has been happening. One of Pym's major clients runs a newspaper advertisement every Friday, the headline for which is approved a few days earlier. The first letter of the headline is being used to indicate the pub for that week, with Tallboy covertly supplying the letter to the gang in advance. Milligan is killed in an 'accident', and Wimsey is nearly jailed for the murder of Dian de Momerie (also the gang's work). The police want to catch the ringleaders during their next weekly drug distribution. Using the phone book, all they need to find the next pub is the letter for the week – as provided by Tallboy. Wimsey is sure that Tallboy killed Victor Dean, but he does not want to act until the gang has been rounded up. On the night of the next drug distribution, Tallboy comes to Wimsey's flat to confess. He says that he was lured into the scheme with an innocent-sounding story and the offer of money, when he was in financial difficulty, but soon became trapped. Dean had found out and was blackmailing him, so Tallboy killed Dean, using Ginger Joe's catapult and the scarab, making it look like an accidental fall on the staircase. Wanting to spare his wife and child, Tallboy proposes suicide. Wimsey, seeing a gang member watching in the street below his window, suggests Tallboy leave, on foot, without looking behind him. Both know that the gang's killers are waiting, and Tallboy is knocked down and killed as he walks home. Principal characters Lord Peter Wimsey, 42, aristocratic amateur detective Chief Inspector Charles Parker, Wimsey's friend, married to his sister Lady Mary Mr Pym, proprietor of Pym's Publicity Mr Tallboy, group manager 'Ginger' Joe, office boy Hector Puncheon, journalist Pamela Dean, sister of the deceased Dian de Momerie, socialite and drug addict Major Tod Milligan, drug-dealer and de Momerie's companion. Literary significance and criticism In their review of Crime novels (revised edition 1989), the US writers Barzun and Taylor called the novel "A superb example of Sayers' ability to set a group of people going. The advertising agency is inimitable, and hence better than the De Momerie crowd that goes with it. The murder is ingenious and Wimsey is just right". Writing in 1993, the biographer Barbara Reynolds noted that "Sayers herself disliked the novel, which she wrote quickly in order to fulfil her publisher's contract, and was