Murder Must Advertise: A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery » (REISSUE)

A refined author with a talent for wry mysteries spiced with quotations of verse and observations about English society, Dorothy L. Sayers created aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. Though best known for her entertaining crime novels, the lively minded Sayers also wrote plays, poetry and essays on Christianity.

When ad man Victor Dean falls down the stairs in the offices of Pym's Publicity, a respectable London advertising agency, it looks like an accident. Then Lord Peter Wimsey is called in, and he soon discovers there's more to copywriting than meets the eye. A bit of cocaine, a hint of blackmail, and some wanton women can be read between the lines. And then there is the brutal succession of murders — 5 of them — each one a fixed fee for advertising a deadly secret.

Library Journal

In this unlikely adventure, Lord Peter Wimsey goes undercover to break up a drug ring. Requested by the strait-laced owner of Pym's Advertising Agency to investigate the suspicious accidental death of copywriter Victor Dean, Lord Peter discovers that Victor's death is only a small piece of a much larger and more convoluted puzzle. Someone at Pym's is involved with a network that smuggles and sells cocaine to the "bright young things" of society. Victor may have been killed for attempting to blackmail that person, so Lord Peter takes over Victor's job. Using his own middle names, he becomes Mr. Death Bredon, a black sheep cousin of the Wimsey family. Along the way, Sayers educates her listeners on the workings of the advertising industry, where, as a struggling author, she worked for eight years in the 1930s, and which, interestingly, has not changed at all in the intervening 70 years since this book was written. Deftly narrated by actor Ian Carmichael, who does a great job with accents of all types, this story will disappoint Lord Peter fans: the plot is overly complex and the characters are largely shallow and stereotypical. Recommended for larger public libraries where the works of Sayers are popular.-Barbara L. Rhodes, Northeast Texas Lib. Syst., Garland Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.