Why is This (slightly embarrassed) Fantasy Author Reviewing Golden Age Mysteries?

I can’t help it. I don’t care about genre conventions. If there’s a book that grabs you by the throat, turns you upside down, shakes you a few times, and then has the gall to quote Edmund Spenser at you while doing it… Well, I need to let you all know about it.

Hang genre conventions.

In one sentence: read Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers. No, it’s not remotely speculative fiction. It’s not even that good of a mystery. But it’s now one of my favorite books of all time.

Here’ s my goodreads review:

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So it’s all been leading to this, it turns out. I’ve casually enjoyed Lord Peter Whimsey for years now. But there’s always been something missing. The mysteries aren’t as intricate as Christie’s, and the characters can come off as opaque in terms of internal motivation. It’s almost as though Sayers was writing around her characters, afraid to fully inhabit them.

Then, this book. It’s not without its flaws. It’s almost completely abstruse to anyone who hasn’t a smattering of Latin or Elizabethan history. I’m pretty sure I missed 90% of the references.

But the real story–the human interaction between Harriet and Peter–is just gorgeous. And in that light, the whole book begins to uncover layer after layer, each one richer than the last.

I’m going to buy an expensive, nice, hardcover version of this, curl up with a set of annotations (there are several online and I’m intent on finding more), and mark this thing up until I’m drowning in the palimpsest (because this is a palimpsest, for sure).

I can’t wait to read this again.

Want to sample my own fiction (in a very different genre)? Enter your email and I’ll send you my recent novella, The Son of the Deathless, for free!