Literature / Have His Carcase

Have His Carcase is a 1932 locked room murder mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. It's the seventh in the Lord Peter Wimsey series.

Harriet Vane discovers a man's body lying on an isolated rock on the shore. His throat has been cut and the razor used is still at the scene. Harriet's and the victim's are the only footprints on the beach. The corpse is washed away before Harriet can tell anyone, but she took photos of the crime scene. Lord Peter Wimsey arrives to help her investigate.

The book was adapted to radio in 1981 and to television in 1987.

Contains examples of:

• The Alibi: An interesting case, because Lord Peter and his associates spend most of the novel using an incorrect estimate of the time of death. They waste a lot of time trying to disprove a suspiciously precise alibi that turns out to be entirely genuine — it's the same character's suspiciously good alibi for two hours earlier that's the fake. Lord Peter remarks at the end that it's the only case in his experience where the murderer was hampered by not knowing what time he was supposed to have done it.
• Best Friends-in-Law: Parker is married to Peter's sister Mary.
• Big Secret: A boat was off shore when Harriet found the body. The owner was surly and obstructive, and his grandson had gone off to Ireland. When they had constructed several theories involving this boat, the grandson reappeared and explained that he and his grandfather had been poaching on another fisherman's lobster pots.
• Blood Is Squickier In Water: The victim is murdered on a rock on the seashore, and when Harriet finds the body his blood has run into a nearby rock pool and turned the water red.
• Bookmark Clue: The murdered man gave a document to his mistress, who used it as a bookmark and then forgot about it. It thus survived when he burned his papers, and was later found by Wimsey.
• Busman's Holiday: Harriet's walking tour is interrupted by a murder mystery.
• Clock Discrepancy: A discrepancy that's based on medical evidence rather than timepieces. Harriet finds the body of the victim with still-liquid blood pooled around it; then the body is washed out to sea before it can be autopsied. Peter and Harriet spend most of the book assuming the murder happened almost immediately before she found the body, because the blood didn't have time to clot; in actuality, the victim was a haemophiliac and the murder happened several hours earlier. Foreshadowed with much discussion of the usual version of the trope; on several occasions, they test suspects' alibis by checking whether the clocks could have been wrong, and Harriet is working on (and struggling with) a novel in which the murderer's alibi depends on the trope.
• Conspicuous Gloves: The fact that the victim was wearing gloves is a clue to his haemophilia, which figures in the plot.
• Downer Ending: It's implied that there isn't enough solid evidence to hold or convict the murderers, even though Peter and Harriet figured out how they did it. Made less depressing later in the series, when Gaudy Night reveals at least one of them was convicted.
• Epigraph: Each chapter is headed with a quotation from the works of poet and dramatist Thomas Lovell Beddoes, many of them specifically from the play Death's Jest-Book, or: The Fool's Tragedy in Five Acts.
• Executive Meddling: In-universe and defied: The editor of the novel Harriet's writing wants her to introduce a romance between the heroine and the detective's friend. Harriet flatly refuses. invoked
• Hooked Up Afterwards: The murder victim was a professional dancer at a hotel, who had been going to marry one of the hotel's regular guests. The bride-to-be is inconsolable when she learns of his death, but at the end of the book there are signs she's finding solace in the arms of another dancer.
• Idle Rich: Discussed with scathing contempt by Antoine. He works in a resort town and part of his job involves pretending to be interested while rich tourists tell him how difficult their lives are, and none of them have any idea what real difficulty is.
• Imagine Spot: When Peter gently mocks Harriet for not being able to ride, she pictures him on a large, spirited horse. Her imagination then makes a "terrific effort" and places her by his side, riding an even larger, more spirited horse.
• In-Series Nickname: Lord Peter gets in touch with some old friends at the Foreign Office, whom he addresses as "Chumps", "Bungo", and "Trotters". They, in turn, know him as "Wimbles".
• Knows a Guy Who Knows a Guy: The more restrained version; Lord Peter knows a fellow who can put him in touch with a man who's an expert in code-breaking and can easily decipher the secret message he's found. Unfortunately, the fellow explains that the expert is out of the country, so Peter and Harriet have to figure out the secret message themselves.
• Literary Allusion Title: "have his carcase" is from Cowper's translation of The Iliad (or from The Pickwick Papers, where it's the Malaproper's rendition of habeas corpus).
• Majored in Western Hypocrisy: Invoked. When Lord Peter, Harriet, and the local policeman all hear a story revolving about an Indian rajah who supposedly did not know about banknotes, the policeman objects: what sort of Indian rajah would not know about banknotes? Why, many of them had been educated at Oxford.
• Mystery Writer Detective: Harriet Vane.
• Never One Murder: Discussed when Peter and Harriet are looking for ways of narrowing down the list of suspects.
  'No; well, there's the Philo Vance method. You shake your head and say: "There's worse yet to come", and then the murderer kills five more people, and that thins the suspects out a bit and you spot who it is.'
  'Wasteful, wasteful,' said Wimsey. 'And too slow.'
• Not Proven: The book ends with Peter and Harriet knowing who committed the murder, how it was done, and that it will be incredibly difficult to prove it to a jury. (Later in the series we find out they managed to prove it after all, and the murderer was hanged.)
• Planning with Props: Peter asks Harriet over breakfast to tell him about how she found the body, and she uses knives, spoons, and a salt cellar to lay out the key details of the location.
• Rightful King Returns: Invoked. The murder victim, whose family were refugees from the Russian Revolution, read a lot of novels with this trope and believed himself to be a rightful heir due a return. The murderer learned about his delusion and played on it to lure him to his doom.
• Royal Blood: Invoked. Harriet wonders if the victim really did have imperial blood, which provides a "Eureka!" Moment for Peter: Did he have haemophilia, like the Russian royal family?
• Running Gag: Invoked. The first half of the novel has a running gag where Peter ends every conversation with Harriet, no matter how short, by asking her to marry him. Halfway through the novel they have a conversation about the state of their relationship in which Peter admits he's been deliberately making a joke out of it so that neither of them have to treat the offer any more seriously than they're ready for. After that, he still proposes from time to time, but not with the same regularity (and Harriet is more unsettled than she expected the first time she notices that he's finished a conversation without proposing).
• Shout-Out: Harriet riffs on the theme of how famous fictional detectives would solve their current puzzle, mentioning Dr. Thorndyke, Philo Vance, Freeman Wills Crofts's Inspector French, and Anthony Berkeley's Roger Sheringham.
• Spell My Name with a Blank: A vehicle the police are trying to trace is said to have been registered in ——shire.
• This Is Reality: Harriet is accustomed to writing scenes where people examine horribly mutilated corpses in the calmest manner. Then she discovers a dead man whose throat has been cut, and finds it a much more distressing experience than she'd imagined.
• Time-Delayed Death: Has its own spin on this trope. The victim died instantly from a cut throat, but when the body is found a couple of hours later his blood clotting disorder makes it look like he's only just been killed. As a result, a lot of time is wasted investigating the wrong alibis, trying to figure out how the murderer was not seen by the person who found the body, and so on.
• Upper-Class Equestrian: Lord Peter makes deductions from a horseshoe Harriet finds, finds the horse that lost the shoe, rides it bareback as part of reenacting the crime, and manages to stay on and bring the horse back under control when it utterly panics and bolts away from the murder site.
• Vanity Licence Plate: Mrs Morecambe has a car with the memorable registration number OI 0101. Lord Peter doesn't entertain the possibility that they could have obtained the number on purpose, so it seems that vanity plates weren't sold at the time.
• What Would X Do?: Harriet Vane discovers a dead body and thinks: What would Lord Peter, or Robert Templeton (the detective in the books she writes) do?

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