I am a Dorothy Sayers fan. I aspire to the quiet strength of Harriet Vane (with a slightly bigger dose of womanly caretaking instinct, please God). I relate to the well-limned Lord Peter Wimsey much as I would to a real person because of his texture and subtlety; I tolerate his shortcomings because I honor his substance. (He is also a masterful conversationalist, which is one of the traits I prize most highly, and I will always be grateful that he introduced me to John Donne.) Busman's Honeymoon is one of my favorite novels of all time, and any friend of Busman's Honeymoon is a friend of mine. And who can praise Bunter enough?

However I find myself in reluctant agreement with Steven Riddle's distaste for the bulky novel Gaudy Night on his blog Flos Carmeli. Perhaps we should, as a commenter suggests, rename the book A Clutch of Harpies. Or perhaps that's too strong. I don't mind the characters as much as I do the waste of several hundred pages spent tracking down the irrelevant perpetrator of a trivial crime. Come to think of it, perhaps what bothers me the most is that Sayers seems to care more about promoting academic vocations for women than about developing an engaging plot. It's evocative of a Susan Sarandon movie in which perfectly good celluloid is wasted on attacking a Big, Bad Industry rather than developing a ripping good story and characters with whom I want to be involved.

So, there you have it. Roz as harpy.

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