The Fountain Pen Mystery by Harriet Vane

Thanks to The Gentleman Stationer

Title: The Fountain Pen Mystery 

Author: Harriet Vane

Publisher: Trufoot’s 

Source book: Have His Carcase by Dorothy L Sayers 

Harriet Vane is trying hard to write her new book The Fountain Pen Mystery at the same time as helping to solve the murder mystery in Have His Carcase.  It’s a struggle and she needs to finish the book for publication in the autumn.

Her agent is keen for Harriet to add a romantic interest especially as her book is to be serialised. Harriet tries in vain to write something. The love scene between her heroine (Betty) and the detective’s friend (Jack) just doesn’t work. Eventually Harriet sends a a brief, snappy telegram to her long suffering agent absolutely refusing to include a love interest.

The book involves a villain committing a crime in Edinburgh, while constructing an ingenious alibi involving a steam-yacht, a wireless time-signal, five clocks and the change from summer to wintertime. Harriet spends a lot of time worrying about how the town-clock could be altered. The whole alibi hinges on the town-clock striking at the appropriate moment… she doesn’t know who is responsible for changing the time on a town-clock. And for modern readers: what even is a town-clock? And why would it be quite so important?

Much worse than all the rest, Harriet’s detective, Robert Templeton has developed a tiresome habit of talking like Lord Peter Whimsy. Lord Peter might be helping Harriet solve her real life murder mystery but she’s still determined not to marry him.

What any of this has to do with fountain pens we never find out. 

And for those of you too young to ever have owned or used a fountain pen: they have a rubber reservoir (for want of a better description) in the body of the pen: you plunge the nib (the bit you write with) into a bottle of ink, and squeeze the rubber to draw up ink. You then have enough ink in your pen to write for several pages. A whole exam for example. This was a vast improvement on earlier pens which had to be dipped into the ink at least every sentence.

Thanks to YouBuyVietnam