I heard great things about The Nine Tailors from The Golden Age of Murder so I had to borrow it. While I enjoyed the book, it felt very familiar, as though I had read it before. So I went to Goodreads and… I’ve read this seven years ago! This is shaping up to be the year of unintentional re-reads.

The Nine Tailors sees Lord Peter in the East Anglian countryside. What starts off as a mechanical fault soon turns into a nine-hour course of bell ringing (of course, Wimsey knows how to ring a Church bell). That’s all and good but some time after, Wimsey receives a letter from the Rector, notifying him of the discovery of an unknown corpse and asking for his help.

Unlike my first read, where I was more-or-less ambivalent/meh about the book, I had a lot more fun. Perhaps it’s because I’m already used to Wimsey’s character or perhaps it’s because I’ve already read about all the bells once but I wasn’t bored. While the mystery wasn’t as fast-paced as some modern mysteries are, the book provides some wonderful dialogue and characterisation and that’s what I really enjoyed.

I don’t know if it’s typical of the Sayers but this is the book where I realised how skilled she is with using speech to make her characters distinctive. There’s a lot of dialogue and many new characters, but it never felt heavy or had the “talking heads” problem for me. In fact, I enjoyed the dialogue because the digressions that each character took was what made them come to life. For example, the Rector is prone to digressions and can start rambling about his beloved Church and bells at the slightest prompting, while his wife’s replies show that she’s the one who lovingly keeps track of things like keys and the welfare of his visitors. I genuinely enjoyed reading their interactions and had a good sense of who they were as people.

The Nine Tailors goes beyond the mystery to bring to life a small village and its Church Bells. Perhaps the younger me couldn’t appreciate that, but present me very much enjoyed the story.