This page is for tropes that have appeared in Lord Peter Wimsey.
For the rest:
- Deadpan Snarker: Bunter's humorous dialogue is always delivered as part of his highly formal, old-fashioned and subservient manner of speaking.
- Dead Person Impersonation: The Five Red Herrings uses the version where a murderer impersonates his victim for a short period to disguise the actual time of death.
- Death by Falling Over: The death at the centre of The Five Red Herrings turns out to be an Accidental Murder that came about when the deceased picked a fight that ended with him being knocked over and whacking his head on a piece of hard furniture.
- Defective Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey has a lot of advantages, being a rich aristocrat, but he also has a severe case of shell-shock (post-traumatic stress disorder, in modern terms).
- Derailed Train of Thought: The Dowager Duchess of Denver tends to change the subject four or five times — in rapid succession — whenever she opens her mouth.
- Direct Line to the Author:
- Some editions of the novels include a biographical sketch of Lord Peter written by his uncle, with an introduction that implies he's a real person who helped the author with her research.I am asked by Miss Sayers to fill up certain lacunae and correct a few trifling errors of fact in her account of my nephew Peter's career.
- Thrones, Dominations is a novel begun by Sayers and completed by Jill Paton Walsh. Paton Walsh's introduction is written as though she was invited to continue Sayers' biography of a real person.
- Some editions of the novels include a biographical sketch of Lord Peter written by his uncle, with an introduction that implies he's a real person who helped the author with her research.
- Dirty Business:
- In The Nine Tailors, Lord Peter explicitly calls it dirty but does recommend putting two suspects in a room together with a microphone to find out what they have to say to each other when they think nobody is listening.
- In Gaudy Night, Lord Peter has Harriet help him draw out information from the senior college members. She tells him that she feels like Judas, he tells her it's part of the job, and she soldiers on.
- Discreet Drink Disposal: Averted in Busman's Honeymoon. When Lord Peter is offered some homemade parsnip wine, Harriet, realizing the distress of a world-class oenophile, suggests he dump it in a nearby potted plant. However, Lord Peter goes ahead and drinks it (not without a shudder) after observing that the plant already appears unwell.
- Disguised in Drag: Jacques "Sans-culotte" Lerouge, who disguises himself as a flirtatious, gamine lady's maid in order to infiltrate wealthy houses and pilfer their valuables.
- Disposing of a Body:
- In Whose Body?, the entire mystery hangs on the villain's creative solution to this problem.
- Several of the short stories, including "The Abominable History of the Man with the Copper Fingers" and "The Fantastic Horror of the Cat in the Bag", also feature unusual methods of body disposal.
- Distinction Without a Difference: In Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter is told that a 'financial gentleman' has come to call:Lord Peter: Name of Moses?
Bunter: Name of MacBride, my lord.
Lord Peter: A distinction without a difference. - Dogged Nice Guy: Lord Peter pursues Harriet for something like five years.Lord Peter: I shall, with your permission, continue to propose to you at decently regulated intervals, as a birthday treat, and on Guy Fawkes' Day and on the Anniversary of the King's Ascension. But consider it, if you will, a pure formality. You need not pay the slightest attention to it.Harriet: Peter, it's foolish to go on like this.Lord Peter: And, of course, on the Feast of All Fools.
- Don't You Dare Pity Me!:
- In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, George Fentiman and his wife are in serious financial straits, made more stressful by the fact that they're having to live off Mrs. Fentiman's income because George is too ill to hold down a job. At the beginning of the novel, Peter offers George a loan to tide them over, but George says that since there's no prospect of being able to pay the money back it would amount to taking charity from a friend, and the situation isn't bad enough yet that his pride will let him accept that.
- Harriet's reaction to Peter's declaration of love.
- Double-Meaning Title: "Striding Folly" refers to a tower in the village of Striding. But if 'Striding' is read as a verb, it also relates to the moving towers in Mr Mellilow's dream.
- Downer Ending:
- In Have His Carcase, 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. Though in Gaudy Night we're told that at least one of them was convicted.
- And the end of Unnatural Death sees Wimsey musing that almost certainly, fewer people would have died if he hadn't involved himself — and the man who originally asked him to investigate isn't even grateful.
- Dreaming of Things to Come: In the story "Striding Folly", the protagonist dreams he's being chased through a checkerboarded landscape by moving towers. It turns out to be a premonition of a chess game where he's checkmated with two rooks. Also of an attempt to frame him for murder.
- Dreaming the Truth: In Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter has a nightmare featuring symbolic representations of a key part of the mystery he hasn't yet consciously put together.
- Driven to Suicide: At least three of the series' various murderers.
- In Unnatural Death, the murderer commits suicide in a jail cell while awaiting trial.
- In Murder Must Advertise, suicide is a choice to keep the villain's innocent family from guaranteed poverty and social ostracism.
- In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, it was seen as the only honourable way out of the situation—which was not unusual in those days, at least in certain realms of fiction.
- In Strong Poison, the grief-stricken Ryland Vaughan tells Peter his suicide plan, and shows him the drugs he intends to use. We never find out what happens to him.
- In Clouds of Witness, the apparent murder is actually the suicide of a man driven to the brink of ruin and then abandoned by the woman he loves. This goes undiscovered for most of the book, in part, because instead of leaving his suicide note somewhere nearby he mailed it to the woman — who didn't bother to read it.
- Played with in Gaudy Night — when Peter is asked how he would have handled accusing his brother (or sister) of murder, Harriet suggests that the correct etiquette in a murder mystery is "poison for two in the library".
- Also in Gaudy Night, but more seriously, an important part of the backstory is the death of Arthur Robinson, Annie's husband, who lost his position, turned to drink, and eventually shot himself.
- Drives Like Crazy: Peter, as he explains in Busman's Honeymoon:I don't happen to be afraid of speed — that's why I like to show off.
- Durable Deathtrap: Not actually a deathtrap (Lord Peter and Gerald get nothing worse than a soaking) but the mechanism protecting the Pirate Booty in "The Learned Adventure of the Dragon's Head" is still in perfect working order after two hundred years of no maintenance.
- Eat the Evidence: "The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps That Ran". The murder weapon is a skewer that's then thrust into a joint of meat being roasted. As the meat cooked, the traces of human blood on the skewer would have been destroyed.
- Eek, a Mouse!!: Discussed in Strong Poison.Mr Pond: You're not afraid of mice apparently?
Miss Murchison: No. In your days I suppose all women were afraid of mice.
Mr Pond: Yes, they were, but then, of course, their garments were longer.
Miss Murchison: Rotten for them. - Empathic Environment: The denouement of Unnatural Death — a story of escalating violence and cruelty — sees Wimsey and Parker examining the body of the murderess, Mary Whittaker, who has hanged herself in her cell. When they emerge, they find an eclipse in progress, as if all the light in the world had been snuffed out, echoing Wimsey's state of mind. (The closing chapters are explicitly set in late June 1927, and there was a real total eclipse over parts of the UK on 29th June 1927.)
- Emphasize EVERYTHING: Miss Climpson likes to emphasize everything with italics in her letters. (Actually single, double, and triple underlining, which in print translates to italics, small caps, and block caps respectively.) Also lots of exclamation points. This is meant to indicate her old-fashioned, Victorian outlook; overuse of underlining is often mentioned as a characteristic of Victorian women's writing, especially in letters.
- Engaging Conversation:
- Lord Peter sometimes uses this gambit to flatter older women. In "The Queen's Square", he says to his dance partner that if he'd only had the luck to have been born earlier, he'd have married her. (She is much older than he is and is not offended.)
- However, when he actually means it, i.e. proposing to Harriet Vane during their first face-to-face conversation, she at first doesn't believe him.
- Epigraph:
- Each chapter in The Nine Tailors is headed with a quotation from a work on bell-ringing.
- Each chapter in Have His Carcase 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.
- Epistolary Novel: Not the whole novel, but the prologue of Busman's Honeymoon tells the story of Peter and Harriet's engagement and wedding through extracts from the letters and diary entries of various interested parties, some of them more biased than others.
- Erotic Dream: At one point in Gaudy Night, Harriet dreams of being held in Peter's manly arms, but by this point she's had a lot of practice at denying her feelings, so she shrugs it off by saying that dreams are never what they appear to be about and it must have been a metaphor for something.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death and Have His Carcase, among others, are solved with Eureka Moments. Whose Body? discusses the phenomenon in some detail.
- Everybody Lives: Each of the novels has at least one major death, at least in the backstory; Gaudy Night is the least bloody, as the death was some years ago and all of the criminal's victims survive.
- Everybody Smokes: Peter, Parker, Harriet and Saint-George all smoke, as do many supporting characters. Peter's masterwork while working in advertising is a campaign for Whifflets Cigarettes.
- Dorothy Sayers was herself a heavy smoker; her portrait in the National Portrait Gallery
depicts her in her study nonchalantly holding a cigarette between her fingers - It's a kind gesture to offer someone a cigarette, without bothering to first ask if they smoke. (Harriet to Miss Cattermole in Gaudy Night; Peter to Cranton in The Nine Tailors.)
- Dorothy Sayers was herself a heavy smoker; her portrait in the National Portrait Gallery
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: A downplayed example, since Helen, Duchess of Denver is not exactly evil for all her faults. But nevertheless, she has a fairly low opinion of most of the people around her, and the insights we get into her thought processes suggest that she tends to view the decent things they do as part of some act or gambit that they do for cynical and self-motivating reasons rather than simply because they're just decent people doing the right thing.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: In "The Bone of Contention", the horse Lord Peter borrows refuses to approach the scene of a long-ago murder.
- Evil Matriarch: Helen, Duchess of Denver, is a rather unpleasant person, and nobody in her family much likes her. She's openly antagonistic towards Peter and Harriet in the later books.
- Evil Twin: Appears in the short story "The Image in the Mirror". A pair of mirror-image twins, born out of wedlock, are Separated at Birth — one is raised by a kindly aunt as her own, while the other is taken to the colonies by the mother and left alone and resentful after her death.
- Executive Meddling: Defied in Have His Carcase: 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.
- The Exotic Detective: An apparent Upper-Class Twit who solves crimes as a hobby.
- Expy: Bunter is explicitly compared to Wodehouse's Jeeves; Lord Peter and Freddy Arbuthnot both resemble Bertie Wooster.
- Face Death with Dignity: In Murder Must Advertise, Tallboy chooses to go out alone, forgoing protection, knowing that the criminal gang has a lethal "accident" planned for him, but also knowing that if he dies in an "accident" his part in the business won't become public knowledge and his family won't suffer for his mistakes.
- Faking the Dead:
- In "The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba," Peter stays publicly dead for two years while undercover — even Parker believed him dead (although no one seems too surprised when Peter turns up alive).
- In The Nine Tailors, it's believed that Geoffrey Deacon died shortly after breaking out of jail, but it turns out he faked his death to get the authorities off his back.
- Family Versus Career: One of the major themes of Gaudy Night, and of Harriet's arc as a whole. The staff and students of the college reflect a range of approaches to the issue, from Miss Hillyard who Does Not Like Men and hates family women and thinks career should always come first, to Annie Wilson, who believes women should serve their husbands and Stay in the Kitchen. Harriet contrasts both extremes with fellow alumna Phoebe Tucker, who has three children and a flourishing archaeology career alongside her husband.
- Female Misogynist: Annie Wilson from Gaudy Night, who thinks that women should only ever be homemakers and utterly despises women who choose to have a career. She also loathes women who have relationships, but who she thinks treat their partners like they're beneath them.
- Femme Fatale: Cathcart's mistress Simone Vonderaa in Clouds of Witness — described as a belle à se suicidernote by one person who met her.
- Fictional Painting: In Jill Paton Walsh's Thrones, Dominations, the artist Chapparelle paints two portraits: The first is of Harriet, and its in-story purpose is to show her character and to let her see the second portrait in-progress. The second portrait is of Rosamund, and is destroyed by her murderer to hide the clue it portrays: a papier-mâché mask that the murderer used to fool a witness into thinking the victim was still alive, and thus provide the murderer with an alibi.
- Fingertip Drug Analysis: Performed by a chemist in Murder Must Advertise to determine that a packet of white powder labelled "Bicarbonate of Soda" is in fact cocaine.
- Follow That Car: Several times; lampshaded in Murder Must Advertise:"Follow that taxi," he said, exactly like somebody out of a book. And the driver, nonchalant as though he had stepped from the pages of Edgar Wallace, replied, "Right you are, sir."
- Food Porn: Lord Peter, being a noted gourmet, often indulges in such meals. The judge's summing-up in Strong Poison is a darker example, as it shows how inappropriate his treatment of the case is.
- For Doom the Bell Tolls: The Nine Tailors is named after a tradition in which a church's bell is rung nine times to announce a death in the parish. The church's bell tower plays a central role in the specific death that the novel revolves around.
- Foreshadowing:
- In Strong Poison, several people who don't like the look of Norman Urquhart, including one of the only people who suspects him of the murder before even Lord Peter, single out his unnaturally sleek and glossy hair. It turns out that he's been taking small quantities of arsenic regularly to gain an Acquired Poison Immunity, and the state of his hair is one of the symptoms.
- In The Nine Tailors, the epigraphs on the first few chapters — up to and including the one in which the corpse is discovered — all have something to do with death. The very first one is about the fact that bell-ringing can itself be lethal to the unwary, which foreshadows a revelation all the way off in the final chapter.
- Early on in The Nine Tailors, Jack Godfrey warns Hilary Thorpe that bells can be dangerous if not treated with proper respect, and that his own bell has killed twice. And as it turns out, it was the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul that actually committed the murder being investigated.
- Also in The Nine Tailors, one of the early examples of the Reverend Venables' character as an Absent-Minded Professor is him misplacing the parish announcements, including the banns of marriage for an upcoming wedding. The banns for a different wedding become a plot point toward the end of the novel.
- The Nine Tailors again: In frustration at not being able to work out who did the murder, Lord Peter declares that he might as well say that he did it himself, or that the parish priest did it, or the man who rings the church bell to announce a death in the parish. It turns out in the end that all three of them were among those who inadvertently contributed to Deacon's death.
- At the beginning of Busman's Honeymoon, Peter and Harriet arrive at their honeymoon cottage and send Bunter to knock loudly when nobody lets them in, saying "Wake Duncan with thy knocking". This is what Macbeth says when Duncan is dead ("Wake Duncan ... I would thou couldst"). The person being knocked for is dead.
- Fowl-Mouthed Parrot:
- The Thodays in The Nine Tailors have a pet parrot, given to them by Will's sailor brother — which, unfortunately, came with a sailor's vocabulary.
- In Murder Must Advertise, an old man in a pub tells an anecdote about his aunt's parrot, also acquired from a sailor. "Fortunately, the old lady couldn't hear half what it said, and didn't understand the other half."
- Freudian Excuse: Discussed in Clouds of Witness — the Dowager Duchess of Denver is firmly opposed to modern psychology, and doesn't believe in "subconsciousness" or "repression." Later stories — particularly Gaudy Night — involve a greater deal of psychological analysis, of heroes and villains alike.
- A Friend in Need:
- In Strong Poison, two of Harriet's friends stick by her through the trial.
- In Gaudy Night, after Harriet has defended Lord Peter's detecting — even if he does it for fun, he does do it, and many people have reason to thank him — another woman brings up a neighbor who had helped with her drains for nothing because he liked working with them.
- Friend on the Force: Lord Peter has two: Chief Inspector Charles Parker, his best friend who freely consults him on cases, and Sir Andrew Mackenzie, chief of Scotland Yard, who ensures he has formal access to evidence when necessary.
- Full-Name Ultimatum: In Gaudy Night, Peter sends a letter to his nephew, Gerald, Viscount Saint-George, who has got into trouble largely of his own making. Jerry notes that he can tell how angry Uncle Peter is by whether the letter salutes him by his nickname (Gherkins), as "Jerry", or as "Gerald" — and in this case, Uncle Peter's blazingly furious, because the salutation is "My dear Saint-George" and it's signed with Peter's full name. (The next letter, following some bridge-mending, begins "Dear Jerry" and ends "your querulous and rapidly decaying uncle, P.W.".)
- Funetik Aksent: The Five Red Herrings features phonetic renderings of a range of accents from various parts of Scotland and Ireland, not to mention a travelling salesman with a very strange accent of no discernible origin.
