Gaudy night at Shrewsbury College, Oxford.
Times Literary Supplement (Simon Harcourt Nowell Smith, 9 th November 1935): CRIME IN COLLEGE And Miss Sayers has long stood in a class by herself.”
This novel is also a romance, culminating in a moment as delightful for Lord Peter as for Harriet Vane. In the solution of the mystery created during, or after, the celebrations of Gaudy Night, Lord Peter Wimsey plays his usual essential rôle.Gaudy Night, which gives this new full-length mystery its title, is a night of special significance at Oxford University where the chief events of this story take place.
Truth, Sayers argues, cannot exist in a vacuum, but must be seen in terms of its context and consequences. loyalty, the competing needs of duty to the truth and duty to other people, and the importance of balance. Mystery and detection are largely subordinated to the central themes of “intellectual integrity as the one great permanent value in an emotionally unstable world” (“Gaudy Night”), woman’s place in society, the choice between the celibate intellect and marriage, principle vs. The novel is not so much a mystery (crime already committed, investigators try to work out what happened) as an ongoing sequence of events which the investigators try to fit in to the overall pattern. It is perhaps Sayers’s richest novel, in terms of incident and humour, but is less satisfying as a detective story than the previous two novels. Sayers considered it the book in which she most successfully integrated setting, plot and theme to form a whole (“Gaudy Night”). Gaudy Night emphasises characterisation and theme over plot it is “a novel not without detection”, rather than a detective novel. The themes and the plot march hand in hand-as it appears Harriet and Wimsey walk towards the altar. The villain is extremely well hidden, but satisfying and inevitable: the motive is the logical consequence of all that has gone before: all the careful presentation of a way of life, a world, and the intelligent discussions of women’s place in the world and of principle vs. The whole story is nearly all seen from the perspective of Harriet Vane (apart from a few brief scenes from Wimsey’s), who has returned to Oxford for the Gaudy, and finds herself called back to investigate a poltergeist-cum-poison-pen. It scores full marks as both a novel and a detective story. Eight years later, older and wiser I am able to recognise it for what it is: very long, very talky, and very, very good. When I first read Gaudy Night at the age of thirteen, I found it extremely dull and pompous, stuffed with pretentious conversation and without a murder above all, it was (shudder!) a romance.
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