Book #96: Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers

I loved Gaudy Night enough that I checked out four more Sayers novels at the library--all of her Lord Peter Wimsey novels that involved Harriet Vane, who was the main character in Gaudy Night. I liked Harriet's and Peter's relationship in Gaudy Night and was interested in reading about how they met and how their relationship developed over the series of novels. Strong Poison is a lot more of a standard mystery novel than Gaudy Night though--Harriet is accused of poisoning and murdering her lover, and Peter believes that she didn't do it so he is determined to prove her innocent, so he has to figure out who would have done it besides her. He makes some great connections and figures out who the actual murderer was (not Harriet!) with the help of this group of assistants he hires. (It felt like they did the majority of the grunt work instead of him doing much of anything except for figuring stuff out, which I feel like is almost cheating.)

I was kind of hoping for some more illumination into the Peter-Harriet relationship and didn't really get it in this book. The thing I loved about Gaudy Night was how complicated and difficult they were together--Peter keeps asking Harriet to marry him and she's always refusing. I also liked how that book was inside of Harriet's head, so there was so much more explanation behind why things happened that way. But in this book, he basically just starts proposing to her for no reason at all--he falls in love with her with NO reason, which I feel like is a little bit of a cop-out on Sayers' part. He sees her on the witness stand in court, decides she's innocent, and then goes in and proposes to her in jail. What? I did not understand the attraction there and I didn't feel like Sayers did a good job making them seem real. I think I will still read another book of hers, but I wish she would write more from the perspective of Peter or Harriet and not just about them--that was the part I really liked about Gaudy Night.