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Strong Poison (1987)

Strong Poison (1987)

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Rating
4.14 of 5 Votes: 1
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ISBN
0060809086 (ISBN13: 9780060809089)
Language
English
Publisher
harpercollins publishers

About book Strong Poison (1987)

Rating: 4* of fiveThe Book Report: Lord Peter Wimsey, younger brother of the Duke of Denver, bibliophile, and dilettante in the arts and sciences of murder, meets his One True Love, the Other Half of His Soul; where else would he do this, but in court? Too bad she's the accused in a rather sensational murder trial, in which she is accused and about to be convicted of poisoning by arsenic her Illicit Lover, now ex- after having the *temerity* to propose honorable and legal marriage to her. He was, it turns out, having her on when he refused to countenance the idea of marriage; he was counting on his Peculiar Charms to sway his Muse and fellow novelist into revealing her true depths of devotion to him by setting this test. Having fallen (and Fallen) for it, Harriet felt (not at all unreasonably) that she'd been a right prat and, in umbrage extreme, slung the rotter out on his ear, refusing thereafter to treat his suit. Subsequent to their final meeting, unluckily, the rotter collapses and dies at his cousin's home, where he's been living for over a year since the end of the dream.Lord Peter, attending the trial (as who would not?) with the Hon. Freddy and the Dowager Duchess of Denver (aka Mater), forms the simultaneous convictions that Harriet is innocent, and that she shall be Lady Wimsey as soon as the event can be fixed. How to forestall the hangman's deft attentions is his sole focus, needless to say, and he goes about proving the identity of the real culprit with his accustomed panache, energy, and cunning.Ah, but stay the strains of the Wedding March, dear readers, because Harriet...quite sensibly...is Once Bitten, Twice Shy re: matrimony. She offers herself as his leman, his dolly-bird, his bit o' stuff, but marriage? To a well-known aristocrat, with all the attendant hoo and pla? No, indeed. Wimsey is, well, not to fobbed off with mere sex when what he craves is glory and delight everlasting in matrimony golden, so he ankles off as soon as he sees her acquitted. The End. Only, of course, not so much. But that's another book.My Review: A Certain Party, who shall remain nameless herein but is frequently addressed by me as "Horrible" and is known on LibraryThing as "karenmarie", has really, really put her foot in it this time. I mention, oh so casually in passing, that long, long ago I read and disliked this book. "Oh," burbles The Evil One, "I read that and found it both witty and amusing, don't you think it would be fun to re-read it?" I, ever the innocent and naive victim, forgot that the aforementioned Evil One has hooked me on ever-so many mystery series with her offhand cruelty, fell for it and re-read the book. Reader, beware! NEVER VENTURE NEAR HER! You'll end up reading long lists of (admittedly quite good) mysteries.Wimsey is certainly not for every taste. His erudition, not notably fine for that era, is huge by modern standards, and so his references to poets, writers, and cultural furniture quite ordinary in the 1930s, will come across as condescending to thos of this less well-versed (!) time and place. His general attitude of privilege might cause some sensitive souls in the era of Political Correctness to flinch. And Sayers' lovely, steady, and quite dry prose will go down like a martini at a Salvation Army bash with the modern reader accustomed to gutter talk, explosions, gunshots, and generally seamy turpitude that passes for most modern mysteries.And thank GOD for that. It's a breath of chamomile-scented mountain meadow air to me to re-find these books in a state and at a time when I can appreciate them. No one tell The Evil One, blast her eyes, that I am thoroughly glad to have read this book at 51 that I understood and so little of at 25. Loose lips sink ships!

I'm sorry, Hercule Poirot. There's a new literary detective in my life, and while I will always cherish your silly Belgian antics, Lord Peter Wimsey just understands my needs better - he makes me laugh so much more than you do, and he has that sincerity that you lack. Now don't cry, Hercule. It's not your fault; the fact is that Lord Peter is just...well, truth be told he's a better man than you. You take cases more out of boredom, and also because the police tend to beg for your help. Lord Peter Wimsey seems to care so much more than you - when Harriet Vane was accused of poisoning her former lover, Lord Peter knew she didn't do it, and he decided to take her case because he genuinely cared about her, and this led to a delightful scene where he proposes marriage to her in prison. He's such a better speaker than you - he talks like Oscar Wilde wrote all his lines but decided to be sincere about them for a change. All I can do to prove my point is quote directly from his conversation with Harriet after he proposes: "'No - dash it all, I seem to be saying all the wrong things today. I was absolutely stunned that first day in court, and I rushed off to my mater, who's an absolute dear, and the kind of person who really understands things, and I said, "Look here! here's the absolutely one and only woman, and she's being put through a simply ghastly awful business and for God's sake come and hold my hand!" You simply don't know how foul it was.''That does sound rather rotten. I'm sorry I was brutal. But, by the way, you're bearing in mind, aren't you, that I've had a lover?''Oh, yes. So have I, if it comes to that. In fact, several. It's the sort of thing that might happen to anybody. I can produce quite good testimonials. I'm told I make love rather nicely - only I'm at a disadvantage at the moment. One can't be very convincing at the other end of a table with a bloke looking through the door.'"Also, and I know I've mentioned this before, you don't really share things with your readers, Hercule, or even the other characters in your stories. You have a tendency to discover Very Important Clues and then not mention them to anyone, just so you can reveal them at the most dramatic moment possible. There's just no communication. Lord Peter is different - not only did I know every detail of the case as he discovered it, but he even shared the investigation with other characters in the book! He has a veritable army of smart spinsters who do investigation work for him, and he dispatched two of them to help with the Vane case. This resulting in two wonderful scenes, where one woman learns how to pick locks from a born-again thief, and another where a Miss Murchinson uses fake Spiritualism to convince someone to search for a hidden will. It's all fascinating and funny and very educational, especially the Spiritualism stuff. So I'm sorry to say that Lord Peter Wimsey is now my favorite detective* at the moment, and that I think it's time we took a break while I explore this. I'll return to your stories again some day, but for now I want to focus on spending more time with Lord Peter. Thank you for understanding, and I hope we can still be friends. Yours truly,Madeline*Sherlock, sweetie, don't you even worry. You're still my Number One and always will be.

Do You like book Strong Poison (1987)?

My fifth Peter Wimsey book, and the first one with Harriet vane in it.Also, by happenstance, the first one I am writing a review of.Coincidence? Not quite.Despite the fact that this is the series' first love-tension filled book, this is not the first book where Sayers branches out of the normal mystery detective framework to occupy a somewhat broader niche. She began doing that much earlier, in Clouds of Witness, and certainly did so in the previous installment: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, with her commentary about PTSD (then known as shellshock).This is the first book, however, where Wimsey's character undergoes a true and profound change. That in and of itself is atypical of the standard mystery and detective story, though certainly not unheard of. That is to say, in this day and age. Previously, though, as can be witnessed in the example of the great Sherlock Holmes, great detectives tended to remain a bit static, and pursue their investigation in more or less a similar manner.I am not going to pick sides on the great rift between Wimsey fans - yes Harriet, no Harriet - at this point, as we've really seen very little of said Harriet, but I do find it interesting to see Wimsey in this somewhat new light. I also find it interesting, albeit I much prefer Wimsey to his spinster assistants - to see that not even the Noble Sleuth can do everything on his own. The fact that Sayers chooses him to employ assistants and allows his investigations to take some time is a point to her credit, especially as she did it before so many others had.I also confess that, on the sheer level of emotional engagement and writing, I felt this book gripped me less than the previous one had - mostly perhaps because my own romantic struggles are more or less over, but my fascination with The Great War historically, and the topic of PTSD psychologically - remains. I felt, perhaps, a similar sort of emotion in the author who seemed to infuse more energy into the psychiatric than the romantic, but this quibble, which is personal anyway, doesn't detract much from the book. I still swallowed it in a few days.I plan to restrain myself from further Sayers for the near future, mostly because she tends to take rather largish bites out of my schoolwork, both in terms of time and in terms of inclination. However, I will likely return to her with all due impatience before long, by finding some sort of convenient and pleasant-sounding excuse to take a break.
—Genia Lukin

This might be my favorite Wimsey novel so far. Here's what I especially love:+ MISS CLIMPSON! I was really uncomfortable some things she said in Unnatural Death, but they didn't come up in Strong Poison and so I was left to enjoy her opinions on Spiritualism, her wrestling with her conscience, and her astonishing ingenuity. Really the entire episode with Miss Booth is one of the cleverest things I've read in the Wimsey novels. And I love so much her comments on tradition and modernity: "In the o
—Dorothea

If there are any contemporary writers of mysteries as talented, consistent, and stylistically astute as Dorothy Sayers, would someone please point them out to me? While the mystery is well-plotted and full of devious accessory detectives, the main draw here is the rich prose.Sayers has a profound talent for absorbing the reader into the story. This passage, thick-packed with evocations of heat and choked with unnecessary commas, makes the reader feel she is squeezing her way into this chaotic boho artist party right alongside the protagonist. Marjorie hammered loudly on a door, and, without waiting for an answer, flung it open. Wimsey, entering on her heels, was struck in the face, as by an open hand, by a thick muffling wave of heat, sound, smoke and the smell of frying.It was a very small room, dimly lit by a single electric bulb, smothered in a lantern of painted glass, and it was packed to suffocation with people, whose silk legs, bare arms and pallid faces loomed at him like glow-worms out of the obscurity. Coiling wreaths of tobacco-smoke swam slowly to and fro in the midst. In one corner an anthracite stove, glowing red and mephitical, vied with a roaring gas-oven in another corner to raise the atmosphere to roasting-pitch. On the stove stood a vast and steaming kettle; on a side-table stood a vast and steaming samovar; over the gas, a dim figure stood turning sausages in a pan with a fork, while an assistant attended, something in the oven, which Wimsey, whose nose was selective, identified among the other fragrant elements in this compound atmosphere, and identified rightly, as kippers. At the piano, which stood just inside the door, a young man with a bushy red hair was playing something of a Czecho-Slovakian flavour, to a violin obligato by an extremely loose jointed person of indeterminate sex in a Fair-Isle jumper. Nobody looked round at their entrance.However much I might want to perform search and rescue operations on the commas in there, I cannot help but be borne along as intended on this delightfully erratic hypothesis proving adventure that Peter Wimsey undertakes throughout this novel. My primary complaint is that upon finishing this novel I did not immediately have another one at my fingertips to plunge back in for another installment.
—Robin

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