Clouds of Witness

Lord Peter Wimsey

Peter Death Bredon Wimsey has just returned from a Corsican holiday, all scented baths and vendettas, when the call of the blood summons him home to a family catastrophe: his brother stands accused of murdering his sister's fiancé. He is a man of contradictions — flippant, self-deprecating, and genuinely brilliant — whose amateur sleuthing is both a game and a duty. His peculiar position as a peer's brother investigating a peer's crime makes him the only person who can move between Scotland Yard and Bredon Hall.

Lady Mary Wimsey

Lady Mary arrives at Lord Peter's flat in a state of desperate agitation, her complexion strained and her eyes hollowed by recent illness, begging to see her brother before he does something dreadful. She is a young woman caught between an engagement she accepted out of weariness and a love she thought she had lost, and her frankness with Parker is as disarming as it is calculated. Her testimony — and her silences — sit at the center of the case against her brother, and her fragility is the human cost the investigation keeps threatening to expose.

Mr. Parker

Parker is the professional who does the unglamorous work — the cross-examinations, the interviews, the careful note-taking — while his aristocratic friend supplies the flashes of intuition. He is competent but not flashy, and his anxious, almost tender handling of Lady Mary when she collapses in the flat reveals a man more emotionally exposed than his job usually permits. His partnership with Peter is the story's central working relationship, and his scruples about the case's human wreckage give the mystery its conscience.

Captain Denis Cathcart

Cathcart was a man of good family and no money, reduced by degrees to the final deep of dishonor — keeping a mistress in Paris while courting a duke's daughter for her fortune. He understood the transaction perfectly: he could pay for Simone Vonderaa's beauty and good humor only so long as he had money, and money he must have by hook or by crook. His engagement to Lady Mary was a business arrangement on both sides, and the question of who killed him is inseparable from the question of who he had wronged.

Bunter

Bunter is the quiet engine of the Wimsey household — laying out bath-salts and flesh-brushes in Paris, producing a phial of ammonia for a hysterical Lady Mary, and later appearing with arms full of scarlet and ermine at the exact moment his master needs them. He is a valet who has turned his camera from fingerprints to craggy scenery and back again, and whose respectful impertinence is one of the book's great pleasures. His loyalty is absolute, his competence total, and his presence gives the amateur detective a professional's infrastructure.

Sir Impey Biggs

Sir Impey arrives still in wig and gown, apologizing for the tedium of the day's proceedings, and immediately establishes himself as the kind of counsel who is not to be taken liberties with. He is the Wimseys' hired champion, and his skill at cross-examination is the legal counterpart to Lord Peter's detective work. His presence in the case signals the gravity of the Duke's position and the machinery of English justice closing around a peer of the realm.