The Nine Tailors
When his sexton finds a corpse in the wrong grave, the rector of Fenchurch St Paul asks Lord Peter Wimsey to find out who the dead man was and how he came to be there. The lore of bell-ringing and a brilliantly-evoked village in the remote fens of East Anglia are the unforgettable background to a story of an old unsolved crime and its violent unravelling twenty years later.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2016–2025years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Sayers, mentioned here in passing, wrote probably the only detective story explicitly called out (as an introduction to change ringing) in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (a mighty 20 volume encyclopaedia).
So if you like old detective stories and this article tickled your interest, perhaps give "The Nine Tailors" a whirl.
- For those who prefer reading books, there's always the precursor: _The_Nine_Tailors_ by Dorothy L Sayers. If you can find it, I believe there was a program or series called something like _Lord_Peter_Wimsey_ that aired on PBS that may have aired some time before the turn of the century.
- Bellfounder.
Fun fact: big church bells are so huge, weighing a tonne up, that pre-industrial revolution they were too big to move. So they were frequently cast in temporary moulds outside the church where they were going to be installed; archaeologists have found the furnaces. Bellfounders were itinerant and travel from site to site.
Another fun fact: bellringing is dangerous; people have died from it. Before the peal is rung, the bell is rocked from side to side until it eventually balances in an unstable position, mouth up; to ring, you pull it off balance, help it go round, and then check it, mouth up again. Except... it's a tonne of metal. Once it starts moving, it's going to keep moving. Get the rope looped round your neck, and it'll quite happily hang you as it goes.
For everything you ever wanted to know about bells, bellringing, changeringing, and the Fens of England, read Dorothy Sayers' The Nine Tailors; and the non-bell-related content is damn good, too.
- One of the weirder murders was in “The Nine Tailors” by Dorothy L Sayers, featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and much church bell ringing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Tailors
