Strong Poison

The fifth Lord Peter Wimsey novel, published by Gollancz in 1930, and the first in which Harriet Vane appears. Harriet, a detective novelist, is on trial in London for poisoning her former lover, the writer Philip Boyes, who died of arsenic after visiting her flat; the evidence that she had been buying poisons under false names, she says for a novel, weighs heavily against her. The jury fails to agree, and Wimsey, who has fallen in love with her in the courtroom, has a month before the retrial to prove her innocence, helped by Miss Climpson and the women of her agency. The book begins the long courtship that continues in Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night and ends in marriage in Busman's Honeymoon, which critics have seen as Sayers's departure from the conventions of the genre in favour of character and emotion.