Death in the Pot by Harriet Vane

Thanks to Molly Brown House Museum 

Title: Death in the Pot

Author: Harriet Vane

Publisher: Trufoot’s

Source book: Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey #6)

Harriet Vane, a writer of detective stories, is writing and researching Death in the Pot when her ex-lover Philip Boyes is murdered with arsenic. Part of her research involves investigating how easy it might be to buy arsenic under an assumed name (in the 1930s you could easily buy arsenic in a high street chemist provided you signed the Poison Register, and of course there were no checks to ensure you really wanted to poison rats and not a relative, or that you really were who you said you were). Naturally the police look on this as highly suspicious behaviour and Harriet is arrested and put on trial for the murder.

While Harriet languishes in gaol*, sales of her books are booming and her publishers Trufoot’s are rushing to get her latest book, Death in the Pot into print. The proofs have to be corrected while she is in prison on remand. And her legal fees are being paid by her publishers.

We learn that Harriet’s last book has gone to three new editions, and her new one has pre-sold 7,000 copies. The book is about a couple who live in Bloomsbury, a happy life full of love, laughter and poverty until someone poisons the young man leaving his partner inconsolable. [I have to say that this sounds dreadfully depressing, and I think perhaps I would rather not have known even these rather skimpy details of the plot.]

Philip Boyes was also an author of five novels, and a large number of essays and articles, but he was not particularly successful until his death (death is always good for business). We are told that all his literary works were of what is sometimes called an ‘advanced’ type. Apparently he preached doctrines which may seem to some of us immoral or seditious, such as atheism, and anarchy, and what is known as free love. And all this, if you ask me, is code for nobody would want to read them. And I don’t think many people did. His publishers, Grimsby & Cole, are bringing out several new editions of his works, including a special memorial edition, with portraits, on handmade paper, limited and numbered, at a guinea.

Lord Peter Wimsey thinks the police have got it wrong and sets out to investigate. It is thanks to the assistance of Lord Peter’s employee Miss Climpson, and a chance discovery that Philip Boyes’s rich old aunt has a nurse with distinct leanings towards spiritualism (she reads a book called Can the Dead Speak? published by the Spiritualist Press over tea and cakes in a Lake District café), that the true murderer is revealed.

*The word gaol featured in lots of children’s comics when I was young. Being slightly dislexic I pronounced it goal and it took me years to discover it ought to be jail.

Thanks to Global Founders London