Illustration Friday: Jungle

Some Dorothy Sayers fan art for this week’s Illustration Friday topic.

I’ve been falling in love with Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane and their hard-won, thoroughly negotiated friendship all over again because my housemate and I watched the Edward Petherbridge/Harriet Walter miniseries and were distraught to realise that they had not made Busman’s Honeymoon, which has led to reading out key selections to everyone who stays still long enough. Mostly the snarky accounts of the wedding which starts it all, and the sublime domestic comedy of cleaning the chimney, and the awful devastation of deep happiness in the face of long-running trauma that is the last chapter (in case you aren’t familiar with the book, it is a murder mystery, but that’s never what I remember).

The tigers – tamed and shabby, sleek and shining – make a metaphorical appearance in Busman’s Honeymoon and that’s all I’m going to say! Except that Busman’s Honeymoon is necessarily preceded by (at least) the grave and charming Strong Poison (London celebrity trials! Bohemia! accused innocence! unexpected and unrequited romance!), the intrepid and jolly Have His Carcase (practical rambling lady novelists, English watering places, creepy barbers) and the relentlessly thought-provoking and heart-wringing Gaudy Night (Oxford women’s colleges of the 1930s, philosophy, life choices, proper work and the terms of human relationships).