I Read Books: The Nine Tailors
Tailor in this context is a folk pronunciation of teller, in this case the bell that is rung for the dead. Six rings for a woman, nine for a man, then a number of bells for their age, and then a long, slow tolling for a while.
If you aren’t willing to read quite a bit about bell ringing then you’ll probably fall out of this mystery novel early on as they don’t find the body until page 70, and there’s been a lot of stuff about bells and churches and East Anglian parishes and some ten year old backstory in the meantime.
Lord Peter Wimsey crashes his car somewhere in the Norfolk fens on New Years Eve, takes shelter with the vicar who is planning an extraordinarily long bell ringing for the New Year; nine hours or so. However several of the reserves have dropped out due to flu, and they’re left short, so Wimsey, a campanologist in his youth, volunteers. Involved in the curious parish, it’s Wimsey, the amateur sleuth, they turn to when, later in the year, a body is found in a grave. No, not the body that is supposed to be there (Lady Thorpe who died on New Year’s Day, the first death to be rung out in the book), but another one. (They’re digging it up because her husband Sir Henry has died and he wanted to be put in the same grave, just to be clear.)
All this bell ringing and local history is both interesting in itself and also necessary for the plot. This is one of the books in which Sayers, already writing interesting and clever mystery novels, raises her game, and the genre with it. We are investigating the life of a rural parish as much as a murder, and also (probably) making a theological argument at the same time. Which is not to say that there aren’t, for example, a message in code, brief trips out to France and London, hidden treasure, secret identities or an apocalyptic flood in the finale. Because there are.
Read This: For a 1930s mystery novel I cannot recommend this more highly.
Don’t Read This: If the promise of an intriguing murder mystery is not enough to get you to work through the details of change-ringing
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