The Nine Tailors

Title: The Nine Tailors

Author: Dorothy L Sayers

Number of pages: 384

Started: 29 March 2012

Finished: 4 April 2012

Opening words:

"That's torn it!" said Lord Peter Wimsey.

The car lay, helpless and ridiculous, her nose deep in the ditch, her back wheels cocked absurdly up on the bank, as though she were doing her best to bolt to earth and were scraping herself a burrow beneath the drifted snow.


Plot summary:

When his sexton finds a corpse in the wrong grave, the rector of Fenchurch St Paul asks Lord Peter Wimsey to find out who the dead man was and how he came to be there.

The lore of bell-ringing and a brilliantly-evoked village in the remote fens of East Anglia are the unforgettable background to a story of an old unsolved crime and its violent unravelling twenty years later.

What I thought:

This was a very readable crime novel set in a bygone era. Lord Peter Wimsey stumbled into a village where all turns out not to be well and in the end solves a mysterious death. It was enjoyable enough and a break from some of the grittier novels of recent times, and a pleasant distraction.