Fridge / Lord Peter Wimsey

Fridge Brilliance

• I was a bit put off by Harriet's reaction to a corpse in the film of the Lord Peter Wimsey book Have his Carcase, thinking she was being shown as something of a weak woman. Then, I read how this scene in the book comments on how people in detective stories always treat discovered corpses nonchalantly, whereas a real person would act like Harriet. Now, I notice how omnipresent that unreality is in most mysteries — Jordan
  • Plus, she'd just been falsely accused of murder and barely escaped with her life. She'd gone to the seaside specifically to forget all about that chapter of her life. You can understand her being kind of freaked out to stumble across a corpse.
  • To continue in this theme, in the 1987 adaptation of Have His Carcase, Harriet Vane (as played by Harriet Walter) does a phenomenal job playing a discovery of a body that actually seems realistic- with all of the disgust and retching that you would expect from unexpectedly finding a bloody and dripping corpse. It makes you realize that in many other on-screen depictions of people finding bodies, the finders just seem underwhelmed.

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