiated as the caretaker of someone struggling with occasionally serious mental illness, and Bunter’s steadfast loyalty is easily explained by a trauma-bond from the trenches. In the second book, Clouds of Witness, we’re taken to Peter’s family to face a criminal charge against his duke of a brother. Peter is unabashedly his mother’s favorite child, not just because he’s most similar to her, but because she seems to treasure him as only a parent can a child who was almost lost. He hardly knows his little sister, their very different experiences in the war serving as a wedge between them. Peter’s detecting is a vulgarity amongst his class, but it’s tolerated because it is understood as a remedy for his madness, and while he’s a person of power by default of birth, in these early books, Peter is also othered from his class by how widely known his struggles with PTSD are. He’s desperate for escape and solace, and it makes him relentless and dogged in pursuit of puzzles and cases. But Peter is also furious about seeking truth, about seeing things as they are and not as romance and tradition and honor dictate they be, and that is surely an aspect of his character tied to the great disillusionment of WWI. 

If it’s not obvious, far and away my favorite of the early Sayers books (and maybe one of my favorites in the whole series) is The Unpleasantness at the Bellonna Club. The setting of a gentlemen’s club for veterans on Remembrance Day is brilliant. Seeing Peter amongst other men who are coping (or very much not) with similar wounds is fascinating. It's also interesting to see Peter's wellness contrasted:  unlike so many others in the Bellonna, his body is intact, and compared to poor, shattered George Fentiman, his psyche is comparatively whole. I also happen to think the mystery is unusually good for Sayers (I love a forensic angle!), but the setting and cast of characters in this book are elevating and illuminating. There is something so heartrending and fascinating seeing Lord Peter be moved from the setting of the aristocracy (where he painfully doesn’t fit anymore) to this haunted house of haunted men, a place where he does fit, where he immediately understands the other men in ways he could not seem to comprehend his own brother. It’s great! It’s so good! In this book, Sayers’ love for her own character works so well. 

Sadly for me, but happily for the imaginary character of Peter, Sayers’ rather dropped the PTSD after this book. Perhaps she’d simply felt she’d explored it as much as was fruitful. Perhaps expunging the unpleasantness allowed Peter to heal in a profound way off page. I think there may actually be an argument for the latter, to an extent. But also, it isn’t too much longer until Harriet is introduced and Peter Wimsey begins his transformation into romantic hero as well as amateur detective. 

I took a break from my summer of Sayers to read mostly police procedurals this fall. I slowed down, in part, because of a dreadful hypothesis: I expect that I’ll dislike Lord Peter more and more as the series concludes and he trends towards being more authoritative in his aristocracy and more romantic in his heroism. I hope to be wrong when I do finish the rest of the books.

Peter Robinson Part Two: Aftermath

With my Banks backstory out of the way, I have some thoughts about 2002’s Aftermath, the book I most recently read. Aftermath has a corker of a premise:  it’s set in the titular aftermath of two police officers accidentally discovering the solution to an ongoing serial crime spree while responding to what seems like a domestic violence call. I’m a fan of the police procedural sub-genre, obviously, since that’s been the bulk of what I’ve been reading and writing about this fall, and most of the time books in the genre focus on the investigation, the hunt, the cat and mouse. Especially the sub-sub-genre of serial killer novels, which this falls into. I was surprised and excited to enter the narrative at a different point in the investigation, and I admire that Robinson clearly decided to put effort into exploring new aspects of the police procedural so far into his established series and character:  by book 12 in a long series, many authors are simply coasting through formula, and the effort to do new things mid-series validates my decision to push through the challenges and stick with the series. It is also why I will keep reading, even though I had many misgivings about how Aftermath ultimately unfolded. 

I’m flagging the rest of this for spoilers. I don’t recommend reading on unless you either don’t care or have already read the book.

  As I mentioned, the premise of Aftermath is that two police officers discover a house where serial killings have taken place while responding to a domestic call, a discovery that quickly turns violent:  one of the two officers is attacked and killed by the man of the house, while the other loses control defending herself and beats the man, Terry Payne, to unconsciousness and ultimately death. The titular aftermath is not just Alan Banks’ suspicion about the level of involvement or knowledge that the battered wife, Lucy, may have had in the murder of many young women, but also Annie Cabbot’s task of investigating charges of police brutality against Janet Taylor, the young female officer who beat Terry Payne in self-defense, ultimately causing his death. 

It’s an ambitious plot, and I think ultimately the Cabbot thread of the investigation is handled better because there is ambiguity left within it, while the Lucy Payne thread is too tidily wrapped up. It’s truly uncomfortable to read about the unraveling of the promising young woman whose career is destroyed through her own use of force. Police brutality and killings are a continual problem in America, where I live, and I found it fascinating to see this explored with care to the complexities in one fictional version of this common event. (Not to say that all real life police killings are as complex as this fictional one; many are not.) Robinson does a good job letting his characters grapple with a series of equally true facts:  Janet was in an unimaginably terrifying situation; the man she killed was involved in horrific crimes; and, at a certain point, she made a choice to keep hitting him. Janet’s act of violence in reaction to violence ends in further tragedy, as the book closes with the young officer dead in a car accident caused by her own drunk driving. Was Janet a “bad apple,” just prone to making reckless decisions? Maybe. But the system that created her and placed her in a position of both vulnerability and power is also scrutinized. Far from every police procedural book or series grapples with the system and deep questions of justice, but the fact that some do is certainly one of the reasons I read so much of this mystery sub-genre. 

Now is as good a time as any to mention that Annie Cabbot’s backstory includes being gang raped by police colleagues, and being blacklisted in her career when the perpetrators argued that she was a willing participant. Like Connelly’s Renee Ballard, she is an outsider because of her attempts to report sexual assault or harassment. And much like Connelly’s Ballard, I have mixed feelings about male writers using workplace rape or assault as a mechanism for plot and character development. It also causes a character problem when applied to female detectives:  she must have powerful reasons to stay in a job and a system after being made a victim of it. Ballard is of the true detective trope, obsessively and almost supernaturally drawn to crime. It’s less clear to me what Cabbot’s excuse is. She ends Aftermath with a renewed dedication to investigating crimes and advancing her career after doing this internal affairs type work and I was like, “Why???” Cabot was our viewpoint witness into the dirty tragedy of Janet, and that textual positioning in no way sensically translates to the sudden commitment to ambition and advancement. I can read in to the text that maybe it inspires Cabbot to be the change in the system or whatever, but that wasn’t on the page. Maybe I’ll see in the next book, but even beyond the Janet plot, I’ve always been on the fence about Robinson’s decision to make rape such a central part of Annie’s character, and the amount of times it was referred to in Aftermath isn’t helping me resolve it positively. On the plus side, I’ve also never loved the power imbalance between Cabbot and Banks as a romantic couple and I was happy that this book broke it off; here’s hoping it sticks.

This complaint about the handling of rape relates to what I feel is the most serious mishandling at the heart of Aftermath, and possibly one that would make me question whether to keep reading if I weren’t so damn committed to the series: the decision to give Lucy Payne, the battered young wife of the apparent serial killer, a horrifying backstory of child abuse that’s part satanic panic part hillbilly cannibal. And to make her the real serial killer. Because of her childhood trauma. The book actually, textually states that sometimes abuse makes people grow up to be violent abusers. I don’t like this trope and felt it wasn’t handled well here. I know that the "cycle of abuse" was at one time thought to be true, but current studies at a minimum complicate this idea, if not disprove it. Within fiction, I simply don't find it interesting, and I don't think it serves this story well at all. I don’t necessarily dislike the decision to make Lucy involved in the crime and set Banks to the task of proving it, but her abuse backstory and assigning that the reason for her participation in horrific crime is terribly flat and reductive, especially in contrast with the ambiguity and grace allowed Janet. It's altogether too tidy, and it makes for a lesser book.

In conclusion, it seems I grapple with the Peter Robinson Inspector Banks books even beyond the surface level of my problems with their audio presentation! But even though I disliked elements of Aftermath, I do like that it inspired me to think hard and grapple. Ultimately, the experience of thinking through my reactions to some of these tropes and real world issues is even more valuable to me than just straight up having a good time with a book. Though, I did absolutely follow this book up with a selection of fun and less challenging books to give my mental grappling hooks a break!

Peter Robinson Part One: The Tragedy of the Narrator

 I’ve been reading through Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series for some years now. Peter Robinson was a British-Canadian author of the long-running Inspector Alan Banks series, which debuted in 1987 and reached 28 books by the time of Robinson’s death in 2022. Banks immediately impressed me as a cut above many police procedural true detectives, and I liked the setting of the Yorkshire Dales. 

When I refer to reading these, I mean with my ears through audiobooks. I had momentum going with these audiobooks at one point, but the narrator of the books available through the library changed after nine books with 2000’s In a Dry Season. A narrator change can be welcome or unobtrusive, or it can be basically fine after a period of adjustment. Sometimes it can be disastrous. This was disastrous. I sadly don’t know the name of the original narrator (I got these from the library from a city where I no longer live so I don’t have easy access to the name), but he was fine:  your bog standard unobtrusive narrator, the baseline one hopes for. Unfortunately, I hate Rob Keith’s performance. Partially it’s comparative, partially it’s because he does things I don’t like in any book, partially it just feels wrong for the characters. I don’t think Keith’s posh, RP accent is a good fit for either the character of Banks (uneducated and from a  working class background, but a self-taught intellectual and lover of music) or for the Yorkshire setting. Keith’s reading is slow and ponderous even at increased speed. But most of all, he’s one of those male narrators who tries to do high pitched female voices. 

I hate how Keith voices women. 

This is disastrous because, as anyone who has read the Inspector Banks books may know,  In a Dry Season is a turning point in the series in many aspects, most notably for the introduction of Annie Cabot, a recurring character and POV narrator! It’s also a book that features historical interludes written by a woman with ties to the case. There’s a lot of opportunity to hear Keith’s idea of what women sound like.

Not to harp too much, but did I mention I hate it? It actually caused me to drop the series for several years. But by this point in the series, Banks had gotten particularly interesting, struggling with big changes in his personal life, and despite the terrible voicing and some (ongoing) hesitations about her backstory, I liked Annie Cabot and thought it was a very intriguing turn to introduce an equal and a foil to Banks. Even more so, In a Dry Season has a setup that is practically made for me:  it’s a very cold case, a historical crime, unearthed in a fascinating setting of a ghost town that had been submerged by a dam and unearthed by drought. I work in a historical profession and this premise is absolute catnip for me.  It haunted me that I’d given up on a book that I otherwise would like. So I made my peace with the idea that books 1-9 were sort of a different series, waited a few years, and came back to the audio series.

While this is still my least favorite narration of any series I’m actively listening to, I did end up enjoying the content of In a Cold Season even though it felt like more of a literary mystery than a proper procedural like the previous Banks books. But the shadow of the narrator impacts me, and I find it hard to untangle my feelings about the change in style and characters from their presentation. Since then, I’ve kept at the series, albeit at a slower pace, both in listening–this is one of the audiobook slogs that I referenced in my last post, as I continue to be actively repelled by Keith’s narration–and in how frequently I pick them up. Which will bring us up to the present and the most recent book I read, 2002’s Aftermath, in part two… 

DI Fawley and Realism in Police Procedurals

I’ve alluded that, so far, I’ve been choosing not to write in depth about books or authors who I don’t connect with. While I’m going to say some mean-sounding things about Cara Hunter’s D.I. Fawley series, I want to stress that this is adamantly not me changing my policy. After all, I read SEVEN of these books in 2025. As of this writing, I am series complete! I’m not a completionist, I won’t finish a book–and certainly not a series–if I am not enjoying it. I stop reading books all the time, but not only do I finish the books in the Fawley series, I gallop through them. 

Before I get into the details, first, a brief introduction. Cara Hunter is a British author and best-seller. She has a detailed website that makes it clear she’s interested in true crime, crime shows, and the history of crime fiction. She’s a fan of the genre and I love that about her! (Sometimes her books even have fun references and easter eggs for fellow mystery and true crime heads.) The D.I. Adam Fawley series makes up the body of her work; outside of this series, she has only one stand-alone novel. The first Fawley book, Close to Home, was published in Britain in 2018 and the most recent, Making a Killing, came out this year in 2025. These books are police procedurals set in Oxford and its surroundings and they feature not only the titular Fawley, but his team of detectives. They lean towards the thriller side of a mystery-thriller spectrum in my opinion because they often include in their POV people involved in the case, including the criminals. This frequently puts the reader in the position of having more information than the detectives. Some of the cases will be familiar to people who also consume true crime content; at least one is very “ripped from the headlines.” (Not that this is new in crime fiction: The Murder on the Orient Express is also inspired by true crime, after all.) The crimes are often disturbing and sometimes involve children. 
 

And here's the part that may seem like I'm panning the series:  these books are silly. The forensic science functions like magic in wizard school books for tiny children:  it’s inexplicable and convenient, but also incredibly easy for any random villain to manipulate. I’m talking about villains capable of planting touch DNA levels of magic pseudo-science. Maybe this sort of DNA manipulation is technically possible (I'm not a scientist), but they're socially improbable. And the Oxford police are apparently free of bureaucracy and backlog, because DNA analysis happens within hours. It’s funny that the science and procedure of these police procedurals feels so out of step with everything I know about policing and science because Hunter works with several long-term consulting partners and even has a podcast with several of them. Maybe they do it differently in Oxford! 
 

The impressive competence of the police is only outdone by that of the villains, who are the most evil people to EVER walk the earth. Psychopaths and sociopaths are real and rampant in Adam Fawley’s Oxford. They come in all ages and genders, though they do tend to lean female; included in their ranks is at least one child mastermind. In addition to their abundance, the psychopaths of Fawley’s Oxford are all geniuses, capable of outsmarting the police and manipulating evidence. And these aren't once-in-a-lifetime brushes with evil for the detectives: they encounter these diabolical criminals regularly, every year or two. 

I don't know why it feels so silly. I'm not fussy about Jessica Fletcher stumbling over so many dead bodies, I don't care that some Agatha Christie books are improbable. I think the feeling that these are extra silly comes from my expectations of the police procedural subgenre:  I do expect the "procedure" to be believable-to-its-time even if the crimes aren't. I had to recalibrate my expectations away from strict realism to enjoy these books, and once I did, found a lot to enjoy. In fact, the series has several characteristics that I particularly enjoy and am always looking for in modern series: 

• Multimedia or multivocal presentation – I like when mystery books include documents, and I like when they have multiple perspectives. This series has both:  multiple points of view and a narrative that is interwoven with letters, emails, news articles, social media posts, police reports, phone conversation transcripts, podcast scripts, etc. I don’t want every single book to follow this style, but when this style is done well I usually enjoy it. 
• High quality audiobook - I especially enjoy this approach when it’s handled well in audio. These audiobooks are a gold standard for multiple narrators done well. Each book has multiple narrators and (aside from the occasional wobbly Irish or American accent), each is quite good. I may even enjoy the "document collage" style even more when it's presented in a well-done audio. 
• Teamwork makes the dreamwork - Especially in police procedurals, I love reading about collaborative mystery solving. Yeah, yeah, I do like the Harry Bosch books and consider them my flagship police procedural series. But I really enjoy interpersonal conflict and agreement, multiple perspectives and disagreements, flashes of brilliance spread around and that build upon one another. It just feels more realistic, especially in the workplace setting that is the police procedural.
• The steady march of time - Building off the above, I automatically prefer modern books that exist in a temporal stream over ones that keep their characters suspended in amber. Hunter's characters undergo big life events that change their relationships to their work, and I think that's neat.

A flip side of these characteristics is that I don't think they're all done at a top standard. In particular, while I like the large cast of detectives,  I don’t think they are as interesting or as deep as, for example, the cast in Elly Griffiths' Ruth Galloway books. The pleasure in Hunter's detectives is not their individual strength, but that they make up an interesting collective, with different approaches and personalities having both synergy and conflict. Still, character work is not Hunter's strong suite, and the shallowness of the villains that I mentioned above is a black mark against these books. I'm also on the fence about ripped-from-the-headlines and sensationalist plots that are sort of the natural outcome of insanely evil criminals. So far, I've felt like the series more or less stays on the acceptable line of the lurid element of crime, in part because I think Hunter demonstrates through some of the essays that I've read that she is thinking deeply about true crime and crime fiction and making very intentional decisions about tropes and how she is subverting or repurposing them. That said, the series does walk that line and I wouldn't necessarily recommend the series to everyone--it's not one I've suggested to my mom, also a crime reader, for example.

While it's not on my list of favorite characteristics, the books are just undeniably propulsive. I tear through them on audio, and as some of my other current ongoing series are a bit of a slog on audio, it's nice to spice them up with books that are gripping even if they're not great. I don't usually assign scores, but this series is a solid 3/5 stars for me, never topping out more than 3.5, but also rarely dipping below 3.