This isn't my favourite novel by Sayers, I think for me, the favourite is Bellona Club, followed by Clouds of Witness. I like Honeymoon but I do find that Peter and Harriet have become rather more snobbish than they were in earlier works. Peter used to have a lively friendly manner to his social inferiors, and Bunter was someone who was close to him. Now Bunter has retreated into more of a servant role, does not do any detecting, and Harriet is Peter's confidante.
They both are rather more condescending to the lower orders of the village, very much the upper class couple patronising the various tradesmen and the police... and servants like the Ruddles.
Peter does show compassion for Crutchley, and agonises over his part in the man's death. But I think that after showing how upset Peter gets when one of his cases results in someone being hanged, Sayers perhaps did not want to write any more murder mysteries. She does not usually show the business of detecting going all the way to the trial and the gallows and having done so, possibly she felt it woudl be too painful to keep on showing this part of criminal investigation. She did start to write another Peter novel but never got very far with it.. She felt also that detective fiction encouraged people to feel that there was a simple solution to all kinds of complex problems in life.. that all one had to do was to set a detective in place to work out who committed the crime and then all would be well.
Having written a play version of Busman's honeymoon, she then began to write plays on religious subjects.. during the war, she wrote a very famous and well received cycle of plays on the life of Christ, and though she always loved her Wimsey character and wrote bits about his family history in letters to friends, she never managed to complete a detective novel again.
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