Guest Post: Jeanne on “Murder Must Advertise”

Please welcome back Jeanne of the Bookblog of the Bristol Public Library as she considers the thorny issue of bring a fictional character to life.

“Murder Must Advertise”

I started my life-long love affair with mysteries under the auspices of the Golden Age authors.  One of my favorites was Dorothy L. Sayers and her aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, so I was delighted when “Masterpiece Mystery” actually had a TV version of some of the cases.  A few decades later, I am the proud owner of the episodes starring Ian Carmichael as Wimsey. 

I’ve long been a champion of the Ian Carmichael version of Lord Peter Wimsey, dating back to the first time I saw the shown on “Masterpiece Mystery”—a staple of my Thursday nights for years.  I was less impressed with a later version starring Edward Petherbridge. This series took up the stories with Harriet Vane, while the Carmichael shows were based on the earlier, Vane-less books.  In the intervening years, it seems that more people favor Petherbridge and dismiss Carmichael.  I do need to take a look at the Petherbridge episodes, but in the meantime I decided to watch another of the Carmichael episodes to see how they’d held up.

One of my favorite episodes was “Murder Must Advertise.”  I was fascinated with the inner workings of the advertising world.  I knew that DLS had actually worked at such an agency, so I felt confident that she was doing an accurate portrayal. As the story opens, Lord Peter is called to investigate the death of a young copywriter at Pym’s, an old and prestigious advertising firm.  Dean fell down a metal staircase and the police ruled the death accidental, but the deceased had sent a letter to Mr. Pym indicating there was something troubling going on at the firm.  Lord Peter decides to investigate and goes undercover as Death Bredon, a novice copywriter. He soon discovers that Dean had been involved with the de Momerie  crowd, a group of Bright Young Things who are known to be dabbling in drugs and he wonders if the two things are connected.  Meanwhile, Inspector Parker (who is also Lord Peter’s brother in law) is trying to uncover a drug distribution ring.

Much of the criticism I’ve heard about Carmichael centers around his age:  he is too old to be Lord Peter.  At 53, he was about a decade older than his fictional counterpart, and not lithe nor tall.  The scenes where he dons a Harlequin costume don’t play particularly well, but in other ways I find him ideal for the Lord Peter he was playing. While the Duke’s second son served bravely in WWI and came home suffering from shell-shock, he did a good job of concealing personal trauma in the early books.  He uses the guise of an upper class twit to lull his suspects into a false sense of security, and while Carmichael played that aspect very well indeed he was also adept at dropping the guise for the viewers and showing them the sharp intelligence underneath. 

As with most of the great characters, Wimsey grew and changed over the years. At the start of the series, he seemed more the typical gentleman sleuth who delighted the intellectual challenge of solving a puzzle to a more complex character who suffers agonies of remorse when his investigations led murderers to the gallows.  At the end of Busman’s Honeymoon, it seems he will undertake no more murder investigations because of the burden and pain that resolution can bring.

In “Murder Must Advertise,” Carmichael’s Wimsey sets out on a bit of a lark.  He sets himself up as a regular working man, borrowing an address from his brother-in-law in case anyone checks up on Mr. Bredon, and is positively gleeful at the prospect. He flirts a bit with the typists, is hail-fellow-well-met with the other workers, and has a grand time snooping. He does arouse a bit of suspicion (his clothes and shoes are too expensive for his persona) but he comes up with ready explanations. 

As the case progresses and it becomes obvious that the stakes are very high, he gradually loses the high spiritedness. In a particularly good scene, he confronts a murderer—a man who killed to hide his secret, who got in over his head and now regrets many things—and gives him counsel that they both know will lead to the man’s death.  As the man leaves to meet his fate, Carmichael’s Lord Peter shows compassion and pain.  The fun has gone out of the puzzle.  It was a telling moment for me.

That ability to move effortlessly between the upper class twit and intelligent human being is one of Carmichael’s strengths.  Some of his early acting jobs involved playing the aristocratic fool in light comedies, including a turn as Bertie Wooster, and it served him well. It’s not always easy to play a believable idiot.  Hugh Laurie managed it in “Blackadder” playing a dense Prince George and later an equally dense Lt. George.  He moved on to playing Bertie Wooster to Stephen Fry’s Jeeves.  In fact, I first watched the TV series “House” to see if he could do drama as well as he did comedy.  (And, come to think of it, Laurie would be my choice to play Lord Peter in a revival… well, except for the age thing again.)

The bottom line is that I still feel that Carmichael did quite a good job at portraying the character as I perceive him; your mileage may vary.  The filmed version offered additional casting treats for older British series fans—I leave it up to the reader to decide if “older” modifies “series” or “fans”—with Timothy Christopher of “All Creatures Great and Small” and Paul Darrow of “Blake’s Seven” playing two of the suspects.

Guest Post: Jeanne on "Sidney Chambers, Ian Carmichael, and The Nine Tailors"

Please welcome back Jeanne of the Bookblog of the Bristol Library on this final Monday of November….

Sidney Chambers, Ian Carmichael, and The Nine Tailors

I have been reading my way through the Sidney Chambers aka Grantchester books by James Runcie and was intrigued by a particular aspect of one of the stories.  In it, Sidney is persuaded to take a bit part in a movie production of “The Nine Tailors” by Dorothy Sayers.  Sidney is rather put off by having to do several  stereotypical vicar things—shots of him riding his bike are described, for instance—but is soon sidetracked by a mystery.  Which I can’t quite remember, because I was sidetracked by the idea of a filmed version of “The Nine Tailors.”  (In case you aren’t familiar with the structure of the Chambers books, there are generally at least four novellas in each book with a mystery—not necessarily a murder—attached to each.) I had read the book years before and remembered it as being difficult for me because so much of the plot revolved around the formal ringing of the church bells (the “tailors”) and I got more than a bit lost.  For what it’s worth, reviewers seem to think it’s one of the best of the series but Sidney and I were not convinced.

Curious, I checked the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) just to see what filmed versions existed and found only one listed:  a four part series with Ian Carmichael as Wimsey.  I had enjoyed that series and knew I owned at least one episode, but I was delighted to discover I actually owned  the complete set.  There must have been a good sale at some point.  So I settled in to watch.

As I said, I really enjoyed the Ian Carmichael Wimsey series.  Many have pointed out that Carmichael was actually too old to play Wimsey—he was in his 50s at the time—but I liked the way he talked piffle: he was very good at playing Wimsey as  air-head aristocrat when needed, but always allowing the audience to see the sharp intelligence behind the pose.  For me, that was one of Lord Peter’s best investigative techniques, just as it was Miss Marple’s:  the ability to appear to be harmless and a bit air-headed so that suspects would let down their guard.

For those unfamiliar with the book or series, the plot revolves around the theft of a very valuable emerald necklace from a guest at the Thorpe family’s manor house near the village of Fenchurch St. Paul.  The thieves are caught—one of them being the manor’s butler-- but the necklace is not recovered, and its loss drives the Thorpes into near bankruptcy as the family feels obligated to pay for the loss.  Some twenty years later, Lord Peter and faithful valet Bunter end up at the village in time for a ringing of the bells just as Lady Thorpe dies of influenza. Not many months after, Lord Thorpe dies but in the process of digging his grave next to his late wife’s, a mutilated body is found to have been added to her grave.  The news reaches Lord Peter, who believes there may be a connection between the body and the theft of the necklace.

The first thing I noticed was that the series must have been shot on tape instead of film.  It has that faded, grainy quality one gets from tape.  A good bit of the action took place in winter or early spring, which added to the drab look. 

The other unfortunate choice was that the program opened with a young Lt. Wimsey headed off to war.  This was accomplished by putting a mustache and a lot of makeup on Carmichael which to my eyes made him appear older than ever and was actually kind of confusing when later (20 years later, in story time) he looks much younger than he did at the beginning. Apparently, the idea was to show audiences how Bunter—Lord Peter’s batsman in the War—came to be his butler.  This is absent in the book, by the way.

The plot is more than a bit convoluted in both book and movie.  I had to watch parts of it twice to get some of the characters straight for reasons I can’t explain without spoilers, and I still do not grasp the finer (or coarser, for that matter) points of bell ringing which is essential to the plot.  (For one thing, cracking a cipher depends on knowledge of bell ringing.) Still, I found it worth watching which was good, because it took a couple of viewings to get some of the plot points straight.

As for the story which inspired the original question, I concluded that the scenarios Runcie described came from reading the original story and not from the filmed version.  There were also a couple of pointed comments from Sidney’s POV about the plot of the original novel.  I gathered that Sidney—and I presume Runcie—are not fans.