This page is for tropes that have appeared in Lord Peter Wimsey.
For the rest:
- The Jeeves:
- Bunter is famously efficient and deferential, and is explicitly compared to Jeeves.
- In The Five Red Herrings, Lord Peter describes Gowan's butler Alcock (who stage-managed his employer's secret departure for London) as having "the makings of a very fine schemer indeed."
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
- Inspector Sugg spends Whose Body? bullying witnesses, arresting the wrong suspects, and trying to keep Lord Peter out of his investigation. He's next seen in Clouds of Witness helping Peter, Parker and Freddie Arbuthnot safely home after a drunken night out.
- Gerald Wimsey, Duke of Denver, is thoroughly conventional and rather stupid but faced with a choice between risking his own life and endangering the woman he's been having an extramarital affair with he unhesitatingly plumps for the former. He's been accused of murder and she's his alibi, but she's married to a violently abusive man who will certainly kill her if he finds out she's been unfaithful. And his only concern about Peter's marriage to Harriet — a woman well below him in rank and somewhat notorious — is whether she really loves him or not.
- The Killer Was Left-Handed: Busman's Honeymoon provides the page quote, which lampshades the trope. One of the suspects is indeed left-handed, but it turns out that the fatal blow was struck in a way that renders considerations of handedness irrelevant.Lord Peter Wimsey: On the left, from behind downwards. That looks like another of our old friends.
Harriet Vane: The left-handed criminal.
Lord Peter Wimsey: It's surprising how often you get them in detective fiction. A sort of sinister twist running right through the character. - Kissing Cousins: The duke and his wife, as Harriet points out when Peter worries about children.
- Knight Templar:
- At the climax of Strong Poison, Lord Peter tells Norman Urquhart that he has just given him a massive dose of arsenic and asks why he isn't showing symptoms. This prompts Urquhart to break down and confess that he has made himself immune to arsenic, and so was able to kill his cousin by splitting an arsenic-laced omelette with him. Then Parker arrests him. Of course, Peter says that he was lying about the arsenic in the sweets, but there's also a possibility that he wasn't...
- Lord Peter talking a murderer into shooting himself at the end of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.
- Knows a Guy Who Knows a Guy:
- In Strong Poison, The Hon. Freddy saw a man who knows a fellow who has it from a chappie that the villain is in financial trouble. The man owed Freddy a favour, and can have the fellow put him in touch with the chappie in exchange for another favour — for the chappie, that is, not for the fellow, or the man. Y'see?
- Have His Carcase has 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.
- Lame Pun Reaction: In the cricket match in Murder Must Advertise, Ingleby in his first innings is out for zero, called "out for a duck". When he returns to the pavilion, Wimsey tells him "Quack, quack." Ingleby throws the bat at him.
- Lampshade Hanging: Repeatedly. For the entire mystery genre.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Lord Peter gets a blackmailer to return the stolen items by turning the tables.
- Last-Name Basis:
- The staff of Pym's Publicity in Murder Must Advertise. Some of them have worked there for years but it's still 'Mr.' this and 'Miss' that.
- The SCR in Gaudy Night all refer to each other by title or honorific, except for very close friends, who use last-name-based nicknames, like "Teddy" for Miss Edwards.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Harriet and Peter have a conversation about her latest detective novel and the pros and cons of stretching herself beyond the genre standards to give the protagonists authentic psychological depth — in Gaudy Night, the novel that's all about stretching beyond the genre standards to give the protagonists authentic psychological depth.
- Leave Behind a Pistol:
- The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club has Lord Peter and one of his allies allow Dr. Penberthy to take this way out to spare his innocent ex-fiancée the disgrace of a wrongful trial.
- Less literally in Murder Must Advertise. During their final conversation, Tallboy mentions to Lord Peter that he's considered suicide to spare his family the trouble that will come when his part in the criminal conspiracy comes out. Lord Peter points out that at the moment he could commit suicide just by walking down the street, as the other criminal conspirators have a history of arranging "accidents" for people who have let them down. Tallboy takes the hint.
- Let Off by the Detective: In The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face Lord Peter decides not to try to prove his theory because the victim is a villain and the alleged murderer a gifted painter.
- Likes Older Women: Reggie Pomfret in Gaudy Night, an undergraduate of twenty or so, is taken with Harriet (who's in her early-to-mid-thirties).
- Lite Crème: In Murder Must Advertise, Lord Peter, who is working undercover at an ad agency as a copywriter, explains the limitations and requirements of the English labelling laws in some detail to his sister and brother-in-law while visiting them, including details such as the difference between "made from pears" and "made with pears".
- Literary Allusion Title:
- "clouds of witness" is from the Epistle to the Hebrews.
- "strong poison" is from "Lord Rendal" (Child Ballad 12H), in which a man dictates his will after being poisoned by his lover.
- "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).
- "thrones, dominations" is from the Epistle to the Colossians.
- Little Old Lady Investigates: Miss Climpson investigates solo in Unnatural Death and Strong Poison.
- Lohengrin and Mendelssohn: Discussed and averted in Busman's Honeymoon. Peter refuses to have either at his wedding, and the happy couple is played out with Bach instead.
- Long List: Peter rattles off a particularly impressive one in The Nine Tailors, consisting of all the things he's figured out about the case. The only thing missing from it is the identity of the murderer.
- Lost in Character: In Murder Must Advertise, Peter gets enough into the character of Death Bredon and the details of his Whiffle campaign that an interruption from Scotland Yard with evidence related to his actual case is greeted with genuinely heartfelt cursing.
- Lost Wedding Ring: Played with in Busman's Honeymoon. The best man at Peter and Harriet's wedding does lose the ring, but Peter uses his detective skills to find it again so quickly that the whole thing is only a one sentence aside instead of a major plot point.
- Lost Will and Testament:
- In "The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention", the governor's will is discovered next to an old book in a decrepit library. Lord Peter deduces, from the water stains on the book but not the will, that one of the heirs had hidden it there to keep the condition from being fulfilled.
- In "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will", Meleager Finch hides his will and leaves his niece a set of clues to its location in the form of a Crossword Puzzle.
- Loveable Rogue: Jock Graham in The Five Red Herrings; Nobby Cranton in The Nine Tailors.
