When at last we find the important coded message in Have His Carcase, Lord Peter Wimsey delegates the decoding to the whodunnit novelist with whom he has spent much of the story flirting. “It’ll be a nice job for Miss Vane, and a healthy change from crosswords.”
When Have His Carcase was published, the crossword was a novelty; the Guardian had had a puzzle for just three years. One of the many appeals of the novel is how different its world is from ours, as when Lord Peter describes another piece of flirting, this time as part of the investigation he and Harriet Vane are conducting into an apparent murder:
Oh yeah?” Harriet grinned impishly. “When Lord Peter gets these fits of quotation he’s usually on to something.”
“Sez you,” retorted Wimsey. “I am going, straight away, to make love to Leila Garland.”
Lord Peter is fond of a puzzle too; as is often the case in whodunnits, being a solver of crosswords is handy when you are trying to solve a murder.
The only thing we’ve found,” went on Lord Peter, “is Chambers dictionary, and we didn’t find that this evening because Miss Vane had found it before, while she was engaged in wasting her time on crosswords instead of getting on with her writing. We’ve found a lot of words marked with pencil. We were engaged in making a collection of them when you came in. Perhaps you’d like to hear a few specimens. Here you are. I’m reeling them off at random: peculiar, diplomacy, courtesan, furnished, viscount, squander, sunlight, chasuble, clergyman, luminary, thousand, poverty, cherubim, treason, cabriolet, rheumatics, apostle, costumier, viaduct.”
What do those words have in common? They are all at least seven letters long, and none is long enough to be one of what Lord Peter calls “the real sesquipedalians”; crucially, none has a repeated letter. And that makes them ideal for decoding that message, since it has been created using a Playfair code.
So the reader gets a pleasingly lengthy description of how a Playfair code encodes letters in pairs, which means that an E, for example, might be represented by a different letter each time, which means that someone trying to decode the message can’t look for the letter which appears most often and work on the basis that it’s probably an E … and so on.
Happily for us, Playfair codes are not uncrackable, which means that we later get an entire chapter in which Harriet and Lord Peter pore over sections of a Playfair grid. Adaptations tend to leave out this almost unneccessarily protracted section. More fool the adapters: the conversation could only have been more delightful if our heroes had digressed into discussing Playfair’s creator, Charles Wheatstone, who also found time to invent the English concertina and an electronic device that went on to be a key aspect of Scientology. Incredibly, Sayers tells us in a footnote that she has omitted a part of the conversation about whether RBEXMG might represent a date in a certain format “for brevity’s sake”. Those 12 pages could easily have been 20.
My delight in this attention to detail was shared by the pioneering crossword setter Afrit, who first wrote down the golden rule of cryptics: “I need not mean what I say, but I must say what I mean.” Afrit’s puzzles for the Listener often received zero correct entries and a few years after Have His Carcase was published, he set Listener 397, which had a Playfair square in the middle of the grid and made reference to Lord Peter. (It had four correct entries.)
The world of Harriet and Lord Peter may be long gone (can you even still pick up a “pocket edition of Tristram Shandy” to enjoy with your picnic?) but I feel a connection to it through the Listener’s occasional use of Playfair codes, which continued through that puzzle’s relocation to the Saturday Times and to this day. That said, if I’m keen to finish, I might nowadays use dCode’s remarkable Playfair decoder rather than recreating those 12 pages for myself. Is that so terrible?
Our next book
Suggestions for future book club reading are very welcome. In the meantime, our next book is The Twelve Quizzes of Christmas by Frank Paul, which we’ll discuss in November.
Past book club books
The Moment Before Drowning, a crime novel by the setter Picaroon
Fun, a graphic novel about crosswords
Cain’s Jawbone, where you have to work out which order the pages go in
Alan Plater’s mystery Oliver’s Travels
Crossword Ends in Violence (5), James Cary’s D-day novel
Len Deighton’s thriller Horse Under Water
Nick Hornby’s drama State of the Union
Nonfiction grab bag The Puzzler
Novel-as-crossword Landscape Painted with Tea
And much of Morse
Find a collection of explainers, interviews and other helpful bits and bobs at alanconnor.com
The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book by Alan Connor, which is partly but not predominantly cryptic, can be ordered from the Guardian Bookshop
