This page is for tropes that have appeared in Lord Peter Wimsey.
For the rest:
- Quitting to Get Married:
- In Strong Poison, this is how Lord Peter was able to get one of his staffers from his typing bureau to infiltrate Norman Urquhart's law office. The office manager complains to him that the last female secretary was overcome by "a whim" and she ran off to get married. Lord Peter advises Miss Climpson to instruct the replacement to "make sure her skirts are the regulation four inches below the knee" because the manager is "feeling anti-sex appeal".
- A few books later in Gaudy Night, Harriet tries to get hold of Miss Murchison (the lady from the typing bureau who did the infiltration) only to find that she has left the typing bureau to get married.
- Rats in a Box: In The Nine Tailors, neither Wimsey nor the police can figure out which of two brothers murdered the victim, so they put the brothers alone in a room and secretly listen to what they say to each other. It turns out that neither of them did it, but both thought the other did, and so they had been unnecessarily covering for each other.
- Reality Is Unrealistic: Contemporary critics thought the method of murder used in Unnatural Death was laughable. Not only is it plausible, it was used as a method of execution by the Nazi medical system, and was the M.O. of at least one real-world serial killer.
- Real Name as an Alias: Peter Death Bredon Wimsey goes in disguise under the name of "Death Bredon" in Murder Must Advertise and "The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste".
- Redemption Equals Death: In The Nine Tailors, Will Thoday dies at the end trying to rescue a friend from a flood. He had been (inadvertantly) responsible for the painful death of another character, and had been unable to forgive himself.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Male members of the Wimsey family usually turn out this way, according to their chronicler. From the other Wiki
:"Most Wimseys were like the 16th Duke, and his father: 'Bluff, courageous, physically powerful' but not very intelligent; of hearty and voracious appetites of all kinds. They could be 'cruel, yet without malice or ingenuity.' The other type is physically slighter, smarter, with great nervous energy, and 'lusts no less powerful, but more dangerously controlled to a long-sighted policy.' These became churchmen, statesmen, traitors; but sometimes poets and saints. - Regal Ruff: In Thrones, Dominations, Harriet's mourning dress has "a sort of Elizabethan collar," white and pleated. Her dressmaker has a dozen of them made up for her, and she loans one to Rosamund Harwell which ends up being a clue in Rosamund's murder: It's supposed to go with a black mourning dress, not the white dress her corpse was found wearing.
- Releasing from the Promise: Lord Peter released his first fiancée from their engagement when he had to go away to war, having been persuaded that it wouldn't be fair on her if he came back crippled. In the event, he came back whole of wind and limb, to find that in the interim she'd married somebody else with fewer scruples.
- Remember That You Trust Me: Toward the end of Busman's Honeymoon, when the stress of the case starts getting to Peter, he inadvertantly shuts Harriet out emotionally because he's not yet used to having her there to support him. At the very end, he makes a conscious decision to turn to her for comfort, signalling that he's going to remember in future.
- Rescue Romance: Played with. Harriet doesn't fall immediately into Peter's arms after he rescues her, partly because she still has to work through the emotional wreckage of the situation he's rescued her from, and then she has to work through the emotional tangle resulting from having to be rescued. It's years before they eventually get together, and there's a strong impression that not only would they still have got together if they'd met in a rescue-free context, it probably would have happened much quicker.
- Rich Bitch:
- Dian de Momerie in Murder Must Advertise; weirdly, also a Hard-Drinking Party Girl.
- Helen, Peter's sister-in-law.
- Rich Boredom: Harriet admits that Peter catches murderers for fun, but it's still good work.
- Rightful King Returns: Invoked in Have His Carcase. 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.
- Right on the Tick: At the end of Busman's Honeymoon. Lord Peter falls apart at 8am, because he knows that's when the murderer he caught is being hanged.
- Ripped from the Headlines: In Unnatural Death (1927), there's a scene where the police, searching for Mary Whittaker, come across an abandoned car and clues suggesting she's been kidnapped. The previous year, Agatha Christie's disappearance in similar circumstances had led to a nationwide manhunt.
- Rogue Juror: At the beginning of Strong Poison, Miss Climpson is the jury holdout in the murder trial of Harriet Vane, and convinces a couple of other jurors to hold out with her. This leads to a hung jury and a retrial, allowing Peter time to find the evidence to clear Harriet.
- Royal Blood: Invoked in Have His Carcase. 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?
- Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: The solution to Busman's Honeymoon. The murderer weighted a metal cactus pot that hung above the radio, such that when the victim opened the radio cabinet to turn it on, the pot would drop and kill him.
- Running Gag: Invoked in Have His Carcase. 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).
- Satchel Switcheroo: In "The Cat in the Bag" a bag containing stolen jewellery accidentally gets swapped with one containing an actress's severed head.
- Second Love: Harriet, for Lord Peter (his first love was Barbara, to whom he briefly alludes in Strong Poison). And possibly vice versa, though in retrospect she would probably decline to dignify her feelings for Philip Boyes as "love".
- Second-Person Narration: In the exhumation sequence in Whose Body? — 'you' is Lord Peter.
- Secret Test of Character: As mentioned under Silly Will below, one of Lord Peter's cases involves figuring out why a fabulously rich and extremely eccentric uncle had left to his medical student nephew the uncle's digestive tract, and all contents thereof. The explanation turns out to be that the uncle purchased and swallowed a fortune in gemstones just before jumping out a window. If the nephew could work this out, he would legally inherit all those gemstones, which would be more than enough money to last him a lifetime.
- Self-Poisoning Gambit: The solution of Strong Poison.
- Serial Killer: Mary Whitaker is the Black Widow variant, and relies on a low-profile, Make It Look Like an Accident method.
- Sexy Discretion Shot: Huge whacks of Busman's Honeymoon.
- She Is All Grown Up: Wimsey in his early thirties is bony and gawky, and regarded as so funny-looking that caricaturists tone him down a bit when drawing him. Wimsey in his late forties is considered very handsome. Maturity was evidently kind to him.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran:
- During the First World War, Peter was buried alive in a collapsed dug-out, and suffers from what would nowadays be called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
- His friend George Fentiman in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club has an even worse case, suffering frequent psychotic episodes. Sayers's own husband was a shell-shocked ex-soldier, so she knew whereof she wrote.
- Sherlock Scan: Lord Peter does this once, on the Reverend Mr Goodacre in Busman's Honeymoon. He explains some of his deductions explicitly, and the clues to the others are scattered in the narration for the alert reader to pick out.
- Shout-Out: Peter is want to season his speech with literary and historical quotes and references. Many of these are from The Bible or Shakespeare, but anyone who reads more widely will find many, many more. Characters other than Wimsey are not immune to doing likewise — just a good deal less oft.
- Peter's address, 110 A Piccadilly, is a subtle salute to Sherlock Holmes, who lived at 221 B Baker Street. The Holmes' references go beyond that, and are found in nearly (if not all) of the novels and at least a few of the short stories.
- It's a rare Wimsey story that doesn't include a Shout-Out to Gilbert and Sullivan, Alice in Wonderland, or both.
- The Dr. Thorndyke novels of R. Austin Freeman (referred to as just Austin Freeman) are mentioned a few times.
- In Whose Body?, Lord Peter references Joseph Bagstock from Dickens' Dombey and Son, Harold Skimpole from Dickens' Bleak House, and Congreve's The Mourning Bride.
- In Clouds of Witness, Peter bumps into a wooden chest and decides to investigate it. The narrator playfully wonders if, "like the heroine of Northanger Abbey" he was expecting to find something gruesome, rather than just the spare bed linen it contained. The 18th-century French novel Manon Lescaut is referenced more than once after Peter realizes just what was going on with the desceased. The book and its chapters all have literary epigraphs to boot.
- In Murder Must Advertise, Death Bredon creates an innovative advertising campaign that he predicts (accurately) will be "the biggest advertising stunt since the Mustard Club"; the Mustard Club was a famous Real Life advertising gimmick for Colman's Mustard. Murder Must Advertise was inspired by the time Sayers spent working in advertising before the Wimsey novels took off — and now, three guesses who came up with the Mustard Club...
- One of the characters in Murder Must Advertise refers to the advertising slogan "Guinness is good for you." Guess who came up with that slogan? (If you go into an "Oirish Pub" and see one of those old Guinness ads with zookeepers and toucans, you may be satisfied to learn that that was Sayers, too.)
- In Five Red Herrings, there are mentions of several other detective novels. At least two of them are deliberate hints to the solution of the murder: "Sir John Magill's Last Journey" in which the murderer impersonates his victim to conceal the true time of death, and "The Two Tickets Puzzle", in which a vital railway ticket is forged.
- In Have His Carcase, 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.
- Silly Will:
- In "The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach", a wealthy man leaves his stomach to his great-nephew, a medical student. When Lord Peter decides he wants to see the actual wording of the will, he poses as an author collecting examples of comic wills.
- In "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will", the eccentric uncle leaves his fortune to the (Conservative) Primrose League, just to annoy his Communist niece. There's a covering note, explaining that there's a later will leaving the money to her, if she can be frivolous enough to find it.
- Skewed Priorities: The Nine Tailors has a minor example, as a sign of the Reverend Venables being an unworldly Absent-Minded Professor. On being introduced to Lord Peter Wimsey, he immediately recognises the name — from Lord Peter's other hobby of collecting antique books. He has no idea about Lord Peter's fame as a detective until somebody else tells him about it later.
- Smart People Know Latin: And Peter and Harriet are smart enough that he proposes to her, and she accepts, in Latin. This is Truth in Television for educated English people of that generation. Also, the specific words he uses (placetne, magistra?) are a Shout-Out to the Oxford degree ceremony. note
- Smart People Play Chess:
- Lord Peter says in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club that he's no good at chess himself because he doesn't have the right kind of mind for it; he keeps thinking of the pieces as people instead of as objects to be used and discarded.
- Gaudy Night establishes that Harriet is also bad at chess, for similar reasons to Peter.
- The murderer's accomplice in "Striding Folly" is a brilliant chess player, who keeps Mr Mellilow occupied with a chess game while the murderer commits his crime and plants the evidence to frame Mr Mellilow.
- Smoky Gentlemen's Club: Lord Peter is a member of several. The Bellona Club, featured in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, has a membership of men with military backgrounds. The Egotists' Club, mentioned in several stories, caters to the rich and eccentric.
- Snobby Hobbies: Alongside solving mysteries, the titular character's other main hobby is collecting rare books, which establishes him as a wealthy intellectual. He is also a connoisseur of fine wines, to the point where one short story centers around a man trying to figure out which of three people claiming to be Lord Peter is really him by challenging them all to a wine tasting competition.
- Sommelier Speak: Displayed in the wine taste-off in "The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste".
- Spell My Name with a Blank:
- Among the generic products mentioned by the narrator in "Murder Must Advertise" are "So-and-so's Silks, Blank's Gloves, Dash's Footwear, Whatnot's Weatherproof Complexion Cream and Thingummy's Beautifying Shampoos"
- Part of The Nine Tailors takes place in a French town identified only as "C—y".
- In Have His Carcase, a vehicle the police are trying to trace is said to have been registered in ——shire.
- Spiteful Spit: In Gaudy Night, the antagonist finishes up her Motive Rant by spitting in Peter's face.
- The Spock: Parker is the cautious, logical counterpart to the more emotional and imaginative Wimsey.
- Sports Hero Backstory: Lord Peter is an adept cricketer, and played for Oxford in his student days. At one point in Murder Must Advertise his undercover persona is endangered when he encounters a cricket enthusiast who recognises his batting style.
- Spousal Privilege:
- In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Inspector Parker learns that one of the suspects is about to marry his fiancée in a hurry, and hastens to intervene, surmising that the fiancée knows something that her husband-to-be doesn't want her testifying about in court. It turns out that the fiancée doesn't know anything relevant; the real reason for the hasty marriage is so that nobody will connect the man with his previous fiancée and thus realise what his motive was.
- In The Nine Tailors Will and Mary Thoday learn that their marriage is invalid because Mary's first husband faked his death and was still alive. They resolve to get married again/properly, but the police can't allow it until they've established that Will isn't the murderer/Mary doesn't know anything they might need to rely on in court.
- Spy Speak: In Murder Must Advertise, part of the mystery involves trying to discover the recognition code used by members of the criminal gang.
- Straw Feminist: Miss Hillyard in Gaudy Night, whose prejudice against "womanly" women, married women, and mothers, especially in the workplace, is implied to arise from simple jealousy and is contrasted against the various more reasoned models of feminism displayed by the university staff and students.
- Stepford Smiler: Lord Peter Wimsey is heavily implied to be putting on a fair bit of his light-hearted jocular manner.
- Stronger Than They Look: Lord Peter is a small, slight man, and gets thrown around when caught in a scrum, but has terrific strength in his arms and body, and can't be overpowered one-on-one.
- The Summation: Once per book, but most epically in Gaudy Night. It's not always Lord Peter who gets to do the summation: in one book, where the case has proceeded to trial before Lord Peter finds the key bit of evidence, the defence's summation to the jury doubles as the summation for the reader, while in another, the job of laying out exactly who did what to whom when is done by the murderer himself, who wants to make sure everyone understands how clever he was.
- Surprise Witness: In Clouds of Witness, the defence are prepared to produce a Surprise Witness if it looks like the other evidence won't be sufficient to sway the jury. They'd rather not, because it's an alibi by a woman the defendant was having an affair with, which would be embarrassing all around, dangerous to the woman, whose husband is jealous, and provide the prosecution with a motive, since if the dead man knew it would be reason to silence him. Fortunately, Lord Peter manages to produce a Smoking Gun instead.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: A variation occurs in Strong Poison. Though it isn't considered real evidence, the discovery of the lengths Norman Urquhart went to avoid any possible opportunity to poison the victim is what convinces Parker of his guilt.
- The Swear Jar: In The Nine Tailors, the bellringers have a noticeboard dating from the previous century, with a list of rules including a fine of sixpence for swearing. Later in the book, one of the ringers mentions that the Rector still enforces the fine.
- Sweet Tooth: Norman Urquhart has a serious one, which leads to his downfall. Peter's lack of one saves his life at least once.
- Sword Cane: Lord Peter's favourite walking stick is "a handsome malacca, marked off in inches for detective convenience, and concealing a sword in its belly and a compass in its head".
- Sympathetic Adulterer: In Clouds of Witness, Mrs. Grimethorpe is trapped in an abusive marriage and accepts the Duke of Denver's advances as an escape from her troubles. The Duke has less excuse for his behaviour — the Duchess is unpleasant, but not nearly as evil or controlling as Mr. Grimethorpe — but earns some sympathy for the lengths he goes to to shield his lover from the consequences of discovery.
