Lord Peter’s chief suspect had no opportunity to poison Philip Boyes, and apparently, no motive. There are nobody else to suspect. Lord Peter tries to prove a suicide case, but fails. He has to resort to very unorthodox methods to prove that the man in question did have a motive alright – and even an opportunity, however fantastic it might sound. One of Lord Peter’s helpers has to learn how to pick locks; the other – completely against her religious views – becomes a spirit medium and stages a séance (all faked) – to get him the proof he needs. At last, they succeed, and the unfortunate victim of circumstances – Harriet Vane – is released at the next trial. Unfortunately, she refuses to marry Lord Peter. For now.

The book is written quite cheerfully; I most enjoyed the part in which that cheeky Miss Climpson fakes her ability to talk to spirits. This lady could have been a great sleuth herself, without any help from Lord Peter, I daresay.

Harriet Vane has my sympathy – I can’t stand it when people are wrongly accused of the crime they never committed – but the way she treats Lord Peter meets my strong disapproval. He is a decent fellow – why not give him at least some hope? Okay, the fact that he is a lord is not in his favour, for sure, but he is not a stereotype lord. I was glad to learn from Wikipedia that the silly girl saw the light later and married this lovely person. Any woman with a brain should be happy to.

Weirdly, I feel sorry for Philip Boyes too. He belongs to the type of men I particularly hate, but he doesn’t seem bad enough to deserve such a dreadful death. Dorothy Sayers obviously tried her best to portray him as a nasty person, but she didn’t quite succeed. Perhaps, she thought that the word “atheist” would mainly do the job – but not to me… no… not to me. Incidentally, I happen to share his views in this regard, though I disapprove of men who expect one-way devotion from their women, even if they are really geniuses (and I don’t think Philip Boyes is one). I wish he hadn’t died, but someone has to die in detective stories.

I’d love to read all the rest of the Lord Peter Wimsey series, but it can wait. There are other books on my list, many of them with a higher level of priority. And though I enjoyed “Strong Poison”, I don’t think I’ll want to re-read it soon.

The events described in the book take place in Scotland, in Galloway – a small community of painters and fishers. Lord Peter Wimsey can’t paint, so he has to fish from time to time to belong; so he does. One day though, an extremely obnoxious and unpopular painter named Campbell is found dead in a burn, an unfinished picture drying in the sun up the hill. It’s assumed an accident at first – it would be easier than easy for the painter to slip while working on his picture and fall down the slope breaking his neck. But Lord Peter Wimsey has a different opinion. Murder, he says. The police believe him, since his capabilities in the field of investigating murders is well known. Lord Peter Wimsey gets to work helping with the investigation.

Among the residents of the place there are many who might wish Campbell dead, but six of them have especially strong motives. And it so happens that they all disappear on the day of the murder, only to be found later, five of them with the most incredible stories of where they had been. The sixth of them has an airtight alibi… unless he had an accomplice. Each of them could have committed a murder. Well, whodunit?

Dorothy L. Sayers’s English is far less smooth than the language of her contemporary writers like Agatha Christie or Patricia Wentworth. It’s rougher, harder to understand – and in the case of this particular book the difficulties are increased by the fact that most of the characters talk with a strong Scottish accent, which the author faithfully reproduces in writing. I soon learned to substitute “where” for “whair”, “know” for “ken” and “doubted” for “dooted”, but that wasn’t all. A cockney chaffeur wasn’t really a problem: being a foreign reader I might not understand spoken cockney very well, but I’m used to the written version of it – so many English writers seem to be fond of it. But a “reverse-cockney” butler was a bit of a surprise. His habit of adding an unnecessary H in front of every word supposed to start with a vowel wasn’t quite what I expected. And then, as if all the above weren’t already enough for this poor foreigner, the author brought in a fresh witness with a lisp and replaced every S and half of the C’s with a TH.

No wonder it was 4.15 a.m. when I finished. The mystery was worth it, however. I’d bet you’ll never guess the solution until you’ve read the book in its entirety – or, alternately, looked it up – and the stories of the five red herrings are fun in themselves. The characters are painstakingly drawn too, each of them as different from everyone else as we all are in real life – one has to marvel at the writer’s skill and imagination where it comes to inventing personalities, as, from what I understand, nobody of them actually copies any real person she might have met.

A highy recommended book.