Have His Carcase By Dorothy L Sayers Part I

Have His Carcase is one of the Sayers Peter Wimsey novels... It’s not my favourite of her works, but it provides us with a view of the developing romance between Harriet Vane and Peter.

He had saved Harriet from being hanged for murder of her former lover...and had gone on trying to persuade her that he was in love with her and is eager to marry her.  Harriet, an independent woman who wrote detective novels is bruised by her unhappy relationship with Philip Boys her ex-lover.  She does not want another relationship and tries to avoid Peter.

At the start of the novel, Harriet, who has resumed her writing career , has gone away on a walking holiday on the South west coast.  She is busy with writing a mystery story... and enjoying her vacation.  However, the book does show a certain bitterness towards men, on the part of “independent women”.    Harriet does a lot of musing about the roles of men and women, while she’s walking.  She is glad that she is able to earn a good living by herself and not be dependent on a man or marriage.  She tells herself that she does not want to depend on anyone ever again…  She notes that men tend to like a woman to be dependent and “womanly” and don’t usually like career women.  However they don’t like the reality of a woman being very dependent on them emotionally or practically and they begin to resent it, when the woman is past her first youth.

Harriet has been walking by the seaside near to a resort called Wilvercombe, and when she stops for lunch, she notIces someone lying on a rock.  When she goes to warn him that the tide is coming in, to her horror, she finds that he is dead.  His throat has been cut.  She decides to go for help, to notify the police but is worried that the tide will wash away the body before she can do so.  She takes photographs of the corpse and then sets off to find the nearest town and talk to the police.

Harriet walks about trying to find a policeman in the rural area, meeting with fellow hikers on the way…. eventually she is able to report the death – and has to stay in Wilvercombe, until the police find the body.  She calls up the press, reasoning that a story that she, as a detective fiction writer, has been involved in a real life mystery will be good publicity for her new book….

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