Strictly speaking, my friend didn't recommend that reading order herself -- she is very attached to doing things in the Proper Order -- but she passed on to me advice she found elsewhere. Which was, in full:
"Strong Poison is a good starting place: it introduces Harriet Vane, who is awesome. Then you can move on to Have His Carcase, Murder Will Advertise (no Harriet but several awesome ladies are on the staff of a 1920s-30s advertising agency — Sayers worked in advertising herself), Gaudy Night, and Busman’s Honeymoon. Somewhere along there you should add Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, and The Nine Tailors, but those are best after you’re already familiar with Lord Peter. Whose Body (the first Lord Peter novel), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and The Five Red Herrings feel soulless in comparison to the Harriet books, but they’re clever mysteries.
"I read the books in publication order, but Sayers improves so much over the course of her career that starting at the beginning is kind of difficult for many. But, if you’re a completist, start with Whose Body."
(And I honestly don't remember what conversation we had that led her to pass on that advice to me: I think it's likely that I was more interested in Harriet than in Peter, and was uncertain if I wanted to read a half-dozen Peter novels just to get to Harriet.)
Anyway, that's the order I followed: Strong Poison, Carcase, Murder Must Advertise, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, then back to the beginning and straight through. And now that I've read them all...? I adore Carcase and Busman's Honeymoon. I found Strong Poison a bit rough going -- there's something about the structure of the novel that feels off to me, and it continued to feel so on re-read. I think it's the weakest of the four Harriet novels: it introduces Harriet, but it's not Harriet-POV, unlike the other three Harriet novels. Happily, it's redeeming feature is Miss Climpson and Miss Murchison -- it would be a crying shame to miss them, and I'm so glad I didn't!
I do agree that Sayers improved over her career, but it's not like she was egregious at the beginning. Also, there's a strong throughline through her novels, what with secondary characters coming back in later stories, and also sometimes Peter or Harriet mentioning an earlier case in relation to the current one -- given all that, there's a definite reward to reading the series in order. But would Peter alone have been enough to hook me? I'm really not at all sure that "Whose Body?" was a strong enough bid to lead me on to the next two, or that the first three together were strong enough to keep going until we got to Harriet. But it's hard to say. I actually thought better of Bellona Club than the advice giver did, although I found Red Herrings a terrible grind -- it's the only one of the series that I think is a real stinker. (That said, I'm not as enchanted with Nine Tailors as the rest of the world seems to be? Eh.)
Btw, the ones that I've re-read hold up really well on second reading: Sayers has enough character work going on that they're enjoyable even if you know the solution, and in many cases, it's fascinating to see how she alludes to the solution early on: often, how the detectives keep missing it because of an incorrect assumption they made somewhere. (And often that's a character-driven assumption, although I can't discuss that without spoilers.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2019-03-28 03:59 am (UTC)"Strong Poison is a good starting place: it introduces Harriet Vane, who is awesome. Then you can move on to Have His Carcase, Murder Will Advertise (no Harriet but several awesome ladies are on the staff of a 1920s-30s advertising agency — Sayers worked in advertising herself), Gaudy Night, and Busman’s Honeymoon. Somewhere along there you should add Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, and The Nine Tailors, but those are best after you’re already familiar with Lord Peter. Whose Body (the first Lord Peter novel), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and The Five Red Herrings feel soulless in comparison to the Harriet books, but they’re clever mysteries.
"I read the books in publication order, but Sayers improves so much over the course of her career that starting at the beginning is kind of difficult for many. But, if you’re a completist, start with Whose Body."
(And I honestly don't remember what conversation we had that led her to pass on that advice to me: I think it's likely that I was more interested in Harriet than in Peter, and was uncertain if I wanted to read a half-dozen Peter novels just to get to Harriet.)
Anyway, that's the order I followed: Strong Poison, Carcase, Murder Must Advertise, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, then back to the beginning and straight through. And now that I've read them all...? I adore Carcase and Busman's Honeymoon. I found Strong Poison a bit rough going -- there's something about the structure of the novel that feels off to me, and it continued to feel so on re-read. I think it's the weakest of the four Harriet novels: it introduces Harriet, but it's not Harriet-POV, unlike the other three Harriet novels. Happily, it's redeeming feature is Miss Climpson and Miss Murchison -- it would be a crying shame to miss them, and I'm so glad I didn't!
I do agree that Sayers improved over her career, but it's not like she was egregious at the beginning. Also, there's a strong throughline through her novels, what with secondary characters coming back in later stories, and also sometimes Peter or Harriet mentioning an earlier case in relation to the current one -- given all that, there's a definite reward to reading the series in order. But would Peter alone have been enough to hook me? I'm really not at all sure that "Whose Body?" was a strong enough bid to lead me on to the next two, or that the first three together were strong enough to keep going until we got to Harriet. But it's hard to say. I actually thought better of Bellona Club than the advice giver did, although I found Red Herrings a terrible grind -- it's the only one of the series that I think is a real stinker. (That said, I'm not as enchanted with Nine Tailors as the rest of the world seems to be? Eh.)
Btw, the ones that I've re-read hold up really well on second reading: Sayers has enough character work going on that they're enjoyable even if you know the solution, and in many cases, it's fascinating to see how she alludes to the solution early on: often, how the detectives keep missing it because of an incorrect assumption they made somewhere. (And often that's a character-driven assumption, although I can't discuss that without spoilers.)