Slack Your Rope, Hangman

[sonetka]

In The Beginning is now posted on AO3, for the benefit of castiron and, of course, all the Harriet/Philip shippers out there! I've cleaned it up a bit, mostly smoothing out some of the dialogue and historical references, and making sure it's as much in line with the book as possible (I'd forgotten that the Dyers lived above them, not below, and that Sylvia

Comments

[persephone_kore]

On rereading, I was actually left slightly fuzzy on why Urquhart deliberately poisoned him four times, but I expect he was having trouble getting a high enough dose to kill Philip while remaining confident he himself would be safe. Perhaps they thought Philip was a particularly incompetent suicide?

[sonetka]

I thought he was setting up Philip's death to look natural -- a series of escalating gastric attacks culminating in a deadly one look much more convincing than one deadly attack appearing virtually out of nowhere after a history of low-grade gastritis. It's left a little vague about whether Urquhart deliberately timed the dosings to coincide with Philip's meetings with Harriet (thinking he'd blame the attacks on the stress of seeing her again) or people were just remembering the dates with advantages later on. And since Parker seems to think it's plausible that Harriet was just carrying the stuff around in her pockets and was able to drop it in Philip's cocktail, unnoticed, at least three times, he clearly has mental lapses from time to time :).

[persephone_kore]

Ah, yes, that makes sense.

[castiron]

Thank you :-).

I could see the pre-hanging breakdown going either way -- a less severe one, because this was a case where it was pretty darn clear that Peter had nabbed the right person and saved someone important to him, or a more severe one, precisely *because* Harriet has become so important to him and he now has leisure to think about what he would have lost if he'd failed.

[sonetka]

No problem! I'm flattered that someone liked it well enough to want to download it :).

I keep switching back and forth between scenarios as well -- though I can definitely picture an ugly breakdown when he begins thinking about just how different this particular last visit before hanging had the potential to be. Maybe he's sitting across from Urquhart and begins imagining Harriet in that chair.

[nineveh_uk]

I have to admit that I like the extra-angsty scenario, though "dashes off to Norfolk and has cast-iron excuse not to visit Urquhart at all" has a lot going for it.

[sonetka]

And of course, there's always the possibility that Urquhart took the classic Sayers Villain departure and managed to kill himself while in custody, like Mary Whittaker. Looking it over, it's surprising how few of the murderers from the novels live long enough to actually be executed.

[lopezuna_writes]

Greatly looking forward to reading it through start to finish!

The Busman's Honeymoon Peter is a bit at odds with some of the earlier books. But carrying through with the retcon, I like to imagine that if ever there was a murderer he felt no qualms about bringing to justice, it was Urquhart. Some day I will go back and re-read the Nine Tailors (the only book I don't have a hard copy of) to see if it tells us what exactly Peter is doing right about when Urquhart should be going to trial. If I remember correctly, the opening scenes are set right in the middle of the action of Strong Poison, hence the peevish comments about hanging.

Actually, the whole nervous breakdown thing in Busman's Honeymoon opens up a host of other continuity errors, because, hey, Harriet nearly got hanged for a murder she didn't do. You'd think that fact might feature a bit more in this whole scenario, even if she's not the type to have a nervous breakdown. Not to mention the fact that she found a man with his throat cut, and was intimately involved in

[sonetka]

I don't mind the chickens (I think she's just surprised that Miss Twitterton doesn't have any qualms about it, since she seems like such a fussy, nervous person), but there really is no excuse for Harriet's not knowing her way around a real investigation by that time. (I don't think the suicide impossibility makes SP that bad, though, since if you peeled that whole subplot away the main plot would still stand, it would just be blindingly obvious from the start that the person you really should look at is the one whose house the repeatedly-dosed victim was living AND EATING in!)

Looking at my copy of The Nine Tailors, it looks like it's possible to fix an exact date to Peter's taking up the investigation -- Saturday, May 3rd. I'm basing this on the fact that Mr. Thorpe dies a week after Easter Monday (and Easter that year was on April 20th, consistent with the book's statement that "spring and Easter came late that year" so he died on April 28th), the grave is opened and the body discovered the following Thursday (May 1st), Venables

[persephone_kore]

I could imagine there being significant variation in Peter's reactions (and, like Lopezuna, I could certainly buy Urquhart giving him fewer qualms than average). I think when I read Bunter's summary of his custom and reactions, I mostly thought back to Whose Body and... hm, maybe some of the misgivings about bringing in the murderer in a few others, and the strainedness in Gaudy Night?... and just kind of assumed he was supposed to have been in more or less distress on other occasions, but maybe not always debilitated.

I actually wonder a little what his reaction was after Murder Must Advertise -- the way he sent the murderer to his death in that one was a bit more of a shock to me, but I am not sure it would have struck Peter in nearly the same way.

[sonetka]

It's mentioned briefly in Gaudy Night -- his distress is mentioned generally but there's the half-paragraph where Harriet remembers how he had taken a job at an advertising agency one summer. Digging out the book: "He had found office life entertaining; but the thing had come to a strange and painful conclusion. There had been an evening when he had turned up to keep a previously-made dinner appointment, but had obviously been unfit either to eat or to talk. Eventually he had confessed to a splitting headache and a temperature and suffered himself to be personally conducted home." So it sounds like he took it fairly hard. (Of course, the murderer there is fairly sympathetic. He does something similar with the murderer in Bellona Club as well, and doesn't seem quite as fussed about it, but of course they didn't kill for similar reasons).

[nineveh_uk]

Belatedly commenting (you shouldn't post on Sayers while I'm on holiday!), the plot in Strong Poison never strikes me as the best constructed. The incidents in it are good - Miss Murchison's and Miss Climpson's investigations in particular - but while the "how did Urquhart do it" puzzle is good, the "did Urquhart do it" isn't. It really needs a stronger counterweight to fill up that time. It really ought to be and investigation into Vaughan, but since his obvious motive is sexual jealousy of Philip, perhaps Sayers felt that a second socially-unacceptable but innocent person wouldn't fly with the public/publishers. But you could do something interesting, even have Peter thinking that Vaughan is probably innocent but can't prove it, and to save Harriet he could use Vaughan to muddy the prosecution case, since there isn't enough to convict him, but there's enough to say "you can't prove Harriet did it, but Vaughan had the opportunity, too, he also had access to poison, and he had a motive". Except of course Peter can't do that because he

[sonetka]

If it's any consolation, you ended up replying while I was on vacation myself, so there was a delay on this end as well :). Vaughan is a perfect counterweight and it really sounds, in the beginning, like she's setting him up to be the Unappealing But Innocent suspect -- the fact that he and Philip ate together on the day he was poisoned, his purchase of poisons -- which he admits to having discussed with Philip -- his extreme denunciations of Harriet, which could be a blind, and last but not least the fact that he's collecting the royalties on Philip's books, which are now best-sellers because of a murder which Vaughan's insistence on an inquiry helped to uncover! Of course, you could shoot it full of holes -- there's no way Vaughan could make arsenic take so long to go into effect, for one thing -- but a sufficiently talented prosecutor could make him look really bad, especially if he dropped a few artful hints about Vaughan's likely proclivities as a motive. It's strange how Peter talks to him once and then ends up agreeing with

[nineveh_uk]

I think I read somewhere-or-other that the timetable could just about work with Vaughan, if the arsenic were late, and not with alcohol etc. Whereas it is actually too soon for Harriet. So a prosecutor would have something to work with. I can accept Peter thinking that Vaughan almost certainly didn't do it, because he is genuinely devastated, but surely he'd at least investigate? After all, he might be devastated that it worked