Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries

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My latest (re)discovery - the Lord Peter Wimsey series. A few weeks ago I started with the 3 starring Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walthers which I'd seen on PBS Mystery in the late 1980's. I even managed to do a screen capture of Peter and Bunter (using my cell phone camera) in the Lagonda and to share it on FB. Truly a gorgeous car!

Once I finished rewatching Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, I began watching the even earlier Ian Carmichael series (dating from the mid-1970's).These were also very popular when shown on PBS but I missed them (maybe MPTV didn't carry Mystery then, although more likely I just didn't have time to watch much tv then). Over the intervening years never even heard of them. None of the stories involve Harriet Vane but various members of Peter's figure with the actor who played Mr. Bellamy in Upstairs, Dowstairs as Peter's older brother, the Duke of Denver. Ian Carmichael's Wimsey is different (older, more broadly comedic) but the character is still charming and Glyn Houston's Bunter is definitely much more believable.

The series is delightful providing one can forgive mid-1970's British productions from switching between film and video (this drove me nuts watching The Pallisers on the tv back in WFB but now I watch on the much smaller computer monitor so it's not as jarring. This earlier series includes a television version of my favorite Sayers' mystery -- The Nine Tailors. Reading about the bell ringing inspired me to order a CD of Christmas carols rung on handbells which I boxed up and put in storage in Milw (nowadays I could probably go online and find all sorts of recordings of actual church bells being rung but that was before Internet access.)