to be fair sayers makes a lot of play of wimsey’s insufferability, and indeed he uses it himself also, plays up to it to crack open the class conundrum — cf also the “lawrence llewellyn-bowen = our sherlock holmes” theory

it’s funny, i have really no problem with P. Wimsey but cannot cannot stand Monty Egg – I suspect it is because I subscribe to the secret other rule of Golden-Age detective fiction which states that the (male?) detective must be a of a slightly higher social class than the upper-middle-class crime he is detecting (wimsey a duke’s second son, campion some kind of disinherited scion, poirot at the very least of v independent means (where is poirot’s money from?), alleyn an eton-oxford-diplomaticservice type) (and then with a sidekick from a rung just below the class of the crime, who nevertheless is by his own rights more honourable). I am far too much of a snob to accept Monty Egg, a travelling salesman, of all things.

As I understand it, it was there to avoid the propensity for one-note Fu Manchu-esque villains that peppered the genre at the time.

Carr was supposed to be the master of the locked room, wasn’t he? I should read the Hollow Man.

if yr using the ‘visual editor’ with all clever buttonbar and that when yr writing, there should be a ‘more’ button that puts in a mark where the story stops on the front page. or if yr doing hardkore html stylee you put in <!- -more- -> (er without spaces tho rly — LATE EDIT: AND NOT FORGETTING THE !)

There’s a great bit in The Hollow Man (JD Carr) where he lays out the fair rules of locked room mysteries, sort of like a reader’s charter. It’s combined with a weird sort of meta bit where the character is pretty much a voice for the author outlining a sort of ontology of them.