#sayers

[siena-sevenwits]

Have borrowed Strong Poison and Have His Carcase from my sister.

[littleglitterdust]

[chocolatepot]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

The English class system is complicated, even before one considers its hierarchical werewolf components.

[dearvoidgoodnight]

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man - there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!"; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature.

-Dorothy L. Sayers

[unopenablebox]

there's like no audiobook of have his carcase available online which is unfortunate for my constant desperate need to be listening to sounds 100% of the time that i'm at work, so i tried enduring the Fully Cast BBC Audio Drama version

which 1. was so frustratingly abridged that i eventually gave up and just started rereading the book, because the charm of a dorothy sayers novel is really not captured in a rapid-fire recitation of only that character dialogue that is most central to the plot

upon which reread 2. i discovered that they changed the dialogue in the radio adaptation so that things harriet inferred/noticed/discovered were instead attributed to peter??? like, there's various points where the two of them are talking through theories of the murder, and have dialogue like

harriet: well what if the murderer hid until i left the beach and then turned back again to pretend to be coming from town?

peter: but then you've have met him on your way there.

harriet: ah! but maybe i did, and that's who the mysterious mr. perkins was!

with each of them taking turns being the helpful audience and the daring thinker-of-interpretations.

and in the radio drama they just-- swap the lines around, so that she is always incorrect and he is always making discoveries? which is such on-the-nose pathetic sexism that i feel embarrassed on behalf of everyone involved including me

[tinsnip]

I feel like Lois McMaster Bujold read Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise and immediately turned around and wrote Brothers in Arms.

[filmesbrazil]

[meatthawsmoth]

The demand for 'originality' - with the implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work - is a recent one and would have seemed quite ludicrous to poets of the Augustan Age, or of Shakespeare's time. The traditional view is that each new work should be a fresh focus of power through which former streams of beauty, emotion, and reflection are directed.

Dorothy L Sayers, The Mind of the Maker