Murder Must Advertise (Pocket Books, 1940)

Mr. Tallboy’s eyes, roving negligently round, had fallen on Bredon’s index-card… Neatly printed on the card stood one word.

DEATH

In Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Sayers takes murder mysteries in another new direction: not, this time, exploring an established subgenre, but hybridizing the mystery genre with what we would now call workplace drama, or sometimes workplace comedy. The setting is Pym’s Publicity, a successful advertising firm. Many incidents turn on problems in carrying out the work, friendships and tensions between staff members, and relationships with clients.

[Click the images for versions that kill.]

All this is lively enough so that it could have made up a novel by itself, without the murder — though it would have needed some other central conflict to drive the plot.

The novel opens just after the death of one of the copy writers, Victor Dean, in a fall down a cast iron staircase. Just a week later, a new man named Bredon is hired to replace him by the firm’s proprietor, Mr. Pym.

Murder Must Advertise (Avon Books, 1967)

He is introduced to some of his fellow employees; given a first assignment, writing advertising slogans for margarine; and told the story of his predecessor’s death — and he fills out a card for the records, revealing his own first name, “Death.”

Over the next few chapters, the reader sees Bredon from a number of angles. Notably, at one point, he escorts Pamela Dean, the dead man’s sister, to a large masquerade party — one with drinking, gambling, and orgies, and something else going on in the background.

Murder Must Advertise (Avon Books, 1967)

At this party, Bredon, in a black and white harlequin costume, performs a remarkable athletic feat: climbing a bronze statue and diving from it into a pool, which catches the attention of a striking woman guest at the party, Dian de Momerie (described as fair-haired and tall).

The next chapter, the fifth, reveals both Death Bredon and the harlequin to be identities assumed by Lord Peter Wimsey, and in fact the rest of the novel has him alternating between all three identities, and either having one revealed as being another, or such a revelation being averted. This complex intrigue adds to the interest of the plot.

Murder Must Advertise (Avon, 1971)

But it also makes Wimsey seem rather like Zorro or Batman: not merely in being rich, but in being amazingly acrobatic (especially for a man approaching 40) and above all in his being able to function with almost no sleep. At the same time, the changes of identity give Murder Must Advertise a comedic effect that reminds me of the original silent Zorro film that starred Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

As it happens, Wimsey isn’t the only character in this novel doing detective work. Willis, another copywriter, sets out to shadow Bredon and Pamela Dean, first when they have lunch together, and then at the scandalous party; and being an amateur, he makes himself obvious.

But later, one of the office’s messenger boys, Joe Potts, nicknamed “Ginger” for his red hair, and a fan of murder mysteries, comes to Bredon’s attention, and is recruited to ask collect information around Pym’s on his behalf — and does a much better job of not being obvious.

In the Sexton Blake book that my friend Ginger Joe has just lent me, the great detective, after being stunned with a piece of lead-piping and trussed up for six hours in ropes which cut his flesh nearly to the bone, is taken by boat on a stormy night to a remote house on the coast and flung down a flight of stone steps into a stone cellar. Here he contrives to release himself from his bonds after three hours’ work on the edge of a broken wine-bottle…

An important subtext of the story is class consciousness: There’s a division within Pym’s between copywriters who went to public schools and to Oxford or Cambridge, and those who didn’t (akin to the sort of thing that Nancy Mitford later wrote about as “U” and “non-U”). Wimsey, quintessentially upper class, makes a point of telling one of the non-upper-class copywriters how foolish it is to make an issue of the difference.

Murder Must Advertise (HarperCollins, 1985)

He’s backed up in this by Miss Meteyard, perhaps the story’s most interesting minor character:

The minute anybody begins to worry about whether he’s as good as the next man, he starts a sort of uneasy snobbish feeling and makes himself offensive.

—though the issue might look different to the characters who didn’t have the advantages that are at issue.

Miss Meteyard is arguably the most perceptive person at Pym’s, other than Bredon himself. She spots Bredon’s not being what he claims practically at first sight, by knowing how expensive his shoes are; and much later, she manages to track down his real identity, by locating an entry in Who’s Who for “Peter Death Bredon Wimsey,” his real full name.

In a conversation with Wimsey, she reveals that she had spotted some of the things that he has painstakingly investigated, but had chosen not to do anything about them. I found her puzzling on several reads of Murder Must Advertise: It wasn’t clear how she fit into the story. This time, it struck me that she’s very like a self-insertion by Sayers, with the same Oxford education and the same job in advertising — and having her solve the mystery would have been a major piece of authorial self-indulgence.

And what is the mystery? We get a hint early on, from learning that Victor Dean was amorously involved with Dian de Momerie—perhaps one of the worst odd couples imaginable — and that de Momerie is a drug user (“drug” in this case meaning cocaine) and is acquainted with a small-scale dealer with ambitions. (This is the mysterious something else at the party that Willis attended.)

There turns out to be a link between the drug trade and one of the advertising campaigns handled at Pym’s, and that link supplied a motive for Dean’s death. This also lets Sayers make a moral point about the parallels between drug dealing and commercial advertising as such: a venture into the genre of satire.

Murder Must Advertise (Hodder trade paperback edition)

The climax of the novel takes place at a cricket match between Pym’s and a team fielded by one of their major clients. On one hand, the preparations for the match bring the class conflict theme into bright focus.

On the other, the match itself is the scene of not one, but two really clever “recognitions” (as Aristotle calls them): One of Wimsey’s teammates makes a skillful play that shows he had the ability to commit the murder, but Wimsey himself, who has been playing carefully in the competent, mediocre style of Bredon, forgets himself and plays masterfully in a way that one of the people in the audience instantly recognizes. This brings the whole story to an ingenious double crisis.

An old literary joke has it that a comedy ends with a wedding, and a tragedy with a funeral. In a final chapter, after the mystery is solved, Wimsey returns to Pym’s, under his own name, and provides a believable story about what he was doing there; and on his way out, donates funds for two collections, for a funeral wreath and a wedding gift.

And both seem fitting: The courtship in this novel is suitably comedic, but the final fate of the murderer is genuinely tragic. All that makes this one of Sayers’s most literarily sophisticated novels.

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William H. Stoddard is a professional copy editor specializing in scholarly and scientific publications. As a secondary career, he has written more than two dozen books for Steve Jackson Games, starting in 2000 with GURPS Steampunk. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife, their cat (a ginger tabby), and a hundred shelf feet of books, including large amounts of science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels.