Seriously. I’ve been rationing Dorothy Sayers for a long time now and I finally couldn’t help myself and I’m reading the last one with Harriet Vane in it. After this I think I’m down to Wimsey books with train schedule mysteries and such. I’m widely read, although not as much in the mystery genre, and rarely have I found anybody I just liked so much as Peter Wimsey and his give and take with Harriet. All our readers’ advisory databases are worse than useless - what I like about him isn’t in any of their check boxes, you know? No, I do not wish to just read more books about aristocratic detectives, Novelist. I mean, yes, I do enjoy the time period and such, and I really enjoy books written in, say, the teens through forties and set contemporaneously, but really I’m looking for that “special something”. Novelist suggests one of those “after Pride and Prejudice” novels, which is a good idea but clearly, you know, lacking (if it had suggested Pride and Prejudice we might be on the right track), Elizabeth George, who I enjoy but realize that Lynley is indeed a cut-rate Wimsey and plus she has sucked the big one lately, and assorted other wrong fits. There are also a bunch of things I don’t recognize - a lot of David Roberts. Who’s that guy?
What should I read to find the same romantic je ne sais quois as, say Gaudy Night, which is one of my favorite books? Who am I going to just like as much?
The Richard Jury books by Martha Grimes are great. Read them in order for best effect. Sarah Caudwell’s all too brief series starting with Thus Was Adonis Murdered is terrific as well.
I second Sarah Caudwell. Has the same kind of dry humor found in Dorothy Sayers. It’s a damn shame she only wrote three books in the series before dying.
I suspect that if you like Sayers, you will like Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody novels. Set mostly before WWI (although a couple of the later ones are set during WWI, and the latest after the end of the war), they are mysteries set mostly in Egypt, starring Emerson and Amelia Peabody, Egyptologists extraordinaire. Though I think Peters’s form has fallen off in her last few books, the first 8 or 10 books in the series are great, and have the same combination of excitement and understated humor that I find appealing in this type of literature. So check out Crocodile on a Sandbank, the first book (I think), would be my suggestion. Peters is a bit of a romantic, and so there is a very charming element of that in the relation between Amelia and Emerson, too.
You might give Liza Cody a try. I recommend Bucket Nut.
Also, P.D. James.
Also–very different from Saylor’s Wimsey, but have you read Dick Francis at all? Not as exquisitely written as Saylor’s stuff but very good plotwise. Pretty much a different protag in each book, although they all have certain similarities.
Thirding Josephine Tey and Ngaio Marsh–more Marsh than Tey (although Tey is my favorite mystery writer). You might want to try Georgette Heyer’s mysteries as well–not quite the same, but still Golden Age, English country house type murders.
Elizabeth George’s series is somewhat akin, but set in modern day UK. There is an Earl who is a detective. (more like there is a detective who is an Earl…)
Minette Walters is also a very good writer in the British tradition.
Agatha Christie ok with you? I love her Miss Marples more so than her Poirot’s. I was never a huge fan of Whimsey, though…
I’ve always found PD James really dry and impersonal compared to Sayers. I tend to like Kate Wilhelm’s Barbara Holloway books, though she’s never approached the beautiful style she gave us in When Late the Sweet Birds Sang again.
Not on a literary level, but I find a lot of the true noir detective novels like *The Thin Man * portray characters with the sort of confidence Lord Peter has. However, I don’t think of them as managing the complexity of character Sayers did, nor the sustained romantic relationship.
James’ earlier books are fairly good, and she builds a nice cast of characters. But about book 9 or 10, she just dries up. It is almost impossible to read her. I can’t remember the title of the book (sorry) but if you go by the publication dates, the first ones are good.
Note that Jill Paton Walsh has published two books with authorship attributed “and Dorothy L Sayers,” based on notes and half-completed ideas of DLS. They’re not too bad, as those things go: THORNES, DOMINATIONS is the first, and has more of Sayers’ thoughts in it; the second is A PRESUMPTION OF DEATH, based on “The Wimsey Papers” (wartime newspaper columns written by Sayers during WWII.)
A few of Ngaio Marsh’s works come vaguely close to Sayers, but you’ve got to select carefully.
I just don’t connect with P.D. James. Seems, I don’t know, cold. I’m hardly a mystery connoisseur - I can appreciate that the actual mysteries she writes are fine, but I just don’t, you know, care. (Oh, and I’m not just looking for mystery recommendations - if you have something totally different, I’d like to hear about it too.)
I like Elizabeth George, but she’s gone downhill and Lynley is such a cut-rate Wimsey. Havers is a much more interesting character. Also I will never forgive her for murdering Lady Helen for no good reason whatsoever.
I did enjoy The Thin Man for the relationship between Nick and Nora, yes, but it’s obvious that it doesn’t, you know, go anywhere.
I don’t care for Agatha Christie much, like PD James - the mystery might be good but there’s not much going on with the characters. I mean, sometimes you just want a good puzzle, but mostly when I read I want more than that. (But you can’t go cheating with the mystery! I hate when they pull that crap - if you’re working with the conventions of a specific genre you can’t go cheating. My only sorrow about Gaudy Night is that the mystery is just not up to snuff.)
There are 4 Sarah Caudwell novels - Thus Was Adonis Murdered, The Shortest Way to Hades, The Sirens Sang of Murder, and The Sibyl in Her Grave. So for those of you who only know the first 3, there is a treat in store for your new year!
Any Marjery Allingham fans here? My favourite is "The Beckoning Lady. I just love the Cassands, and the Glubalum song!
And if it doesn’t have to be mysteries, what about Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon, and “A Bullet in the Ballet” and “No Bed for Bacon”?
Oh, boy! Another chance to recommend Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing About The Dog.
Nope, not a series. It’s a science fiction novel based at Oxford’s time travel lab–sometime in the not-so-distant future. With visits to the Middle Ages, dotty upper-class Victorian England & the destruction of Coventry Cathedral. Which is being rebuilt…
Very intelligent & very funny. With definite nods to Peter & Harriet.
Philo Vance, written by S. S. Van Dine, was often dubbed the American Peter Wimsey since they were contemporaries. They both have ridiculous affectations, talk in ways that no human has ever spoken, share bizarre understandings of of obscure trivia, are patrons of art that they don’t know much about, and have the world falling at their feet for absolutely no good reason. Personally I find Vance slightly less obnoxious and unreadable than Wimsey, so he may not be for you, but I don’t understand fans of Wimsey. Try it, it might work.
Zsofia–yes! I stopped reading George after that occurrence. I saw she had a new book out and found it was a several hundred page defense of her doing what she did! Gah. No-never again will I read her.
Why couldn’t she have killed off Deb? Deb the whiney spoiled brat who messes up murder investigations because she has NO brain at all?
Nero Wolf keeps popping in my head, but I’ve never read him.
Defense?! It wasn’t even a defense! It was a “I guess you snots don’t know that there are POOR PEOPLE out there and their lives SUCK. So let me tell you all about it and punish the hell out of you for buying my books! And it won’t even be a very good book! So there!”
Wolfe is one of my all-time favourites, but I wouldn’t say that he would work as a substitute for a Wimsey fan – the sensibility is too American, and I’m pretty sure that Wolfe and Archie would have hated Wimsey, Harriet, Bunter and their whole class-ridden set.
About the only thing I can think of that might work is the afore-mentioned early Ngaio Marsh.
And yes, it’s awesome. More awesome if you’ve already read both Three Men in a Boat and Dorothy Sayers.