Note: The title of each part refers to a change-ringing composition. The chapter titles are a (sometimes playful) reference to a ringer’s alternating position in the bell-ringing sequence.

Lord Peter Wimsey is a British aristocrat living in England in the 1930s. He and his manservant Bunter are taking a motor trip to visit friends in East Anglia on New Year’s Eve when they swerve off an icy road, and their car lands in a drainage ditch. The two men walk to the nearest village in search of help. This proves to be Fenchurch St. Paul, where Wimsey and Bunter soon meet Mr. Venables, the parish rector. Since it will take a day to get the car repaired, Venables insists that the visitors stay at the rectory for the night.

Venables is very proud of his church and even more proud of its bell ringers. Change ringing is a unique British custom that requires several men to ring individual bells at precise intervals, altering their position in the musical sequence according to well-known mathematical patterns. The author says of this practice, “As his bell weaves her way rhythmically up from lead to hinder place and down again, he is filled with the solemn intoxication that comes of intricate ritual faultlessly performed” (22).