This page is for tropes that have appeared in Lord Peter Wimsey.
For the rest:
- Mad Artist: "The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers" concerns a sculptor who disposed of his murdered girlfriend by dipping her into his bronze-plating solution, thus turning her into a statue.
- Mad Lib Thriller Title: The Dawson Pedigree, an alternate title used by some US editions of Unnatural Death.
- Magic from Technology: In one story, Lord Peter convinces the inhabitants of a small Basque village that he is a magician by using modern technology. ("Jesu Maria, the wizard could make music come out of a box!") It seems that this is a village so backwards and isolated that not only has not heard about the radio by the late '20s, but neither the gramophone or even music boxes.
- The Main Characters Do Everything: In The Nine Tailors, Lord Peter convinces the Chief Constable to swear him in as a special constable so that he can follow up a clue with the French police in person (even though it wouldn't be part of a special constable's duties, and the proper course of action would be to send to Scotland Yard for a police officer who can speak French).
- Majored in Western Hypocrisy: Invoked in Have His Carcase. 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.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: In Murder Must Advertise, members of the drug ring who are too indiscreet or otherwise become liabilities have a statistically unlikely tendency to be hit by runaway lorries or fall under subway trains.
- Malaproper: The Dowager Duchess, on occasion.I said to her, "Well, my dear, tell Peter what you feel, but do remember he's just as vain and foolish as most men and not a chameleon to smell any sweeter for being trodden on." On consideration, think I meant "camomile".
- Malicious Slander:
- In Unnatural Death, a doctor recounts to Lord Peter how his suspicions about an old woman's death had been translated into wild accusations by the rumour mill, forcing him to leave town.
- The villain in Gaudy Night distributes slanderous letters to turn her victims against each other and themselves.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
- The solution to The Nine Tailors — rationally plausible, but spooky.
- "The Image in the Mirror" suggests that twin brothers might share a psychic connection, though it lampshades the unlikelihood.
- In Murder Must Advertise, Dian de Momerie, in conversation with a disguised Lord Peter, seems to have a moment of telepathy: "There's a hanged man in your thoughts. Why are you thinking of hanging?" Lord Peter's internal monologue tries to explain it as an effect of the drink and drugs she's taken.
- Meaningful Echo: Halfway through Murder Must Advertise, there's a scene where a disguised Lord Peter, playing up his role as a mystery man, tells Dian de Momerie that when his task is complete he will return to the place from which he came, deliberately echoing the traditional wording of a judge handing down a death sentence. At the end, as the murderer goes to his death, Lord Peter completes the quotation to himself, picking up from where the earlier quotation left off.
- Meaningful Name: Hallelujah Dawson. Yes, that's his real name. Yes, he's a missionary. How did you guess? Then there's the venerable Rev. Venables (see The Vicar, below) and the equally Reverend Tredgold (named in anticipation of Heaven's golden streets). Arguably, Wimsey's own name is an example, and lampshaded in the series: his coat of arms bears the motto "As My Whimsy Takes Me."
- Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: The murder in Murder Must Advertise was an attempt to keep the lid on an extensive criminal conspiracy, and Lord Peter's investigation of the murder results in the entire criminal organisation being brought down.
- Minor Injury Overreaction: In Five Red Herrings, the wealthy painter Gowan has his friends and servants arrange an elaborate alibi, and skips the country in the middle of the night, because Campbell cut off his prized beard.
- Mirroring Factions: As a few characters in Murder Must Advertise point out, there are distinct parallels between illegal drug distribution and the advertising industry.
- Mirror Routine: In "The Image in the Mirror", a man who suffers from a chronic fear of doppelgängers meets his long-lost Evil Twin when he mistakes him for a reflection in a glass door, then has a panic attack.
- The Missus and the Ex: Mentioned by Wimsey in Murder Must Advertise:In all social difficulties, ask Uncle Ugly. Do you want to know how many buttons there should be on a dress waistcoat? How to eat an orange in public? How to introduce your first-wife-that-was to your third-wife-to-be? Uncle Ugly will put you right.
- More Hero than Thou: In The Nine Tailors, two men try to shield each other from blame for murder, unaware that neither of them did it.
- More Insulting than Intended: In Murder Must Advertise, Mr Tallboy, in an argument with Mr Smayle, sarcastically asks "I suppose you are sending your son to Eton, then?" unaware that Smayle's son is mentally handicapped.
- Morning Sickness: In Jill Paton Walsh's Thrones, Dominations, Harriet vomits several times earlier throughout the book, foreshadowing that she's pregnant with their first child, Bredon.
- Most Writers Are Writers: Harriet Vane is a mystery writer, enabling a lot of lampshade-hanging and some venting about the difficulties of the writer's life.
- Motor Mouth: Peter has a tendency to gabble on impulsively, particularly in the earlier books. His mother has the same habit, but it's also suggested that Peter uses it as a defence mechanism of sorts against his emotional demons.
- Mystery Writer Detective: Harriet Vane is best known for her detective novels. She takes an active part in the investigations of Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
- Sir Julian Freke in Whose Body?.
- William Bright (because Light Is Not Good) in Have His Carcase.
- Narrative Profanity Filter: The Five Red Herrings features several foul-mouthed characters, whose utterances are hidden variously behind euphemisms ("I'll break your qualified neck for this") and a large number of dashes, with or without an initial letter. (When there's an initial letter, it's most often a "b" — and, interestingly, the word "bastard" appears openly more than once, suggesting that "b———" is something even stronger. note )
- Necessarily Evil: Peter hates himself a lot.
- Never One Murder:
- Averted in the first two novels, but the third makes up for it, with the antagonist following up the original murder by bumping off two people who know too much and making attempts on the lives of three more. Peter is left feeling guilty about it, because some if not all of those people would have been left alone if he hadn't frightened the murderer by sticking his nose in.
- Discussed in Have His Carcase, when Peter and Harriet are discussing 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.'
- Never the Obvious Suspect:
- In Strong Poison, Harriet is the obvious suspect in the poisoning of Philip Boyes — so much so that the story starts with a judge summing up the evidence for the jury at Harriet's trial. After the jury returns a hung verdict, Lord Peter has thirty days to prove that Harriet didn't do it.
- Discussed in The Five Red Herrings. Lord Peter says that if he ever writes a detective novel, it will begin with a man being murdered in such a way that there's only one, very obvious, suspect, and end, twenty chapters full of red herrings later, with the revelation that it was the obvious suspect who did it. Parker laughs and mentions that this is the ordinary solution in real life.
- Discussed in Busman's Honeymoon, just before interviewing the last person to see the victim alive:Lord Peter: Enter the obvious suspect.
Harriet: The obvious suspect is always innocent.
Superintendent Kirk: In books, my lady.
- Never Suicide: Played both ways over the course of the series. In Have His Carcase, Peter correctly suspects murder when the police are ready to write the death off as suicide; on the other hand, in Clouds of Witness the apparent murder turns out to have been suicide in the end.
- New Powers as the Plot Demands: When the time comes to take undercover work in an advertising agency, Wimsey turns out to be a great copywriter. When he has to learn to pick locks, the expert criminal says he could have been a great thief. When a spoiled society girl wants a thrilling adventure, he delivers it perfectly. When a theatrical agent seeks the lead for his play, Wimsey is perfect. Even when the elderly vicar of a tiny village which still keeps up the ancient practice of bell-tolling needs help, Lord Peter Wimsey is the expert bell-ringer.
- Next Sunday A.D.: "The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba" was published in 1928 and set in 1929.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: At the beginning of The Nine Tailors, Lord Peter agrees to help with Fenchurch St Paul's new-year bell-ringing, which would otherwise have to be cancelled due to a shortfall of experienced bell-ringers. If the bell-ringing had not gone ahead, Deacon would not have died, and Lord Peter would not have the guilt of his part in the tragedy to add to all his other guilts.
- No More for Me: Lord Peter's reaction to seeing a spectral coach drawn by headless horses, in "The Bone of Contention": "Good Lord! How many whiskies did we have?"
- Non-Idle Rich: Lord Peter.
- Noodle Incident:
- The Attenbury Emeralds case.
- An incident with a pig, during the war, mentioned in Gaudy Night.
- Notable Non Sequitur: In the short story "The String of Pearls", when the suspects are all searched the pearls don't appear but Sayers takes an apparent whimsical tangent on the weird and random stuff people keep in their pockets. Inevitably, one of these random things turns out to be a clue as to who took the pearls and where they are now. Also inevitably, the reader is expected to realise this, so some of the other suspects have random items that really are random, but which look as if they could be used to conceal the pearls somehow, or else suggest a motive.
- Not a Game: Investigating murder. Parker points this out explicitly in Whose Body?
- Not Proven: Have His Carcase 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—but in Gaudy Night it's revealed that the murderer was in fact convicted and hanged.
- Not with Them for the Money:
- One of the reasons Parker takes so long to make his feelings for Lady Mary known is the disparity between her wealth and his middle-class earnings. Part of the agreement they come to is that her money is put in a trust for their children, out of which the trustees pay her an allowance in line with his income.
- Lord Peter's courtship of Harriet Vane is, if anything, impeded by his vast wealth clashing with her strong desire to stand on her own feet. Shortly after they finally get together, Lord Peter expresses the suspicion that if he'd had nothing more than the clothes on his back, she'd probably have married him years earlier, and Harriet admits that this is quite plausible.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Peter's standard pose. Younger brother of an Upper-Class Twit, Lord Peter goes out of his way to cultivate an Upper-Class Twit image himself. The hapless criminals of Britain think of him as "Bertie Wooster playing detective"; by the time they find themselves face to face with Lord Peter's frightening intelligence, it's much too late.
- Of Corpse He's Alive:
- In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, an attempt is made to obscure the time of death by propping the deceased up in a phone booth and then establishing him in his usual armchair at the club, apparently asleep behind a newspaper — where, since that's his usual daily routine, he remains undisturbed for nearly three hours.
- In Five Red Herrings, it initially seems that Campbell slipped and fell to his death while out painting, but it's quickly established that he's been dead since before he was seen heading out to paint, and ultimately that every time somebody thought they saw him alive that morning was his killer impersonating him to lay a false trail. (It's not a full example of the trope, however, as the killer does it by dressing in his distinctive outerwear and never goes to the extreme of puppeteering the corpse itself.)
- Oh, Crap!: Younger brother of an Upper-Class Twit, Lord Peter goes out of his way to cultivate an Upper-Class Twit image himself. The hapless criminals of Britain think of him as "Bertie Wooster playing detective"; by the time they find themselves face to face with Lord Peter's frightening intelligence, it's much too late.
- Old Maid: Harriet, in her early thirties when she marries Peter.
- Old Retainer: Bunter is young yet, and the first of his family to serve a Wimsey, but he has all the hallmarks of maturing into it. Even more so in Jill Paton Walsh's sequels.
- One-Steve Limit: Averted. Several quite unusual names — Gotobed, Pomfret, Jukes — reappear throughout the books, attached to presumably unrelated characters. There's also one story where two brothers are called Haviland and Martin, and in a later book an unrelated character is called Haviland Martin.
- Only One Plausible Suspect: In Strong Poison, it's clear to the reader from quite early on which character must have done the murder; the suspense is maintained because it's less clear how and why.
- On One Condition:
- In "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will", the will specifies a puzzle that must be solved in order to locate the actual bequest.
- "The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention" turns on a will by which The Unfavorite son inherited until his father was buried, whereupon it would all pass to the other son. Friends of The Unfavorite stole the body to prevent burial, Lord Peter discovers the will in a book, family disputes erupt, and the final touch is Lord Peter's deducing that from the water stain in the book but not the will, that the other son had hidden the will so The Unfavorite would not find out about the condition in time.
- Oop North:
- Clouds of Witness begins in rural Yorkshire, complete with dour, taciturn farmers and boggy moors.
- The Five Red Herrings is set largely in the south of Scotland, but occasionally crosses the border.
- Parker is originally from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria.
- Open Sesame: The words Open Sesame must be spoken in Peter's voice to open the inner compartment of the safe in The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba.
- Opposites Attract: Inspector Parker and Lady Mary for multiple reasons. One is that she's the daughter of a Duke and a member of hereditary aristocracy, and he's a commoner. The other is that he's a high-ranking police officer and she's a devoted communist-sympathiser.
- Painless Death for a Price: In "The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba," Lord Peter (who's infiltrated a criminal gang) is caught by the Big Bad and sentenced to "Number 4 treatment". He offers to give up the combination to his safe, which contains all he has learned during his infiltration, in exchange for a quick death. By the time the Big Bad gets his hands on the information, he's no longer in a position to do anything to Lord Peter, be it quick or slow.
- The Pardon: The post-World War I pardon of deserters is a plot point in Nine Tailors. In the backstory, a man deserted from a British regiment during a battle in France and settled down nearby. His French wife knew he was a deserter and helped him keep his identity secret.note However, he continued to keep his identity secret even after the pardon, showing he had something else to hide.
- Parental Favoritism: In Busman's Honeymoon, the Dowager Duchess explicitly tells Harriet that Peter is her favorite child.
- Parental Marriage Veto: Several parents attempt this, including Lady Levy's and Lady Dormer's, because the prospective spouse is middle-class and/or Jewish. Often, the couple frustrate them by eloping. The Levys go on to veto The Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot's suit to Rachel Levy, but he proves himself by courting her for seven years and agreeing to raise their children Jewish.
- The Perfect Crime:
- In Whose Body?, part of the murderer's motive is the desire to demonstrate that it's possible to commit the perfect crime when unhampered by irrational considerations like sentiment and conscience; he claims that if he hadn't been caught he would have written up the whole experiment and arranged for it to be published after his death for the edification of posterity.
- In Unnatural Death, contemplating a murder that initially passed as a death by natural causes, Lord Peter asserts that the only perfect crime is one that goes undetected; as soon as anybody suspects that there's been a crime, it's a failure.
- Pirate Booty: In "The Learned Adventure of the Dragon's Head", Lord Peter and his nephew track down the treasure of "Cut-Throat" Conyers, who was widely believed to have been a pirate and sailed with Blackbeard. Conyers hid the treasure many years after he'd retired from piracy and settled down as a country landowner.
- Plain Palate: Mr. Copley in Murder Must Advertise, who lives on "under-cooked beef-steak, fruit and whole-meal bread" due to his digestive problems and is very good at advertising for processed foods that he would never eat himself.
- Planning with Props: In Have His Carcase, 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.
- Plot Hole: The chapters of Strong Poison that send Miss Climpson to Windle assume she is unfamiliar with the Vane case - Peter refers to Mr Urquhart as if she wouldn't know him, and she later refers to Harriet as "someone she had never seen". Except, of course, she was one of the jurors in the case and had participated in the investigation from the beginning, and had seen both Urquhart and Harriet many times.
- Poison Is Evil: Much discussed in Strong Poison. Mystery novelist Harriet Vane is tried for poisoning her lover Phillip Boyes with arsenic. Despite a mistrial, she is widely assumed to be guilty and vilified on that account. Norman Urquhart's cook comments on this to Bunter, "...but the horrors of slow poisoning, that's the work of a fiend."
- Professional Maiden Name: In Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter's new wife Harriet agrees to be Harriet Wimsey for everyday purposes (and gets a small thrill the first time she has occasion to write her new name), but states without hesitation that she'll continue to be "Harriet Vane" on her book covers.
- Promotion to Parent: Peter becomes trustee of a fortune left to the orphaned Hilary Thorpe in The Nine Tailors, letting him ensure she gets the best education and pursues her career, despite the objections of her old-fashioned uncle and guardian.
- Pronouncing My Name for You: In Murder Must Advertise, Death Bredon's new co-workers ask him how he pronounces his first name (which so far they've only seen written down). He says that most people with the name "Death" pronounce it to rhyme with "teeth", but he prefers it to rhyme with "breath". He is promptly addressed only as 'Bredon' or 'Mr. Bredon.'
- Psycho Lesbian: Mary Whitaker in Unnatural Death fits a lot of the lesbian stereotypes of the era - she's described as "sexless", domineering, having no use for men, and as predating on a younger woman. Ultimately, her sexuality, if any, is never confirmed, and money becomes her only goal.
- Pun-Based Title: Lots of these in the short stories, for example:
- "The Entertaining Episode Of The Article In Question"
- "In The Teeth Of The Evidence"
- "The Undignified Melodrama Of The Bone Of Contention"
- Put on a Bus: Lord St. George, in the sequels. He is last heard of flying in the war, and his death is between books, leaving Peter “stuck with the strawberry leaves” after all.
