Murder Must Advertise

I’m now listening to this murder mystery by Dorothy L. Sayers for at least the third time in its unabridged version and have decided that this might possibly be my all-time favorite light reading (or, in this case, listening). Not only is Lord Peter Wimsey a most dishy hero (I’m pretty sure Ms. Sayers was hopelessly in love with this character of her own creating), but the who-dunnit-and-why mystery is satisfyingly complicated without being convoluted and the characters, most of whom work in an advertising agency, extremely well-rounded … they “jump off the page” even though the book was written almost 70 years ago. Best of all, it’s brightly witty and satirical, even laugh-aloud funny at many points. Drawing from her own experience in an advertising agency, Ms. Sayers makes Pym’s Publicity come alive, and I suspect not much has changed in the advertising world since her time. Her description of the firm is a case in point:

Mr. Bredon had been a week with Pym’s Publicity, and had learnt a number of things. He learned the average number of words that can be crammed into four inches of copy; that Mr. Armstrong’s fancy could be caught by an elaborately-drawn lay-out, whereas Mr. Hankin looked on art-work as waste of a copy-writer’s time; that the word “pure” was dangerous, because, if lightly used, it laid the client open to prosecution by the Government inspectors, whereas the words “highest quality,” “finest ingredients,” “packed under the best conditions” had no legal meaning, and were therefore safe; that the expression “giving work to umpteen thousand British employees in our model works at so-and-so” was not by any means the same thing as “British made throughout”; that the north of England liked its butter and margarine salted, whereas the south preferred it fresh; that the Morning Star would not accept any advertisements containing the word “cure,” though there was no objection to such expressions as “relieve” or “ameliorate,” and that, further, any commodity that professed to “cure” anything might find itself compelled to register as a patent medicine and use an expensive stamp; that the most convincing copy was always written with the tongue in the cheek, a genuine conviction of the commodity’s worth producing — for some reason — poverty and flatness of style; that if, by the most far-fetched stretch of ingenuity, an indecent meaning could be read into a headline, that was the meaning that the great British Public would infallibly read into it; that the great aim and object of the studio artist was to crowd the copy out of the advertisement and that, conversely, the copy-writer was a designing villain whose ambition was to cram the space with verbiage and leave no room for the sketch; that the lay-out man, a meek ass between two burdens, spent a miserable life trying to reconcile these opposing parties; and further, that all departments alike united in hatred of the client, who persisted in spoiling good lay-outs by cluttering them up with coupons, free-gift offers, lists of local agents and realistic portraits of hideous and uninteresting cartons, to the detriment of his own interests and the annoyance of everybody concerned.