Surprise! Charis and Sharon return at long last to the shores of Wilvercombe to continue our discussion on HAVE HIS CARCASE. We share life updates for both of us, discuss why this book’s plot is so impossible to talk about, bring up Raymond Chandler’s thoughts on Golden Age detectives, and cover an important emotional watershed for Harriet and Peter. Also: we run through changes in our posting schedule going forward and introduce our Patreon!
This episode tips its hat at the whodunnit of the murder but does not give detailed spoilers about the howdunnit.
Shownotes:
- Here is the fuller citation of Sayers’ letters to her publisher Victor Gollancz about turning from Five Red Herrings to writing Have His Carcase, as excerpted in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899 to 1936: “[Readers] have also grumbled that Lord Peter a) falls in love b) talks too discursively–here is a book [Five Red Herrings] in which nobody falls in love (unless you count Campbell) and in which practically every sentence is necessary to the plot (except a remark or two on Scottish scenery and language). Much good may it do ’em! Anyway, I will return to a less rigidly intellectual formula in HAVE-HIS-CARCASE which will turn on an alibi and a point of medicine, but will, I trust, contain a certain amount of human interest and a more or less obvious murderer. But I haven’t made up the plot yet…”
- We discuss the central idea found in Brigitta Hudácskó’s “Ruritania by the Sea-Detection by the Seaside in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Have His Carcase,” which ran in HJEAS: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies Vol. 27, Issue 1 in 2021. Our thanks to Hudácskó for sending us the article and for our podcast’s first scholarly citation!
- We discuss at length Raymond Chandler’s 1944 article for The Atlantic Monthly titled “The Simple Art of Murder”
- We refer to the meme Worst Person You Know Made a Great Point
- And we also share our mutual love for the 2013 film Pacific Rim
