Book review: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

The thirty-seventh book I read in 2015 was The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers.  It's not the last of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, but it's the last one for me, as I read the Harriet Vane books first before going back to fill in the rest of the Wimsey oeuvre.  It actually has nothing to do with people who make or mend clothes for a living, although the misunderstanding does arise in the course of the story.

Lord Peter, traveling to Duke's Denver with the faithful Bunter, runs off the road after dark in the village of Fenchurch St. Paul and manages to get involved in a series of events surrounding a missing necklace which bankrupted an aristocratic family and an unidentified body interred in someone else's grave.  I'm not altogether convinced by the medical science which finally explains the death, but the circumstances are convincingly horrific and the fellow who suffered them suitably dastardly almost to deserve them.

Sayers's picture of parish life, and the care the parish priest provides to the souls in his neighborhood, is touching enough that even this devoted nonconformist got a little nostalgic.  One of the highlights of the book is a flood, to prepare for the arrival of which the whole village cranks into highly-efficient gear, under the direction of the rector, to turn the church into an emergency shelter.  The portrayal of pre-WWII stiff-upper-lipping and keeping-calm-and-carrying-on indicates all that was admirable about British character in the early twentieth-century.  The fact that Sayers apparently felt it morally necessary to punish the innocent victims of the villain's perfidy, in connection with the do-the-right-thing-and-kill-yourself-to-avoid-shame trope that appears in a couple of her books demonstrates the less-lamented aspects of the same period.