Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers
Personally I found Busman’s Honeymoon to be pretty tedious although it appears from the reviews on Amazon.com that regular readers of the series like it. One review does mention that it’s not a good place to start the series, being the last book I gather. I did once read another Whimsey story and don’t remember much about it except I don’t think I disliked it as much as this one.
Busman’s Holiday is a good deal about the relationship between Whimsey and his new wife. As such, they quote a lot of poetry at each other. They quote poetry to other people too and speak in French a lot. Then there are the English colloquialisms and the outdated vocabulary, so all in all I probably only understood about half the book. It’s hard to believe there’s anyone still living today who would recognize all those quotes (and that such a person is reading mystery novels).
Luckily you only need to understand perhaps a quarter or an eighth of the book to get the mystery which is hardly mentioned for chapters at a time. It turns out the bad guy did it. Big surprise. How he did it is contrived and why he did it is unexplored. Well, he’s a bad guy.
Suffice it to say that I don’t think I’ll be trying any more of the Whimsey books. As a reasonably well educated person, I don’t need to be made to feel that stupid. And as an avid mystery reader, I prefer a bit more mystery in my mysteries.