Lord Peter Wimsey / Tropes T to Z

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

For the rest:

• Tropes A to C
• Tropes D to F
• Tropes G to I
• Tropes J to L
• Tropes M to P
• Tropes Q to S

---

• Table Space: In Jill Paton Walsh's Thrones, Dominations, Harriet, newly married to Lord Peter, is still getting used to some of his eccentricities, including "the passion for ritual that set ten feet of mahogany between husband and wife at a solitary meal."
• Taking the Veil: A gender-inverted example occurs in the Back Story of Unnatural Death; Miss Dawson's Uncle Paul became a monk after suffering a disappointment in love.
• Tempting Fate:
  • In Unnatural Death, Lord Peter decides to place an advertisement asking a possible witness to contact him. Parker remarks that he doesn't expect anything to come of it, but it can't do any harm. This gives Peter such a strong feeling of tempting fate that he nearly decides not to run the ad. He goes ahead, though, and it results in the witness being murdered to keep her from talking.
  • Played for laughs in The Five Red Herrings. One of the police officers, having developed a pet theory about who did the murder, remarks that he'll eat his hat if a particular piece of evidence doesn't belong to his preferred suspect... and almost immediately receives a telephone call proving definitely that it doesn't.
• Theory Tunnelvision:
  • At the end of Whose Body?, the murderer boasts that he planned out his murder on very logical lines, avoiding all the irrational impulses that usually trip up murderers, and was only caught due to a piece of bad luck that he couldn't have predicted. He goes on to relate, without apparently recognizing the significance, that the only reason Mr Thipps got caught up in events (and thus the only reason Lord Peter was on the case) was that the murderer changed part of his plan at the last moment due to a sudden vindictive impulse.
  • In the short story "The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps That Ran", Peter has taken an interest in biology experiments by a London doctor who insists he is on the verge of something big. Then his upstairs neighbor's wife is stabbed to death, and the neighbor spills out his story to the police, blaming it on a mysterious Italian gentleman who has been stalking her. The doctor eagerly confirms several particulars of the story, including the "fact" that "Italians use knives" and a disgusted Peter confides to Bunter that he doesn't see much of a future in the doctor's experiments, because the doctor has "a theory", and only sees the facts that fit with it. Sure enough, the neighbor turns out to have murdered his wife himself in a fit of jealousy, and his story was pure invention.
  • While reviewing Harriet's case dossier in Gaudy Night, Peter poses a theory and Harriet points him to a contradictory fact; he apologizes for — borrowing a phrase from Sherlock Holmes — "theorizing ahead of my data."
• There Will Be Toilet Paper: In Murder Must Advertise, Mr Copley cuts himself shaving the morning after he had to change the Nutrax headline at the last minute — so he has to explain himself to his bosses with a blob of cotton wool on his cheek.
• This Is a Work of Fiction: The Five Red Herrings has its own special notice on the dedication page, stating that the places and train timetables are real, but the characters and their goings-on are entirely fictional and "just put in for fun and to make it more exciting". It goes on to say that if any real people have the same name as an unpleasant character it's only a coincidence; "even bad characters have to be called something".
• This Is Reality:
  • Very common among the Genre Savvy protagonists.
  • In Have His Carcase, Harriet is accustomed to writing scenes where people examine horribly mutilated corpses in the calmest manner. Then she discovers a dead man whose throat has been cut, and finds it a much more distressing experience than she'd imagined.
  • In Busman's Honeymoon, as they prepare to interview 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.
• Thrifty Scot:
  • Peter makes a lot of Thrifty Scot jokes. Of the many Scottish characters in the stories, only Great-Uncle Joseph and Jock from The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach seem noticeably thrifty.
  • Subversion in Busman's Honeymoon, where Bunter announces that a "financial gentleman" called Mr MacBride is calling — and, rather than a stereotypical Scot, he's a Londoner with a cockney accent.
• Time-Delayed Death:
  • Busman's Honeymoon. The cause of death is a head injury that doesn't kill the victim for some time, during which he moves away from the place where it was inflicted. The nature of the injury is recognised during the initial medical examination, so the investigators don't make the mistake of assuming he was killed on the spot where he was found, but it does make it harder to determine how he was killed.
  • Have His Carcase has its own spin on this trope. The victim died instantly from a cut throat, but when the body is found a couple of hours later his blood clotting disorder makes it look like he's only just been killed. As a result, a lot of time is wasted investigating the wrong alibis, trying to figure out how the murderer was not seen by the person who found the body, and so on.
• Tomboy: It's hard to find a little girl in the books who isn't a tomboy of some sort — usually a car/motorbike fanatic. Five Red Herrings has two!
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Sylvia Marriott and Eiluned Price, particularly in the 1987 Edward Petherbridge series.
• The Tooth Hurts: The reason Lord Peter visited his dentist in In the Teeth of the Evidence? A tooth broke.
• Trauma Button: Peter suffers from a particularly nasty one. His use of his detective talents is the only thing that makes him feel useful and dispels his Survivor Guilt from the War... but because of his role as an officer his PTSD is bound up with having other people die because of decisions he made that he thought were necessary, which is an inevitable result of his detective activities due to capital punishment.
• Tricked into Signing: Averted in Unnatural Death. Mary Whittaker tries to trick her great-aunt Agatha Dawson into signing a will by burying it in a bunch of other papers that need a signature — and by having two of the housemaids ready to witness the signing of the will without Agatha realizing it. However, Agatha notices the will and refuses to sign.
• Trickster Mentor: Meleager Finch's posthumous plan to make his niece Hannah more frivolous, involving two wills and a crossword puzzle.
• True Art Is Incomprehensible: In-universe, Peter meets a number of bohemian thinkers who hold to this belief, expressing that, for instance, "Scenes which make emotional history should ideally be expressed in a series of animal squeals." (in Clouds of Witness)
• '20s Bob Haircut: It's a minor plot point in Clouds of Witness that Lady Mary and Simone Vonderaa have the same bobbed hairstyle.
• Unable to Support a Wife:
  • George in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club — unusually, the condition arises after he marries.
  • One Dawson family member lost his fiancée when his family lost its money, in Unnatural Death
• Unbuilt Trope: A detective fiction series where the main protagonist is a war veteran who occasionally gets PTSD flashbacks and worries about the morality of his job? Must be some sort of post-WWII noir story, right? Or maybe some gritty modern series? Nope.
  • Peter acts like a stereotypical Upper-Class Twit, but he does manage his holdings. Quite well, actually. He's also quite famous for his 'hobby', so basically everyone knows he's actually intelligent, just eccentric. Except for certain criminals tricked by his act until it's much too late.
• Uncanny Family Resemblance: Invoked in the invention of Peter's identical cousin, Death Bredon, in Murder Must Advertise and The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste.
• Unconventional Wedding Dress: When Harriet marries Peter, her wedding dress is gold lamé. Quite possibly because she isn't a virgin.
• Undercover When Alone: In The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba, Lord Peter goes undercover to infiltrate a criminal gang. He stays in his cover personality even when alone, to ensure he doesn't accidentally slip out of it when he isn't.
• Unusual Chapter Numbers: Each book has a different system. Some have plain numbers; some are named for that chapter's chief character; some are thematic. (In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, for instance, most of the chapter titles are metaphors drawn from card games.)
• Unwanted Assistance: Mrs Ruddle the housekeeper in Busman's Honeymoon several times takes the initiative to make herself useful in ways that, due to her ignorance or simple thoughtlessness, make matters worse than if she'd done nothing. The example with the most dramatic fallout is when she decides to clean up "them dirty old bottles in the pantry" — the discovery of the damage her mishandling has done to his lordship's collection of vintage port is the only provocation in the entire series to successfully crack Bunter's facade of professional detachment. It also comes out in the denouement that on the day the murder was discovered she cleaned away a vital piece of evidence without thinking to wonder how it came to be in that state or to mention it to anybody, perhaps singlehandedly preventing Lord Peter from solving the case on day one.
• Upper-Class Equestrian: Lord Peter's equestrian skills crop up occasionally. In Have His Carcase he makes deductions from a horseshoe Harriet finds, finds the horse that lost the shoe, rides it bareback as part of reenacting the crime, and manages to stay on and bring the horse back under control when it utterly panics and bolts away from the murder site.
• Upper-Class Twit:
  • Peter's brother Gerald, the Duke of Denver; Gerald's wife Helen, the Duchess of Denver
  • Freddie Arbuthnot, as long as he's not discussing finance or the stock market.
  • Peter himself cultivates this image on many occasions. It frequently lulls a suspect into false security when talking to him.
• The Vicar: Several across the stories, reflecting Sayers's interest in theology.
  • The Reverend Tredgold in Unnatural Death is High Church and conscientious, and offers Peter sensible moral counsel.
  • The Reverend Boyes in Strong Poison is long-suffering, poor and notably tender-hearted.
  • The Reverend Venables in The Nine Tailors is High Church (again), energetic, long-winded and obsessed with his pet subject of campanology.
  • The Reverend Goodacre in Busman's Honeymoon is a classic bumbling Vicar, complete with an inept attempt at a sherry party.
  • Mr Hancock in The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention is High Church (yet again!), over-earnest, and out of his depth in a conservative rural parish.
  • All of these, especially the Rev. Venables, are based to a greater or lesser degree on Sayers' father.
• Vanity Licence Plate: In Have His Carcase, Mrs Morecambe has a car with the memorable registration number OI 0101. Lord Peter doesn't entertain the possibility that they could have obtained the number on purpose, so it seems that vanity plates weren't sold at the time.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: Well, readers anyway. The books are stuffed with obscure literary allusions, and just try to solve the crossword puzzle clue in The Fascinating Problem Of Uncle Meleager's Will. In "The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question," understanding the vital clue requires a knowledge of French grammar; The grammar point in question is quite elementary, but the clue is hidden in half a page of untranslated French dialogue. While most of the original audience would have learned French in school, it's still quite a demand to make of the reader.
• Villainous Harlequin: In Murder Must Advertise, Lord Peter adopts the disguise of a harlequin to infiltrate Dian de Momerie's social circle. The harlequin starts out merely flashy and acrobatic, but gradually becomes mysterious and sinister as Lord Peter adjusts the persona to better fit Dian's interests.
• Violent Glaswegian: Campbell, the hot-tempered Asshole Victim of The Five Red Herrings, is specifically stated to have been born in Glasgow. And for added stereotypical value, his mother is mentioned to have been Irish.
• Waking Non Sequitur: In Clouds of Witness, Parker falls asleep in front of the fireplace while waiting for Lord Peter. As Peter enters, Parker wakes up and says: "The glass-blower's cat is bompstable". In the dream that Parker just had, this is the solution to the mystery. Awake, he can't even remember what "bompstable" meant. ^note the real importance of the scene is Parker's pre-dream thought that a person sat before a fire in order to think about his troubles.
• The Watson: Parker, Bunter, Harriet or a local policeman typically serves as Peter's Watson, and various members of the SCR serve as Harriet's. These Watsons are generally very bright themselves, and serve as sounding-boards to more speculative theories or areas of highly-specialised exposition.
• Wax Museum Morgue: In The Abominable History of the Man With the Copper Fingers. The last statue the jealous sculptor made of his mistress ... isn't quite a statue.
• Wham Episode: The cricket match chapter in Murder Must Advertise ends with Lord Peter getting arrested. Howzat?
• What Did I Do Last Night?: Averted in Busman's Honeymoon. Waking up next to Peter on the morning after their wedding, Harriet is struck by a fear that Peter's reaction on waking will be confusion about who she is or why they're in bed together. After reassuring her as to the felicity of his memory, Peter says that in his pre-Harriet career as a sociable bachelor, he lived by the rule that it's a gentleman's duty to always remember the lady's name.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: In The Five Red Herrings, part of the evidence against Waters is the absence of his bicycle, and the police note that they don't know whether to arrest Waters, or make a search for a bicycle thief. Waters is innocent, and the bicycle thief is never mentioned again.
• What Would X Do?: In Have His Carcase, Harriet Vane discovers a dead body and thinks: What would Lord Peter, or Robert Templeton (the detective in the books she writes) do?
• Who Murdered the Asshole: Campbell, the murder victim in Five Red Herrings. He's a cantankerous, belligerent drunk who's managed to get on the bad side of everyone else in his town, save for one, who's a woman married to a man he's feuding with, which only makes everyone else suspect him of adultery. This is the reason for the titular Five Red Herrings, since so many people hate his guts that initial field of suspects is quite large. The ending even notes that his killer will most likely get off fairly lightly, since Campbell essentially provoked him and he's got good grounds for a self-defence justification.
• Who's on First?:
  • In Strong Poison, Wimsey needs three attempts to tell Miss Murchison Bill Rumm's name, because she thinks he's saying his name is rum (as in "strange, peculiar").
  • In The Nine Tailors, he has even greater difficulty trying to explain the difference between Paul Taylor (a criminal's pseudonym), Tailor Paul and Batty Thomas (named church bells), and being batty (like trying to write a letter to a bell, rather than to a criminal using a pseudonym).
• Widow's Weeds: In Unnatural Death, a lawyer definitely realizes that a woman who asked him a question — for a friend — had actually asked for herself, when he sees her again, and she tells him that the woman she had asked about, the purported friend's great-aunt, had died, and she herself is wearing mourning.
• Wiki Walk: Lord Peter's mother is famous for constantly going off on a tangent, whenever she speaks — and then on a tangent to the tangent, and so on. Back when the books were written, it was probably great fun to read, if you were reasonably educated and followed the news. These days, it's mostly confusing.
• Wine Is Classy: Lord Peter is a big-time oenophile^note "wine lover" for the Greek-impaired. and so this trope comes up often. He has a particular affection for port.
• Wishful Projection: Dr Penberthy in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club accuses a number of women around him of having an obsession with sex, until it becomes clear that he's got one himself.
• With Due Respect: Bunter frequently addresses Lord Peter in this manner, with equal parts sincerity and criticism. Naturally, he's always right.
• Working the Same Case: In Murder Must Advertise, Lord Peter looks into irregularities at an advertising firm, while Parker is occupied trying to track down a drug smuggling ring. The latter are responsible for the former.
• Writing Indentation Clue: In "The Abominable History of the Man With Copper Fingers", Lord Peter mentions that one of the lucky breaks he got in the case was that the villain sent a crucial telegram from an office where they use hard pencils.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Harriet spends Gaudy Night assuming she's in a cautionary tale about women's education, and that one of her university colleagues has been driven to violent crime by the repressive effects of a sexless academic lifestyle. This causes her to miss several clues that the criminal is a married non-academic with children, motivated by her hatred of academic career women.
• The X of Y: The chapters in Murder Must Advertise (bar the first and the last) have names of the form "(adjective)(noun) of an (adjective)(noun)".
• Year X:
  • In Whose Body?, Lord Peter receives a letter dated "17 November, 192—".^note It was established in subsequent books as having taken place in November 1922.
  • In Clouds of Witness, a newspaper article is dated "Monday, November -, 19—". However, the trial scene straight-up says that the year in question is 1923.
  • In The Nine Tailors, the bell-ringing at the beginning of the novel is subsequently marked with a commemorative plaque; the year on the plaque is given as "19—".
• You Didn't Ask:
  • In Thrones, Dominations (finished by Jill Paton Walsh) a secondary character does (indirectly) tell the police about his illicit alibi for a murder. However, he completely fails to mention that he visited the victim that afternoon (well, before she was last seen alive) and gave her a gift that then allowed the real murderer to establish an alibi.
  • During the climactic trial scene in Clouds of Witness, the butler gives evidence of delivering a letter to the dead man the night of his death. When the prosecuting attorney demands to know why he never mentioned this before, the answer is, not only was he not asked but he was specifically told to confine his answers to the questions.
• You Know the One: An example in The Five Red Herrings provides the trope's page quote.
  Here Lord Peter Wimsey told the Sergeant exactly what to look for and why,^*(a tube of white paint because white was used in the painting on the easel) but as the intelligent reader will readily supply these details for himself, they are omitted from this page.

The object in question is subsequently referred to by the narrator and the characters as "the missing object" until its identity is revealed as part of The Summation.

• You Need to Get Laid:
  • In Gaudy Night, after one of the faculty of the women's college makes a rather obnoxious speech and leaves, another one says, "I always thought it was a great pity she never married." The narrator remarks that she had a way of putting what everyone was thinking in terms a child could understand.
  • Directed at Bunter by the narrator in Busman's Honeymoon. Lord Peter, happily married, considers throwing a paperweight at a yowling tomcat, but decides against it. Bunter, still single and "prompted by God knows what savage libido", has no such qualms.
• Zany Scheme: Clouds of Witness has pretty nearly every character trying to pull one of these on the others.

---