Dorothy Sayers. Hangman’s Holiday (1933) Several stories about Wimsey and Montague Egg, plus a couple of psychological crime stories. Very much of their period, neat puzzles, nicely told. Sayers puts her own twist on standard plots – locked room mysteries, mistaken identities, and so on. I like rereading her tales; they give reliable pleasure. In these stories, Wimsey is still a fatuous ass, a sort of intelligent Bertie Wooster (which I suppose was the point of the joke). I’d forgotten what a personable young man Monty Egg is; he would make a good series character. The psychological stories don’t succeed as well; one reading is enough for them. They are “railway reading”; railway reading figures in one of them, so Sayers would not be offended by this characterisation. Slight as these stories are, they take considerable skill to concoct, and even more to write convincingly. *** (2002)
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