Murder Must Advertise

I’d never heard of Lord Peter Wimsey until reading Murder Must Advertise.  In retrospect, he’s one of those things that I really think I should have known about.  I love a good murder mystery.  And there’s a whole series of them.  In fact, until picking up this book I knew basically nothing of Dorothy L Sayers.  It was a name that carried a vague association with the genre, but I kind of thought she might be an American version of Agatha Christie.  But with more crime organised crime.  Aside from her nationality, I don’t think I was far wrong.  The fantastically named Lord Wimsey and the book as a whole is very Miss Marple meets Bertie Wooster.

It all kicks off when young Victor Dean falls down the stairs to his death when at his job at Pym’s Publicity Ltd.  Naturally, this isn’t as accidental as the police first believe and so enters Peter Wimsey, disguised (sort of) as regular-Joe, Death Bredon: copywriter.  Wimsey proceeds to solve the murder largely by partaking in water-cooler gossip and skulking around pubs.  All is not as it seems, and after uncovering a cocaine ring and blackmail plot, not to mention single-handedly winning the company cricket the criminals are all banged up or carted off to the morgue.  I hope that’s not too much of a spoiler, but the detective does solve the mystery.  All this makes it sound like there’s not much deeper going on in the book and, on the surface it is a pretty light and quick read.  But there is more going on under the surface.

Murder Must Advertise paints a pretty disturbing picture of capitalism and the necessity of advertising.  The process of creating adverts is explicitly detailed and broken down; Wimsey even gets stuck into creating campaigns of his own (even if he is bafflingly successful without really trying).  There are whole paragraphs of the book dedicated to just advertising slogans.  In fact, this is how the book ends.  Once all the crime is over it is the power of advertising that is shown to endure and what we’re left with is a bombardment of slogans.  It’s scary that even in the 1930s adverts were everywhere and we’re now buried even deeper in marketing.  Sayers uses the slogans to overwhelm us so that we recognise it as simply crazy that it is so prevalent in society.  When taken out of context it is mad, but it’s something that we accept without question on a daily basis.  Hell, it’s become fashionable to pay for the privilege of wearing a t-shirt featuring some slogans.

According to the Internet, this wasn’t Sayers’s favourites of her books.  But it’s still enjoyable.  It seems to be a case of her needing to write a book quickly and so she wrote what she knew and she wrote it well.  Okay, I have no experience, beyond what I’ve read, of the 1930s London drug scene, but it seems pretty likely to me; a careful balance of desperate down and outs and those with money to burn.  Besides, any book featuring a bored Lord who decides that crime solving is just the ticket probably isn’t that grounded in reality to begin with, so I don’t know what she was so disappointed about.  I mean, my main issue with the book was the entire chapter dedicated to a cricket match.  Reading it was almost as painful as actually having to watch one, plot points be damned.

I had fun reading Murder Must Advertise.  Yes, it has a serious side, but it’s quite easy to overlook that and just slip into the slightly silly crime novel frame of mind (which I find far more enjoyable that the worrying critique of consumerist society mind set).  It’s nice that there are both elements at play in the book.  When all the capitalism and cynical marketing gets too much it’s lovely to have a good old fashioned murder to fall back on.

My next read is a second Nancy Mitford book, Love in a Cold Climate.