Lord Peter Wimsey / Tropes A to C

This page is for tropes that have appeared in Lord Peter Wimsey.

For the rest:

• Tropes D to F
• Tropes G to I
• Tropes J to L
• Tropes M to P
• Tropes Q to S
• Tropes T to Z

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• Absence of Evidence:
  • In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Lord Peter receives a list of the effects found on the deceased, along with a comment from the manservant that there's nothing but the same things he always had on him, and remarks that that's possibly the strangest aspect of the incident. General Fentiman is supposed to have died on Remembrance Day, but it's unthinkable that he would have been out and about on Remembrance Day and not wearing The Poppy. This is one of the signs that General Fentiman actually died the previous day.
  • The Five Red Herrings turns on the absence of a tube of white paint from the crime scene.
  • A dog-in-the-night-time-style example appears in "The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention", when a horse that is terrified of an allegedly haunted heath doesn't react at all to a phantom coach driven by a headless horseman.
  • In Strong Poison, one suspect had absolutely no opportunity to poison the victim - everything they ate and drink was either shared, or preserved for testing. This convinces the detectives that they had something to do with it, and were deliberately shielding themselves from suspicion.
• Absent-Minded Professor:
  • Miss Lydgate of Shrewsbury College in Gaudy Night.
  • The Reverend Venables in The Nine Tailors is an amateur rather than a professional scholar, but is otherwise a textbook example.
• Accidental Misnaming: In a scene in Murder Must Advertise, Chief Inspector Parker is dealing with a witness he regards as a distraction from more important matters, and gets his name wrong at one point, addressing him as "Firkin" when his name is actually "Puncheon". (Both are antiquated units for quantities of alcoholic drinks.)
• Accidental Murder:
  • The death in The Five Red Herrings was the result of a fight that ended in Death by Falling Over. Most of the mystery stems from the elaborate cover-up that ensued because the killer was afraid nobody would believe it was an accident and that the dead man had been the aggressor.
  • The death in Nine Tailors turns out to have been this. The victim was restrained and unable to escape a situation (the belfry during a nine-hour ringing marathon) that causes his death from exposure and shock.
• The Ace: Wimsey can do anything he likes or needs to do, and always excels at it. Besides being a world-renowned wine connoisseur and expert on rare books, he wins car races, rides a horse perfectly, swims, climbs, recites poetry, intimidates or blackmails criminals, picks locks, chooses frocks, and proves to be a great advertisement writer and bespoke-bell-ringer when he has to. Not far behind is his man Bunter, a talented amateur photographer who can spy on criminals better than Scotland Yard can.
• Acquired Poison Immunity: How the murder was committed in Strong Poison. The murderer poisons a meal that he and the victim share after he has spent some time building up an immunity to the poison, which allows him to survive while the victim dies, all the while casting suspicion away from him. Notably this is also a case of Science Marches On, since it is now known that one could not do this with the poison in question—arsenic—without suffering any noticeable ill effects.
• Actually Not a Vampire: One witness in The Five Red Herrings is chased out of a disused part of the house by what she thinks is a zombie. She realises, on reflection, that this apparition was actually a badly-injured man hiding in the attic, which is almost as frightening.
• Adaptation Expansion: Busman's Honeymoon was expanded from a stage play.
• The Alibi: Discussed in several stories, with Lord Peter remarking on multiple occasions that the more iron-clad an alibi appears, the more suspicious he considers it. The title of "Absolutely Elsewhere" comes from Peter's suspicion of a particularly good alibi that appears to establish that the suspect was absolutely elsewhere at the time of the murder. Have His Carcase is an interesting case, because Lord Peter and his associates spend most of the novel using an incorrect estimate of the time of death, and 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.
• All Witches Have Cats: In the short story "The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey", Wimsey poses as a wizard in a remote and backwards village. Nine white cats form part of his disguise.
• Altar the Speed: In Busman's Honeymoon, Peter's sister-in-law Helen takes to herself the planning of Peter and Harriet's wedding, in circumstances and with a guest list that she considers Suitable. Peter and Harriet retaliate by secretly making an alternate plan to get married a week earlier, inviting their true friends, and only notifying Gerald and Helen the day before when it's too late for Helen to do anything except decide whether to attend.
• Always Murder: Every novel involves a murder, mysterious death, or at least attempted murder. Gaudy Night predominantly concerns lesser crimes, though, and violence doesn't emerge until the criminal has been pursued for some time. Amusingly Lampshaded in Thrones, Dominations, where Harriet becomes worried that the corpse in her latest mystery might be the victim of manslaughter or unlawful death rather than true murder. She explains that a murder is an absolute necessity for a successful mystery story; anything less won't sell.
• Amateur Sleuth: Lord Peter Wimsey is an independently wealthy aristocrat whose hobby is detection; except for once moonlighting as an advertising copywriter, he has never held any job — he's too rich to actually need one.
• Ambiguously Gay: Appears quite a bit:
  • "Sir Impey Biggs is the handsomest man in England, and no woman will ever care twopence for him." — Clouds of Witness^note To be fair, he's kind of a dick. Professionally.
  • Eiluned Price is quite vocal about her distaste for men.
  • In the backstory of Unnatural Death, Agatha Dawson and Clara Whittaker lived together for decades, and their niece Mary has another girl utterly devoted to her as a "friend."
• Anachronistic Clue: In "In the Teeth of the Evidence", a corpse is found in a burned out garage, and initially identified by its teeth as the garage's owner — a dentist. While trying to determine whether the death was accident or suicide, a closer examination of the dental records is made, revealing a modern cast porcelain filling, a method not available when the records indicate the filling was inserted. This tips the investigators off that it was murder — the dentist killed a man and altered the fellow's teeth to pass the corpse off as himself.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In Unnatural Death, Miss Climpson relays a vicious racist rant by another character, including that the mere sight of a Black character turned the ranter's stomach. She then apologises, not for the racism, but for mentioning stomachs in polite company.
• Ascended Extra: Lord Peter himself. He started out as a secondary character in a Sexton Blake fanfic that Sayers was writing. Details here.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Strong Poison: Phillip Boyes, self-centred, manipulative, and emotionally abusive to the woman he purported to love. In the immortal words of Lord Peter, "If only that young man were alive today, how dearly I should like to kick his bottom for him."
  • The Five Red Herrings: Sandy Campbell, a foul-tempered alcoholic who seriously hurt someone at the golf course, threatened people's lives, and physically attacked his neighbor.
  • The Nine Tailors: The initially unidentified victim, once his name and history have been discovered, is beyond an Asshole Victim, so foul and evil that he is by most readings the real villain of the book.
  • Murder Must Advertise: Victor Dean was a blackmailer.
  • Busman's Honeymoon: Noakes was another blackmailer, as well as a grasping miser who'd stiff anyone he got the chance to. Both Harriet and Peter are tempted to withhold evidence because they have more sympathy for the suspects—even supposing them to have done it—than for the victim.
  • "The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face": Mr. Plant is horrible to his subordinates.
• Author Avatar:
  • Harriet Vane is certainly an author avatar. Sayers herself strenuously, though not entirely convincingly, denied this.
  • Miss Meteyard, a rather ladettish, Oxford-educated advertising copywriter in Murder Must Advertise is actually an excellent candidate for this. She even has some kind of romantic history that she'd rather was kept secret from her straitlaced boss. She's a pretty minor character, though, so has never drawn the attention Harriet did.
• Badass Bookworm: Small, bookish martial artist Peter. Harriet, Parker and Bunter fit as well, all being highly well-read and -spoken, and pursuing intellectual hobbies, as well as being strong and highly capable.
• Barsetshire: In Busman's Honeymoon, Peter and Harriet move to Talboys, a country house in Hertfordshire, and eventually raise their children there.
• Bathos: Constable Ross giving his opinion on where Waters' missing bicycle is, in Five Red Herrings:
  In my opinion, yon bicycle is doon in the deep waters betune Arran and Stranraer, an' ye'll never see it mair till it rises oot o' the sea tae bear witness at the great Day of Judgement. Unless ye sairch for't wi' deep-sea tackle.
• Bathroom Breakout: At the end of Strong Poison, the murderer, realising the jig is up, asks to use the bathroom with the intention of escaping out the window. On discovering that the window leads to a sheer three-storey drop, he exits the bathroom in search of another exit and is immediately arrested by the waiting police.
• Battle Butler: Bunter is quite a competent detective in his own right, and, like Peter, he's an ex-soldier.
• The Beard: In Jill Paton Walsh's Thrones, Dominations, the "boyfriend" of a missing actress tells Lord Peter that their relationship is only friendly; she dates him to scare off an unpleasantly lecherous colleague, and he dates her because it makes him appear straight.
• Beardness Protection Program:
  • In The Nine Tailors, Nobby Cranton grows a beard after being released from prison to avoid being recognised when he embarks on a new nefarious project.
  • Lord Peter himself grows a beard when infiltrating a criminal gang in one of the short stories.
  • The Inverted version shows up in The Five Red Herrings. Gowan has a particularly impressive beard, and when it gets shaved off he becomes completely unrecognizable, even to someone who knows him well and is specifically looking for him.
• Best Friends-in-Law: Peter and Parker, eventually. Parker falls in love with Peter's sister Mary in Clouds of Witness and proposes to her at the end of Strong Poison, and they are married by the beginning of Have His Carcase.
• Beta Couple: Freddy Arbuthnot/Rachel Levy and Parker/Lady Mary both serve as foils to Peter and Harriet, representing inter-class relationships with extended courtships, facing familial disapproval and social, financial and gender inequality.
• The Big Damn Kiss: Peter and Harriet's clinch at the end of Gaudy Night, bringing a conclusion to five years of Unresolved Sexual Tension.
• Big Secret:
  • In Clouds of Witness, the Duke was committing adultery when his sister's fiancé committed suicide. The other woman was married to a vindictively jealous man, and the Duke refuses to put her in harm's way to clear himself.
  • In Have His Carcase, 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.
• Bilingual Bonus: Many stories include French dialogue or quotations, offered without translation. Gaudy Night does the same with Latin, and even a bit of Greek in the original alphabet. The reader is simply assumed to be educated enough to read them, and in the short story "The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question," a knowledge of French grammar provides a crucial clue — although people who speak French tend to write it off as a typo until the end, which was doubtless the author's intent.
• Blackmail:
  • In "The Unprincipled Affair of the Practical Joker", Lord Peter gives a blackmailer a taste of his own medicine to persuade him to desist and return the incriminating document.
  • In Murder Must Advertise, one of the staff at the advertising agency had tried blackmailing several of his colleagues. Miss Meteyard told him to publish and be damned, and was subsequently left alone. Mr Tallboy chose an alternative method of dealing with the problem, resulting in the murder Lord Peter is investigating.
  • In Busman's Honeymoon, Sellon becomes a suspect in the murder after it comes out that the deceased had been blackmailing him over an incident of professional misconduct.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: In "The Practical Joker" Lord Peter says this to the villain, a blackmailer who's experiencing for the first time what blackmail feels like from the other end.
• Blasting It Out of Their Hands: Lord Peter does this to one of the villains in "A Matter of Taste".
• Blood Is Squicker in Water: In Have His Carcase, 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.
• Blue Blood: Peter and his family are some of the highest nobility in the realm, as are a great many of their friends. Peter sadly notes that, by the 1930s, they're suffering from inbreeding, their traditional lands are basically worthless, and their countless relatives are the most tiresome snobs.
• Bluffing the Murderer: In the climax of Strong Poison, Lord Peter tricks the murderer into thinking he's eaten poisoned food — which, if he was really the murderer, he would be immune to. Rather than feign illness, the murderer makes a run for it and is promptly arrested.
• Body in a Breadbox: "The Fantastic Horror of the Cat in the Bag" features a carpet-bag containing a severed human head.
• Boisterous Bruiser: The Duke of Denver is a proper old-fashioned British country gentleman — gruff, short-tempered, and fond of shooting and shouting.
• Bold Inflation:
  • Miss Climpson often speaks in italics, conveying her gossipy nature.
  • Miss Twitterton in Busman's Honeymoon speaks in a similar way.
• The Book Cipher: In A Presumption of Death, Lord Peter, on assignment for British Intelligence in WWII Nazi-occupied Europe, uses a code based on the works of John Donne. The Germans, suspecting that an intelligence service in which Oxonians have a major role would choose a classic work of English literature, systematically try such works until hitting the right one and breaking the code, coming near to catching the spy. Wimsey then improvises a new code, based on an unpublished text known only to himself and his wife.
• Book Ends: The first chapter of Strong Poison opens with a description of the courtroom on the last day of Harriet's trial, dwelling on details such as the flowers decorating the room. The last chapter opens with a parallel description of the courtroom on the first day of Harriet's retrial.
• Bookmark Clue: In Have His Carcase, 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.
• Brand X:
  • Mentions of the newspapers tend be of fictional papers such as The Daily Yell and The Twaddler, particularly since they're most often mentioned because their reporters are being sensation-seeking nuisances.
  • All the products and advertising campaigns in Murder Must Advertise are, of course, fictional. With one exception, for which see Shout-Out, below.
• Brats with Slingshots: In Murder Must Advertise, one of the message boys brings his new slingshot to work to show the others, and has it confiscated. This prompts several of the adults working at Pym's to reminisce about their own youthful slingshot escapades. It also inspires the murderer to borrow it and use it as the murder weapon.
• Breaking Speech: The villain of Gaudy Night goes on a long, intensely vitriolic rant about their motives and how much they hate the college and specific people in it. Everyone else in the room is so shocked that only the main target of the speech can give a response, and even Peter just sits there with his head in his hands by the end of it.
• Breather Episode:
  • After the brutal killings of Unnatural Death, the darkly comic examination of post-war malaise of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and the emotional turmoil of Strong Poison, The Five Red Herrings is a light, mechanical railway-timetable mystery Peter investigates while on holiday, with a relatively happy ending.
  • Another relatively lighthearted entry: Clouds of Witness, comes in between the truly grisly murder of Whose Body? and the even darker Unnatural Death.
• Broken Hero: Lord Peter always appears to be a cheerful Upper-Class Twit and a Motor Mouth, frequently compared in universe to Bertie Wooster by both the narrator and other characters, but it is revealed that he suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in the War. We get literal flashbacks from him when he relives events of it after a particularly stressful case triggers him and also Flashback Nightmares.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Lord Peter Wimsey is a motor mouthed British nobleman who drops literary quotations almost continuously, plays word games with everyone he meets, and has a hobby as an amateur detective. He's a very good amateur detective.
• Busman's Holiday:
  • The Five Red Herrings: Lord Peter takes time out of a fishing holiday in Scotland to investigate a killing made to look like a painting accident.
  • Have His Carcase: Harriet's walking tour is interrupted by a murder mystery.
  • The Nine Tailors: Lord Peter's visit to friends in Lincolnshire is interrupted by a car accident... which, four months or so later, leads to his involvement in a murder mystery.
  • Busman's Honeymoon: Lord Peter's honeymoon is interrupted by a murder mystery. The title is a deliberate reference to this trope.
• But I Digress: The Dowager Duchess tends to change the subject four or five times — in rapid succession — whenever she opens her mouth.
• The Butler Did It:
  • Discussed in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club; when Peter and Parker are compiling a list of suspects, Peter points out that the victim's manservant had opportunity if no motive and remarks that in fiction it's so often the butler or the servant. In this case, of course, it isn't.
  • Played with in The Nine Tailors. A key part of the backstory involves a butler who stole a valuable emerald necklace from his employer's house and was sent to prison for it. The butler is a murderer (he killed a guard during a prison break), but not the murderer (he didn't do the murder that the plot revolves around, and is never even a suspect). In fact, as it turns out when the corpse is identified, he was the victim.
• The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House: Used in Absolutely Elsewhere — a murderer has their accomplice place the call from another town, and picks up the extension when the call goes through, as a way of faking an alibi.
• Capital Letters Are Magic: In Gaudy Night, Harriet hears at her college reunion about a former fellow student who has gone in for new age mysticism and written a book about Higher Wisdom and Beautiful Thought and that sort of thing.
• Cassandra Truth: In Jill Paton Walsh's A Presumption of Death, retired dentist Mrs. Spright is paranoid and senile so nobody pays attention when she claims that there are Nazi spies in Paggleham. It turns out that she's right.
• Changing of the Guard: The stories experimented with perspective shifts from the beginning, but we see Harriet's point of view more and more as the books go on. Gaudy Night only has one scene that features Peter without Harriet, and Busman's Honeymoon is shared between them as a couple.
• Character Development:
  • At the end of Strong Poison Harriet wonders why Lord Peter is not there to celebrate her exoneration. Her friend tells her that if she wants Peter around, she'll have to send for him. She refuses to do so, but is told she will in time.
  • Early in Have His Carcase Harriet is surprised to see Peter not long after she has discovered the body in question. He gently rebukes her for not letting him in on the investigation, and they go on as friends. Later on she is in a different mood and demands to know the real reason he showed up. He tells her, it was so she would not have been forced to send for him to protect her from another false accusation of murder.
  • By the time of Gaudy Night she sends for him to help, and is a bit annoyed that he is away in Italy. She sends again later, and he is in Warsaw. At last she simply sends for him to come when he can. She has gone from refusing to see him to practically begging him to show up. And is at last realizing how unfairly she has taken advantage of his devotion and good nature. He was busy trying to fend off a second world war, and she had never bothered to know anything more about him except as an amateur detective who liked to take her to dinner. She insists to herself and others that she needs to be treated as an accomplished individual and independent, only to at last understand that this is the one man who always has done so.
• Character Name Alias: In The Five Red Herrings, Hugh Farren wants to get away from it all, so he checks into a hotel as "H. (as in Henry) Ford" — both because it matches his initials and because he plans to fund his holiday by mass-producing landscape paintings and selling them to tourists.
• The Charmer: Lord Peter is very quick-witted and talented at getting people on his side — or, when it becomes necessary (or he's bored), mocking or manipulating them. In the early books, he comes across as rather too prickly and facetious — he moderates this as he ages and expands his social circles. Bunter takes over this role when dealing with working-class folks — especially female servants, who appreciate his dark good looks and flirtatious manner.
• Chekhov's Gunman: In Nine Tailors, the alert reader will notice that one character is excluded from suspicion due to being dead—but that his body was identified only by the clothes it had on.
• Chew-Out Fake-Out: In the short story "Talboys", Peter's eldest son catches a snake and Peter is expected to tell him off, but as soon as the two are alone, he not only tells his son that he thinks it's actually pretty cool but conspires with him to use it to prank an unpleasant guest.
• Chivalrous Pervert: Peter was one in his youth. His uncle, who claims to have taught Peter all he knows, is a Chivalrous Dirty Old Man.
• Christianity is Catholic: Averted — Sayers was a respected Anglican theologian and knew her denominations. Catholicism and High Anglicanism appear in several stories, but so do a number of Protestant and Orthodox faiths.
• Chubby Chaser: In "The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face", Inspector Winterbottom mentions that the victim's mistress was very attractive, if you like them thin. Which he doesn't — he prefers "well-upholstered" women.
• Clear Their Name: The plot of Strong Poison kicks off when Peter attends Harriet Vane's murder trial and realises that she's not guilty despite the apparently strong case against her.
• Clock Discrepancy: Have His Carcase has 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.
• Cold Reading: Mrs. Climpson uses this on a credulous nurse in order to gain her help in securing vital evidence in Strong Poison. She feels rather guilty (due to religious and ethical reasons) but justifies it due to the importance of the evidence, and to use her "skills" to persuade the nurse to stop visiting less ethical "psychics".
• Comically Missing the Point: In Busman's Honeymoon, Bunter discovers the new housekeeper, in a fit of ignorant helpfulness, mishandling Lord Peter's valuable collection of vintage port. Attempting to bring home to her the magnitude of her misdeed, he informs her in ringing tones that the bottle she's casually juggling is a Cockburn '96. Her nonplussed reply is, "Oh, is it? I thought it was something to drink."
• Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch: In-Universe, in Gaudy Night, Harriet attends a literary party, where a gang of authors take turns theorizing why some thoroughly arty and undeserving novel has been awarded a reviewer's prize — because of advertising deals, or political loyalties, or familial connections, or other underhand reasons. Naturally, none of them have actually read the book, or have the faintest idea what it's even about.
• Conspicuous Gloves: In the novel Have His Carcase, the fact that the victim was wearing gloves is a clue to his haemophilia, which figures in the plot.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In The Nine Tailors, while contemplating the renovations to the church at Fenchurch St Paul, Lord Peter recalls the renovation of the church at Duke's Denver, which was taking place in Whose Body?.
  • The renovation of the church at Duke's Denver is recalled again in Busman's Honeymoon, with Lord Peter deciding to hire the same architect to remodel his and Harriet's new country house.
  • All the identifiable guests at Peter and Harriet's wedding in Busman's Honeymoon are returning characters from earlier novels, as are the named journalists reporting on the murder.
• Contrived Coincidence: Lampshaded and subverted in Murder Must Advertise. Dian de Momerie and her coterie get bored and decide to crash the next posh social event they come across; the party they crash is being hosted by the Duke and Duchess of Denver, with Lord Peter in attendance, giving Peter an opportunity to establish the legend of his disreputable cousin Bredon. When Peter tells Parker about it afterward, Parker remarks that that was an impressive bit of luck, and Peter explains that actually Dian had come up with the gate-crashing plan because somebody (i.e. Peter) had sent her an anonymous message suggesting that if she went to Denver's house she would learn something to her advantage.
• Conversational Troping: Characters regularly discuss the differences between then-contemporary detective fiction and reality.
  • In Have His Carcase, there's a discussion of the trope in which a villain sends a message to their victim with instructions for a meeting and ends it with "Bring this message with you." Harriet points out that while the villain's intention is to ensure that the message is destroyed, the real reason for the trope is so that the author can ensure that the message isn't completely destroyed, leaving a clue for the detective. They go on to get the clue that cracks the case from what's left of a letter the villain sent to the victim with instructions for a meeting, ending with "Bring this message with you." Peter suspects that the murderers are such amateurs that they did it that way precisely because they'd seen it done in books.
• Cool Car: Peter drives a succession of sleeve-valve Daimler V12 sports cars that he names "Mrs Merdle", after a Dickens character who was averse to "row" (sleeve-valve engines were famously quiet, at the cost of heavy oil consumption and worse emissions).
• Cool Old Lady:
  • The Dowager Duchess.
  • Lady Dormer in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is also described as one by those who knew her.
• The Coroner: Several coroner's inquests take place throughout the books, but Dr Horner, assistant to forensic examiner Sir James Lubbock, is an example of the "medical examiner" model: he's a hearty, cheerful man who chatters, jokes and sings while he's sawing through the skull of a weeks-old corpse.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot:
  • The death being investigated in The Five Red Herrings was actually an accident stemming from self-defense (the deceased forced his way into the killer's house and started a quarrel which escalated into a struggle which ended with the killer pushing the deceased over and causing him to crack his head on the corner of a countertop), but the killer didn't think a jury would believe this and covered it up. When Lord Peter uncovers the truth and it all goes to trial, the jury does believe him and bring it in as manslaughter.
  • The antagonist in Unnatural Death murders her own aunt, her maid and her best friend, and attempts to murder Lord Peter, Parker, Miss Climpson and a London solicitor, before finally killing herself, all to secure a fortune that, as we discover in Gaudy Night, they would have inherited anyway.
• Crime Reconstruction:
  • At the end of Five Red Herrings, Lord Peter and the police re-enact the events of the murder and the following day, accumulating evidence as they go.
  • "Absolutely Elsewhere" ends with Lord Peter re-enacting the telephone call by which the murderer established his alibi.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Death by electroplating in "The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers".
• Cultured Badass: Lord Peter Wimsey, the second son of a duke, speaks multiple languages (including French and Latin), is a book collector, a well-known cricket player, very careful of his clothes, and is famed across Europe for his taste in wines. Takes up detective work as a hobby mostly because he's bored and got a lot of experience doing intelligence work during World War I, and shows no squeamishness about killing the occasional criminal by accident, usually without the criminal ever realising he was dangerous.
• Cut-and-Paste Note: The poison-pen writer in Gaudy Night uses letters cut from newspapers for their notes. A search for the source papers forms part of the investigation.
• Cyanide Pill: In "In The Teeth of the Evidence", a badly-burned body is thought to belong to a missing dentist; Scotland Yard questions the dentist's wife, who spends the entire interview complaining about how her husband never gave her anything nice, starting with their disappointing honeymoon to the south of France. After this interview, the Inspector asks the coroner to "be thorough in his search for prussic acid", finding it easy to believe that the dentist took his own life just to escape his marriage.

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