Still a winner

Dorothy L. Sayers

Many murder mysteries have been given odds titles, but Have His Carcase (1932) by Dorothy L. Sayers must be one of the oddest, at least for American readers. Yet for its time and place it is actually a very good title. Under British law, the Have-His-Carcase Act, you cannot hold an inquest into a death until you have a body.

In this clever, always interesting novel, there is photographic evidence of a death, yet the body is swept out to sea by the tide, so for about half the book the sleuths, both professional and amateur, can only speculate.

Mystery writer Harriet Vane, herself a murder suspect until cleared after the intervention of Lord Peter Wimsey in a previous novel, discovers a young man with his throat cut along the coast. She finds fresh blood and a razor, but no footprints in the sand other than hers and the victim's. Realizing the tide is coming in, she takes a few photographs and then leaves to summon help

The body soon disappears, but Wimsey arrives, still trying to get Harriet to marry him. He believes it's a murder case, even through the local police and, eventually, the inquest say it's a suicide.

The victim had supported himself by dancing with wealthy older women at a nearby hotel. One of these women says the man had promised to marry her.

Other than the missing body, the case's other major complication is that two men, including this woman's son, had been behaving suspiciously, but both have ironclad alibis for the time of the murder. But if they didn't murder the man, who did?

When I devoured the Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, I considered Have His Carcase my favorite. This rereading doesn't change my opinion.