Murder Must Advertise


Murder Must Advertise is a 1933 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, the eighth in her series featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.

Plot

Death Bredon arrives at Pym's Publicity Ltd, an advertising agency, to take up the post of junior copywriter. He is assigned the room of his predecessor Victor Dean, who has died in a fall down the office's iron spiral staircase. The doctor states that death was caused either by a broken neck, due to his landing on his head at the bottom of the stair, or by a wound of the right temple. The death appears suspicious, as the victim apparently made no attempt to save himself as he fell. In Dean's desk Bredon discovers a part-completed letter to the firm's proprietor, Mr Pym, telling him that something 'undesirable' had been going on in the office.
Bredon befriends Pamela Dean, sister of the deceased, and takes her to a cocaine-fuelled fancy-dress party hosted by Dian de Momerie, a socialite with whom Dean had been associating. Disguised as Harlequin, Bredon attracts the attention of de Momerie and later meets her several times, always in disguise. His presence annoys de Momerie's companion Major Tod Milligan who is supplying her with drugs.
It is revealed that Death Bredon is in fact Lord Peter Wimsey who has been brought in incognito by Pym to investigate. Various clues turn up: a catapult belonging to 'Ginger' Joe, the office boy; a carved stone scarab belonging to Dean; and £50 in banknotes found in the desk of Mr Tallboy, group manager.
After having a drink in a Covent Garden pub, newspaper reporter Hector Puncheon discovers that someone has slipped cocaine into his coat pocket. Chief Inspector Charles Parker, Wimsey's brother-in-law, suspects that Puncheon has stumbled on Milligan's drugs gang, but finds no further suspicious activity there. It appears that the cocaine is being distributed from a different pub each week.
Puncheon follows a man from the pub, who soon dies after falling in front of a train. In his flat is found a phone book with the names of many pubs ticked off, including the one in Covent Garden. Wimsey realises what has been happening. One of Pym's major clients runs a newspaper advertisement every Friday, the headline for which is approved a few days earlier. The first letter of the headline is being used to indicate the pub for that week, with Tallboy covertly supplying the letter to the gang in advance.
Milligan is killed in an 'accident'. But the gang is still operating, and the police want to catch the ringleaders during their next weekly drug distribution. Using the phone book, all they need to find the next pub is the letter for the week – as provided by Tallboy.
Wimsey is sure that Tallboy killed Victor Dean, but he does not want to act until the gang has been rounded up. On the night of the next drug distribution, Tallboy comes to Wimsey's flat to confess. He says that he was lured into the scheme with an innocent-sounding story and the offer of money, when he was in financial difficulty, but soon became trapped. Dean had found out and was blackmailing him, so Tallboy killed Dean, using Ginger Joe's catapult and the scarab, making it look like an accidental fall on the staircase. Wanting to spare his wife and child, Tallboy proposes suicide. Wimsey, seeing a gang member watching in the street below his window, suggests Tallboy leave, on foot, without looking behind him. Both know that the gang's killers are waiting, and Tallboy is knocked down and killed as he walks home.

Principal characters

In their review of Crime novels, the US writers Barzun and Taylor called the novel "A superb example of Sayers' ability to set a group of people going. The advertising agency is inimitable, and hence better than the De Momerie crowd that goes with it. The murder is ingenious and Wimsey is just right".
Writing in 1993, the biographer Dorothy Reynolds noted that "Sayers herself disliked the novel, which she wrote quickly in order to fulfil her publisher's contract, and was unsure whether it would ring true with the reading public". Reynolds quotes a letter that Sayers wrote to her publisher Victor Gollancz on 14 September 1932:
In her 1941 book The Mind of the Maker Sayers wrote: "I undertook to present a contrast of two 'cardboard' worlds, equally fictitious—the world of advertising and the world of the post-war 'Bright Young People'. ". But she went on to quote a reader who pointed out that "Peter Wimsey, who represents reality, never appears in either world except in disguise". She commented, "It was perfectly true; and I had never noticed it. With all its defects of realism, there had been some measure of integral truth about the book's Idea, since it issued, without my conscious connivance, in a true symbolism".

Background

Most of the action of the novel takes place in an advertising agency, a setting with which Sayers was very familiar as she had herself been employed as a copywriter at S. H. Benson's agency, located at Kingsway from 1922 to 1931. In chapter 12 of the novel she quotes the slogan "Guinness is good for you", from her own jingle "If he can say as you can. / Guinness is good for you / How grand to be a Toucan / Just think what Toucan do". Her colleague Bobby Bevan was the inspiration for one of the characters in the novel, Mr Ingleby.

Adaptations

Murder Must Advertise was adapted by Bill Craig for television in 1973 as a BBC TV mini-series starring Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey. A six-part radio adaptation by Alistair Beaton was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 1979, again with Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey.