Summer of Sayers: Murder Must Advertise

Though there's nothing particularly summery about the series as a whole, Dorothy L. Sayers Lord Peter is a summer read for me. I didn't first read her in summer (rather the opposite, I distinctly remember my first Sayers as a February read!), but when it gets muggy and oppressive out, I yearn for the brisk wit and sharp characterizations of Sayers. I tend to do a fair amount of crafting in the summer, and the Lord Peter audiobooks read by Ian Carmichael are the perfect entertainment when I'm keeping my hands busy. Which is all to say that, working on some stitching, I put on 1933's Murder Must Advertise and had a great good time. If you haven't read it and somehow found your way to this page and you also somehow care about spoilers, go away and make Lord Peter's acquaintance! I'm not going to be coy about spoilers. 

Murder Must Advertise is the eighth Lord Peter Wimsey novel, and is in my opinion the start of the three book run that is really at the heart of my love for the series and for Sayers. (Despite the name of the blog and the pseudonym, I'm not an uncritical fan!) This book and the two after it are what I think of when I think of Wimsey:  maybe because they are the best (I think this is probably it, though I ccould make the case for The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club), maybe because they were my first. This was the second Sayers book I ever read, and while I loved it as a teenager, it is also responsible for my fanaticism about always starting at the beginning of a series. Not knowing the lore of Lord Peter, I didn't immediately recognize him undercover, and the marriage between Parker and Peter's sister Mary served as a spoiler to an early book in the series. Now I always read in order, and having read through the whole series chronologically for the first time starting last year, it is much more enjoyable to experience the characters' changing life circumstances and growth. 

An iconic ad campaign created by Sayers!  

It's actually shocking that this book was published in 1933. There is something timeless feeling about the advertising agency setting, the pace and purpose of the work. While the brands and the mediums of advertising have of course changed, the hungry capitalism and  leech-like relationship to the lower and middle classes has only gotten more pronounced. It's funny to put an incisive and interesting statement about consumerism in the mind of an aristocrat, but the critique is excellently balanced by a real interest in the work, maybe even a love for it. Fascinatingly, Sayers portrays Wimsey as becoming hypnotized by the power of advertising:  at times, the mystery of how to coerce masses to buy very stupid products overrides his interest in the death he's been commissioned to unravel. 

In terms of pure quality writing, Sayers was at her best when writing from her personal experiences. This book, which pulls from her experience at S. H. Benton, the largest advertising agency in Britain at the time, feels so specific and alive in its setting and characters that the mystery feels thoroughly inconsequential. I love the office rituals, the inner life of the office boy, the way misspeaking and misunderstanding between coworkers who are already tense can boil over into full on workplace war, inspiring everyone to take sides and stake out factions. While critical of the industry, the book also thrums with fascination for it, and in such close attention there is love as much as dislike. 

As for the mystery plot, it's not very good! I don't like plots about drug trafficking in any era of the mystery novel,  and this is no exception. In addition to the dope smuggling of it all, there's the vexing matter of Lord Peter. As I read, I asked myself what many a reader of Christie's more novelistic mysteries have pondered:  was the presence of the series detective even necessary? Would this be better if it were not a Lord Peter mystery, but instead a workplace thriller where a new hire gradually begins to realize that his predecessor's death was no accident?! I try not to dwell on what-ifs like this, and I've never heard of any evidence that Sayers intended Murder Must Advertise as anything other than a Wimsey mystery. But the book feels so invested in being a novel and so uninterested in the structure of a mystery that it's hard not to play around with the thought. 

As much as I wish Sayers had written novels outside of the series, and that this were one of them, the book has an interesting function in the arc of Lord Peter's character development, so I reel myself away from the what if. Fascinatingly, Lord Peter is at his absolute least sympathetic in this novel as he inhabits the alter ego of Death Bredon, who through commitment to the undercover he builds into an odious and exploitative figure. Bredon is sociopathic and cruel in his dealings with London's drug-addled Bright Young Things, and because Peter is Bredon, we see a side of his character that is hard and unsympathetic, almost vengeful towards aristocratic youth who became ensnared by addiction and ennui. I suppose Sayers was attempting a critique of the Bright Young Things movement, but she herself thought the attempt to parallel it with the artifice of the advertising world an artistic failure. She was bored by the drug plot and the Bright Young Things plot, and it shows:  those sections are boring by comparison to the vibrant world of the agency. It's only as an illustration of Lord Peter at this moment of his character development that his vengeful cruelty towards the Bright Young Things has any value. If the Bright Young Things are being consumed by an inability to find meaning in life, the book suggests that Lord Peter is threatened by the same nihilistic force. He is bored, he is lonely, and not even unraveling a massive dope scheme and dreaming up an advertising campaign for the ages is a bulwark against those things. 

Ultimately, while I think Sayers was overly harsh in calling this one of her least favorite novels (especially when there are multiple other contenders for a series worst behind it!), I think her self-assessment was broadly correct. The two worlds don't balance well, the drug smuggling is a muddle.... but it only feels as bad as it does because the other world of the book is so alive and interesting. Unlike some others in the series, I would reread this one. Along with Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night, it forms a sort of trilogy in Sayers' oeuvre:  three books that draw deeply from her own autobiography, and which are much better for it. I can't wait for the next two.