19-404: Have His Carcase is a 1932 locked-room mystery by Dorothy L. Sayers , her seventh novel featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and the second in which Harriet Vane appears. It is also included in the 1987 BBC TV series . The book marks a stage in the long drawn out courting of Harriet Vane by Wimsey. Though working closely with him on solving the book's mystery, she still refuses to marry him. During
38-499: A "Rider from the Sea", a rider who it was said would be carrying instructions for his onward journey to Warsaw. Once at the rock, Alexis met his death at the hand of the murderer who had ridden his horse along the beach through the incoming tide to avoid leaving tracks. Wimsey and Harriet ultimately realise that Weldon is not the simple character he has been presenting, but a criminal who has been living under two different identities. Weldon
57-521: A computerised brain to work out the plots. But working with Chris Miller, the writer who adapted the books, I made some very encouraging discoveries. First, we found some gaping holes in Sayers' plots. And, also, although the plot was important, character and dialogue were at least as important. That realisation, together with the fact that on the Wimseys I was working with a lot of middle-aged actors, led to
76-774: A further adaptation of Gaudy Night mounted for BBC Audiobooks in 2005 to complete the full sequence of Sayers' novels, all starring Ian Carmichael in the title role. The series stars Ian Carmichael as aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. Carmichael played the role concurrently in five BBC Television adaptations beginning with Clouds of Witness in April 1972. Peter Jones played Wimsey's loyal valet and assistant Mervyn Bunter in all original adaptations, and also dramatised Clouds of Witness with Tania Lieven. Gabriel Woolf featured as Inspector Charles Parker , Lord Peter's friend and contact at Scotland Yard (later brother-in-law) in three adaptations. Mystery writer Harriet Vane
95-506: A hiking holiday on the South West coast of England, the detective novelist Harriet Vane discovers the body of a man lying on an isolated rock on the shore, not far from the resort of Wilvercombe; his throat has been cut. Harriet takes photographs and collects the razor used in the death, and other personal items. The man's blood is still liquid, from which it is concluded that he had died shortly before she arrived. There are no footprints in
114-472: A number of times in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens , as Sam Weller 's distortion of the legal term habeas corpus . All the chapter heads feature quotations from the works of the dramatist and poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes . In their overview A Catalogue of Crime (1971/89) Barzun & Taylor noted that the book was "A great achievement, despite some critics' carping. The people,
133-526: A series starring Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter and Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane. Mervyn Bunter is played by Richard Morant , the brother of Angela Morant who portrays the character Mrs Morecambe. The police officer in charge, Inspector Trethowan in this adaptation, is played by Ray Armstrong. Locked-room mystery Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include
152-622: The First World War – better than any of the others who tried over the course of the twentieth century...Just as Wimsey’s buffoonish, aristocratic utterances conceal a vulnerable, perceptive intellect, so does the old-fashioned style of this drama hide a darker, more difficult story." David Hepworth in The Guardian notes that Carmichael "was put on this earth to play two great heroes of popular fiction: Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey." Director and producer Simon Brett credits
171-425: The details below. Request from 172.68.168.132 via cp1112 cp1112, Varnish XID 942994574 Upstream caches: cp1112 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 08:38:06 GMT Lord Peter Wimsey (radio series) Lord Peter Wimsey is a series of full cast BBC Radio drama adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers 's Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels broadcast on BBC Radio 4 between 1973 and 1983, with
190-415: The investigation while ostensibly comforting his mother after her loss. Weldon appears to be a likely murder suspect, but he has an unshakeable alibi for the time of Alexis' death – as do a large number of other possible suspects. Staged to look like suicide, Alexis' death is gradually revealed to be the result of an ingenious murder plot that played upon Alexis' fantasies. Wimsey and Harriet discover that in
209-435: The motive, the cipher, and the detection are all topnotch. Here, too, is the first (and definitive) use of hemophilia as a misleading fact. And surely the son, the mother, and her self-deluded gigolo are definitive types". The novel was adapted for radio in 1981 for BBC Radio 4 by Alistair Beaton, starring Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter and Maria Aitken as Harriet Vane. It was adapted for television in 1987, as part of
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#1732783086592228-494: The new information about the time of death — and by proof of their actual friendship. Even as Wimsey and Harriet solve the case, Mrs Weldon has already moved on to another gigolo at the hotel, a sympathetic French dancer named Antoine. The novel's title appears in William Cowper's translation of Book II of Homer's Iliad : "The vulture's maw / Shall have his carcase, and the dogs his bones". The phrase also appears
247-414: The period leading up to his death Alexis, an avid reader of Ruritanian romances , had believed himself to be a descendant of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia . A series of cipher letters received from an unknown source convinced him that he was being called to return to Russia to take his place as the new rightful Tsar. He had been lured to the rock by his anonymous correspondent who urged him to be ready to meet
266-413: The sand other than hers and those of the victim. Unfortunately, the corpse is washed away by the rising tide before she can summon help. Alerted to the discovery by a friend, Lord Peter Wimsey arrives, and he and Harriet start their investigations. The victim is identified as Paul Alexis, a young man of Russian extraction, employed by a Wilvercombe hotel as a professional dancing partner. The police tend to
285-421: The series with inspiring him to become a crime novelist and his actor-sleuth character Charles Paris . He recalls: I was delegated to produce a series of adaptations...Ian Carmichael had just played the part on television and they wanted him to reprise the character on radio. Up until then, although I'd written four very proper unpublished novels, I’d been rather scared of crime fiction. I thought you had to have
304-406: The view that Alexis' death was suicide and that he had cut his own throat. Alexis had been engaged to a rich widow in her fifties, Mrs Weldon. Her son, Henry Weldon, ten years older than his mother's lover and by all appearances a simple and brutish man, is appalled at the prospect of his mother's remarriage to a gigolo , and at his potential loss of inheritance. He travels to Wilvercombe to monitor
323-608: Was directed for BBC Audiobooks in 2005 by Enyd Williams and was later broadcast on BBC Radio 7 in 2010. Caroline Crampton reviewing a 2016 repeat of Have His Carcase in the New Statesman notes that "Ian Carmichael is Peter Wimsey...Somehow, the Hull-born Carmichael inhabits the character of Wimsey – the Eton and Oxford educated younger son of a Duke who turns to mystery-solving after traumatic experiences in
342-643: Was himself the rider, and had been provided with his alibi by two co-conspirators, a friend and his wife. Although his alibi was secure for the believed time of death, the investigators discover that Alexis had died far earlier than had been thought; he had suffered from the blood-clotting disorder haemophilia (a disorder known to have affected descendants of the Russian Tsar), resulting in his blood remaining liquid for much longer than would normally be expected. Weldon and his co-conspirators are undone by their unsuccessful attempts to reshuffle their alibis to match
361-529: Was played by Ann Bell ( Strong Poison ), Maria Aitken ( Have His Carcase ) and Sarah Badel ( Busman's Honeymoon ) in the original sequence and Joanna David in Gaudy Night . The first six productions were directed by Simon Brett , who became a crime writer himself following his involvement with the series, with the next four directed by Martin Fisher. Gaudy Night , missing from the original sequence,
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