Clouds of Witness

It was an unexpected pleasure to discover that there was a Wimsey novel I hadn't read yet - rather like finding the last bottle of the '47 lurking dust-covered at the back of the cellar. The book - the second full-length Wimsey novel - isn't up to the standard of some of the later ones, but it does have quite a lot to entertain and interest the reader. The Yorkshire setting is nicely observed, with dialect characters who are portrayed as individuals and manage to avoid becoming stereotypes. The scene where Wimsey goes astray on the moors on a foggy night is pure melodrama (Wilkie Collins at his most wuthering), but Sayers defuses the tension with neat irony by tying it into the song "On Ilkley Moor baht'at"What is most interesting about the book, seen as part of the Wimsey "canon", is the way it establishes the relationships between Lord Peter, his brother the Duke, his sister Lady Mary, their mother the Dowager, and Chief Inspector Parker. The Duke is accused of murdering Mary's fiancé: we know, of course, that Wimsey will be able to get him off the hook (any other outcome would pretty much rule out any further Lord Peter novels), but it's an interesting challenge for him, not least because the Duke refuses to explain where he was on the night in question, while Mary's evidence at the inquest conflicts with the other witnesses.

Holds up better than the first book in the series. The characters are getting more depth to them now. The first couple of chapters are a bit dry as they're done in the form of court reporters. Once we get into first person viewpoints, it works a lot better.

I enjoyed this more than 'Whose Body', maybe because I liked Lord Peter Wimsey better here (he was too flippant and silly in the other one for my taste). The characters were intriguing and one felt interested in their fates; the unfolding of the story and clues were good and I enjoyed much of the book. Unfortunately, I personally didn't feel very satisfied at the conclusion/solution--there were so many threads and possibilities, that what turned out to be the truth seemed anticlimactic.

Clouds of Witness was chosen as the book for the month for my mystery book club. This book is the first one that I have read by Sayers, and while the story was all right it was not a favorite of mine. However hearing other opinions at our meeting, it was said that there were other books in the series that were better and not to base this series on this one book. The mystery in the book was one the reader would definitely have trouble solving. There are many twists and turns however the ending came out of left field for me. I enjoyed the characters of Bunter and Parker and found Peter to be the most enjoyable of his family members. Clouds of Witness was a nice read however I am not sure I would have chosen it on my own.

I fear I might have been really lucky with Gaudy Night (which I think is a masterpiece). Sayers has been disappointing ever since I started to read Peter in order. Oh well. I'll keep on reading and see if it gets better.
The story's fairly good but the writing is incredibly heavy and the pacing is wrong - it's way too slow. I also was relatively indifferent to all the characters, which didn't help. Some funny moments mostly to do with Peter's personality but all in all frankly a bit of a bore.

I continue to stumble my way through Golden Age mysteries in an attempt to understand what so many other readers enjoy in them. So far, my only real success has been with Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley, but I am determined to emerge triumphant with Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey. I have to admit that it's been a bit of a hard slog. Perhaps I should just jump ahead to the book in which Harriet Vane makes her appearance?The largest part of Lord Peter's investigation in Clouds of Witness seemed to be crawling around on the floor staring at the carpet, and I was about ready to admit defeat when Wimsey's sister finally decided to tell the truth. Then the mystery really began to get somewhere. I am glad that I soldiered on to the end because I do see glimmers of what this series will be in snippets of conversation between characters, and that "lost in the fog in the bog" scene is marvelous. I do enjoy historical mysteries, but I am most definitely a 21st-century reader, so I do sometimes doubt the wisdom behind my dabbling into these fabled waters... but it is for the very reason that these mysteries are fabled that I can't leave them alone!

The plot is absurdly complicated, amusingly so. There are no end of intrigues in the country house where the murder takes place.

But that's not the joy of reading a Sayers' novel: the pleasure is all in the humor. Wimsey acting a fool, Bunter's magical ability to produce anything needed, Mary's good heart, and the Dowager's formidable control of everything. It's Downton Abbey written by Oscar Wilde.

Personal copy

Lord Peter Wimsey’s brother Gerald is arrested and accused of the murder of his sisters boyfriend. Wimsey hurries home from his vacation on Corsica and goes to work - with his “partner”, detective Palmer and his manservant Bunter. Mary, Peter’s sister, is also under suspicion as her story doesn’t hold water - a lot is at stake here for Peter - and there’s more action in this one - Wimsey is shot at (twice), are in severe danger in a swamp and have to endure a lot before the case is closed.

This is probably my second favorite of the Wimsey novels, after Murder Must Advertise, particularly for the trial before the House of Lords --a tradition now ended by later legal reform.

Lord Peter's family is thrown into suspicion when his brother is accused of murder. The Duke of Denver is obstinate in his refusal to defend himself. Lord Peter tries to unravel the case. He finds multiple infidelities and secret affairs. Much of this book shows Wimsey interacting with his family. The book takes place at the family estate. Wimsey is delightfully snarky when dealing with his relations. Several of the chapters of this book are written as transcripts of newspaper articles or courtroom testimony, and I found that format to be somewhat tedious. I definitely prefer straight narrative. This is not my favorite Wimsey book, but lesser Sayers is still greater than many other options.

Every now and then I have to have a visit with Lord Peter Wimsey. He is my favorite, bar none, detective. Archie Goodwin is second, for when I'm not feeling so refined.Read this book recently with a group and found it interesting how much character growth there is, and yet the characters are well established. We just get to know them better. Mostly the Wimsey family, but Parker, Bunter and Mr. Murbles, some of my favorite characters are given good play here.

When Lord Peter Wimsey finds out his brother the Duke has been accused of murder, he hightails it over to try to sort it out. Who really killed his sister's fiance, Denis Cathcart? Lord Peter may find out a few family secrets by the time he's finished detecting...This entertaining second book in the Lord Peter Wimsey series could easily be read as a standalone. Lord Peter reminds me a lot of Bertie Wooster with his prattling and his valet. The twists and turns of the plot kept me guessing until quite close to the end. The adventures of Lord Peter as he gets to the bottom of things generally kept me amused, and sometimes provoked a laugh. I didn't fall head-over-heels in love with it, but I'd be willing to keep reading the series.

While this, the second of Sayers’ Wimsey books, is a longer and more discursive volume than the first, its greater length is not due to padding. In fact what the reader is presented with is a fine and nuanced examination of English society and culture in the decade after the end of the “Great War” and before the onset of worldwide depression. England is changing and yet England has not yet changed. The class system is not what it once was and yet the class system still functions. Education is no longer solely the privilege of the upper and monied classes and yet markers of education are still evident in interactions among people. The story itself is structured much like an onion with layers that must be peeled away in order to discover what lies at the center. The reader will find, especially upon subsequent readings, that the nature of the center is not what they thought it to be and that each layer deserves to be carefully examined upon removal.Warning: beyond here lie spoilers.The opening of the book seems simple and straightforward. Lord Peter Wimsey discovers, while in Parisian hotel returning from a “get away” holiday on Corsica, that his brother, the Duke of Denver, has been charged with murder. Wimsey dashes to his brothers’ side in England only to find that Denver is no more willing to explain to Lord Peter his mysterious behaviour on the night in question than he was to his lawyer. Wimsey, even if he had not previously done work as amateur detective, would no doubt have done everything he could to free his brother. The reader is, however, gently and wittily reminded by Sayers, that his efforts might not have been received in the same fashion were it not for his social ranking, “[t]he Police Superintendent at Ripley received Lord Peter at first frigidly, and later, when he found out who he was, with a mixture of the official attitude to private detectives and the official attitude to a Duke's son.”Sayers provides us with many examples of the ways in which Lord Peter, and his family, exist in a world that fundamentally differs from that of most people living in England at the time. For example, Wimsey had been unaware of his brother’s plight because Lord Peter was on holiday in Corsica. He rushes back to England and then returns to Paris to track down evidence of Denver’s innocence. He is then able to expedite travel to the United States because of his access to important people:"His next appearance was at the American Embassy.The Ambassador, however, was not there, having received a royal mandate to dine. Wimsey damned the dinner, abandoned the polite, horn-rimmed secretaries, and leapt back into his taxi with a demand to be driven to Buckingham Palace. Here a great deal of insistence with scandalised officials produced first a higher official, then a very high official, and, finally, the American Ambassador and a Royal Personage while the meat was yet in their mouths."Finally, in order to return in a timely manner from America with the evidence to prove his brother’s innocence, Wimsey takes to the air. The unusualness of this is underlined in Denver’s legal representative announcement to the House of Lords. Wimsey, he tells them:"[is] at this moment . . . cleaving the air high above the wide Atlantic. In this wintry weather he is braving a peril which would appall any heart but his own and that of the world-famous aviator whose help he has enlisted so that no moment may be lost in freeing his noble brother from this terrible charge."Contrast Lord Peter’s ability to travel and get access to people and information with Wimsey showing off London to Mrs. Grimethorpe as if it was a foreign land and with Mr. Watchett not having been back to London in the 35 years he had tended bar in Yorkshire. Working class English men and women at that time seldom traveled for pleasure and certainly could not have afforded to holiday in Corsica, stay in Parisian hotels and dash across the Atlantic.Sayer’s provides many other contrasts between the lives of the working and upper classes in England. Wimsey travels to Corsica, “admiring from a cautious distance the wild beauty of Corsican peasant-women, and studying the vendetta in its natural haunt. In such conditions murder seemed not only reasonable, but lovable.” He returns to England to almost lose his life in a bog in Yorkshire and to have his life threatened by a Yorkshireman who felt he had a right to kill any man who stepped on his property or looked at his wife. What Wimsey found lovable in “wilds of Corsica” he found anything but when it happened at home and to him. Mrs. Grimethorpe, threatened, beaten and living her life in fear is terrified to leave her husband because she knows that even if she is able to sue for divorce the legal system will not offer her adequate protection. Lady Mary Wimsey, on the other hand, is protected by her family from the consequences of her bad choices in men. The jeweled mascot given to Cathcart by his mistress, Simone, was worth 5000 francs (which would roughly translate into between 45 and 50 pounds sterling in 1925) while Mr. Groyles was willing to elope with Lady Mary on between 6 and 7 £s a week. Sayers builds her story around the fact that all of us lie for reasons that seem important to us. Lady Mary lies to her brother about Cathcart in order to gain independence from her family. She lies to the police to protect Groyles when she thought he might have committed murder. Denver lies about his affair with another woman to protect that woman from her husband. Mrs. Grimethorpe lies in order to protect her own life. In fact, the only crimes that would have taken place had so many individuals not lied would have been Cathcart’s suicide (if that is to be considered a crime) and the inevitable, and likely deadly, assault that Grimethorpe would have made on his wife had he had more proof that she was being unfaithful to him. Sayers draws a picture, in this book, of the vast gulf between the classes in England and of the grim circumstances faced by so many women of the time. Mrs. Grimethorpe is not rescued from the brutality of her married life by the intervention of the law but by the accidental death of her husband without which there was little any legal power in England could do save her. Lady Mary was willing to sell herself into a marriage without love in order to gain some independence from her family. Simone was willing to sell herself to the highest bidder in order to have physical luxury and a chance to lay a bit aside for the days when her beauty no longer paid her way. Sayers, herself, could not legally be awarded a degree when she finished her time studying at Oxford in 1915 and was among the first to be awarded a degree when that rule was changed. In Clouds of Witness she took the opportunity to witness to the world through the medium of a cozy mystery novel the difficult realities of life for women and the working class in the England of 1926.

Way too much writing in dialect. I recognize the urge to represent speech as an extension of character, but: why not leave some room for the imagination? Obviously an early entry in the series, Sayers still finding her feet as a mystery writer and possibly tossing off however many pages of hyperactive/manic camp because mysteries are what she wrote to make money. Happy for her gradual move away from preciousness and towards thoughtfulness in her later writing. The contrast between Clouds of Witness and Gaudy Night is almost shocking.

Still good fun, although I found the pace and complexity a little much after Whose Body? and the ending not entirely satisfactory - it seemed like it was all red herrings until the clue was produced literally in the nick of time that changed everything. Not bad, but not my favorite so far.

Where I got the book: purchased on Kindle. A re-read. [I find LibraryThing's method of handling editions confusing - I would never buy the CreateSpace version listed here. The Wimsey series just cries out for a really good boxed-set edition, but failing that, the one to collect, if you can, is the Gollancz hardcover.]One thing I always appreciate about the Wimsey stories is that each book has a distinct character. In Clouds of Witness the pace is fast and frenetic, with a wildly confusing murder mystery at the center, and yet Sayers does more to develop her characters here than in some of the other books. The mystery itself almost takes second place to the doings of Wimsey's family, placing Wimsey himself very firmly in a distinct social setting, his home turf where he seems more real than in many of the other books. He doesn't show off nearly as much when he's in the countryside, either; I can't help feeling that, titles aside, this is a depiction of the sort of society Sayers was raised in before she went off to London.I also enjoy the sketch of Wimsey's sister Lady Mary Wimsey, who turns up in later novels but only as a cardboard cutout (his brother Gerald never gets his character developed, which is a great shame). Watching Parker go all chivalrous and defensive of her is always amusing, albeit out of character. Mary is real in this book: later on, the Wimsey family becomes more and more a caricature of a noble English household, and Mary becomes a boring housewife, alas. Plenty happens to Wimsey in this book: he gets chased by dogs, shot, falls into a bog, and flies across the Atlantic (in the 1920s that was a noteworthy adventure). I have never seen a bullet wound heal with such great speed and thoroughness.There is an absolutely priceless little cameo of two writers talking about the trends of the day, something Sayers is able to pick up in the later novels once she writes herself in as Wimsey's love interest when Harriet Vane comes along.I absolutely zipped through this novel (which was supposed to be strictly a post-workout cool down read but ended up as a Main Book) despite having read it several times before. And that really defines the enduring success of the Wimsey novels; they're downright entertaining, and despite (or because of?) being set so firmly in a lost era, never seem to age.

Once more Dorothy Sayers brings forth an admirable cast of characters including Lord Peter Wimsey, amateur sleuth; Bunter, his excellent manservant; Lord Peter's brother, the Duke of Denver, who has been accused of murder; Lord Peter's indomitable mother, the Dowager Duchess; Inspector Parker, whose investigating is hampered by his falling in love with Lady Mary Wimsey, Lord Peter's sister who is withholding information about the case, and a host of colorful local villagers. Wonderful window into the life of the nobility in 1920s England with fortunes still intact and servants to care for every need. One must have some French and be well-read in Shakespeare and other great writer's of the past to catch the asides of this most intelligent, witty and insightful writer of mystery.

The second in Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey series. He's still clever, yet Woosterish at times, and he comes to the wrong conclusion more than once before hitting on the solution. To begin, Lord Peter's future brother-in-law is found dead of a gunshot wound to the chest on the family premises; Peter's brother, the Duke, is suspected and arrested, but will say nothing in his own defense. Their sister, the dead man's fiance, begins acting very strangely, shuts herself in her room, and refuses all attentions. There is evidence at the scene that another person, identity unknown, was present on the night in question. Theoretically, this being a Golden Age mystery and Sayers being very particular about the fairness doctrine, the reader should be able to pick up all the necessary clues to solve the case. I quibble. When Lord Peter takes off for Paris, and then for America, to follow up his brainstorm (which is NOT totally shared with the reader), I could certainly see how he came to his deduction, but I could not make the deduction myself. Maybe I just need more practice. I enjoyed this one very much up to a point, and then I got a bit impatient for the reveal. I think there was one too many red herrings in the pot.