1920 is the generally accepted dawn of the Golden Age of detective fiction. Sherlock Holmes was then still appearing in the pages of The Strand Magazine and the last collection of his investigations, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, was published in 1927; and G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown was still solving mysteries and saving souls. Agatha Christie and Freeman Wills Crofts published their first titles, The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Cask respectively, in 1920 and before the end of the decade Margery Allingham, Anthony Berkeley, John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen would also publish their first detective novels. This was the era in which the puzzle dominated and fair play to the reader in the presentation of information and clues was of paramount importance. Almost simultaneously in 1929, the British detective novelist Father Ronald Knox and S. S. Van Dine, the American creator of Philo Vance, formulated Rules for the creation of detective fiction. No clue could be withheld from the reader; the detective could not pick up ‘a mysterious object’ at the murder scene without telling the reader exactly what it was. Secret passages, poisons unknown to science, evil Chinamen, twin brothers (or even sisters) and ‘supernatural agencies’ were all forbidden. All of the information pertinent to the only correct solution to the crime had to be given to the reader. The question of romance within the covers of a detective story was a contentious one – Van Dine ruled it out of court without discussion while Knox remained diplomatically silent on the matter. And in 1923 Dorothy L. Sayers published Whose Body?
Born in June 1893 in Oxford, where her father, Revd. Henry Sayers, was headmaster of Christ Church Choir School, Dorothy L. Sayers was, like her great contemporary, Agatha Christie, educated at home. At the age of 16, she attended Godolphin College and in 1912 went to Somerville College, Oxford, one of the first all-women colleges, from which she graduated with a First Class Honours degree in French. Her first proper job, in 1922, was as a copywriter in Benson’s advertising agency, a background she was to put to good use over a decade later when she wrote Murder Must Advertise (1933).
In January 1924 Sayers gave birth to a baby boy, John Anthony. This event, far more shocking, a century ago, than can now be appreciated, remained a well-kept secret until long after Sayers’s death. After an unhappy love affair, she had found solace with one Bill White who, on learning of her condition, disappeared. Nobody at Bensons realised her situation – a two-month leave of absence was not questioned – and she successfully kept the baby’s existence a secret while her cousin, Ivy Shrimpton, raised him. John Anthony was ‘good friends’ with Sayers for most of his adult life although he never lived under her roof. In April 1926 Dorothy married ‘Mac’ Fleming, a freelance writer as well as a painter and photographer, twelve years her senior; but as his health deteriorated – he had been gassed during the Great War – Dorothy became the major breadwinner.
It would seem that nothing nobler than economic necessity was the motivation behind her decision to write a book. She had some experience of professional writing – she had already published poetry, and, more surprisingly, written film scenarios – before beginning her first detective novel, Whose Body? in 1921. Published two years later, it sent forth her aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, to solve the mystery of an unidentified corpse, clad only in a pair of pince-nez, found in a bath. In creating this immortal character she gifted him with some of what Fate had denied in her own life. Wimsey, with an enviable address in Piccadilly – note the similarity of ‘110A Piccadilly’ to Sherlock Holmes’s ‘221B Baker Street’ – was a Lord with a manservant, a wealthy bibliophile with a wine cellar, a superb musician, a gifted linguist; and, later, a happy husband with an intelligent and strong-minded wife and, ultimately, a family. If, as is claimed, Sayers, to their joint detriment, fell in love with Wimsey – can you blame her? So confident was she of his success, she had embarked on Wimsey’s second investigation, Clouds of Witness even before Whose Body? was published.
Sayers the Detective Novelist
In a 1937 essay on the genesis of Gaudy Night Sayers wrote: ‘When in a light-hearted moment I set out, fifteen years ago, to write the first ‘Lord Peter’ book, it was with the avowed intention of producing something ‘‘less like a conventional detective story and more like a novel’’. Although she admitted that Whose Body? was ‘conventional to the last degree’ she felt that ‘each successive book of mine worked gradually nearer to the sort of thing I had in view’. Its immediate successor, Clouds of Witness, begins very much as a conventional Golden Age detective novel with a mysterious death at a secluded shooting-lodge in Yorkshire. As the investigation proceeds it transpires that many of those present that night have secrets, none more so than Wimsey’s brother, Gerald, Duke of Denver. The novel culminates in an unexpected revelation during the most dramatic murder trial in the genre.
Unnatural Death (1927), the title of which is not the least clever element (think about it...), contains one of the most sinister characters in the entire Sayers output. And the murder method – the discovery of which is trickier than the identity of the villain – is chillingly plausible. In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) that bulwark of British male society, the gentleman’s club, is exposed to gentle, and sometimes not so gentle, mockery as Wimsey uncovers nefarious deeds within its walls and among its members. And the plight of returned War veterans is also a potent element in a plot that turns on a question of timing.
The Documents in the Case (1930) is noteworthy for a variety of reasons. It is Sayers’s only non-Wimsey novel, it is her only co-authored novel and, as the title suggest, it is told in the form of letters, rather than a straight narrative. It was her collaborator Robert Eustace, a doctor, who suggested the scientific idea at the heart of the plot. Darker in tone than the Wimsey novels – probably because of his absence – and with a smaller than usual cast of characters, it concerns a poisoning in a remote cottage. Although Sayers herself was disappointed with it, the novel remains a fascinating experiment.
She introduced Harriet Vane in Strong Poison (1930) and allowed Wimsey to embark on a three-book courtship culminating in marriage in Busman’s Honeymoon (1937). This is the longest – and, some would argue, the most wearisome and embarrassing – courtship in the annals of detective fiction. Detective fiction purists contend that this type of romantic relationship – between detective and suspect – has no place in a detective story. Other sleuths have managed to meet, court, marry and produce children without any of the soul-searching indulged in by Peter and Harriet. Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn met and married (offstage) Agatha Troy, Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion and Amanda Fitton meet, marry and produce a son – between Sweet Danger (1933) and Traitor’s Purse (1941) – with much less agonising.
Five Red Herrings (1931) is for lovers of the clue-and-alibi type of story. Set in Galloway, an area of Scotland well known to Sayers from regular holidays, it has a wonderful ‘gimmick’ to tantalise those readers who like to play the game alongside the detective. After a member of an artist’s colony is found dead near his easel, Wimsey, without taking the reader into his confidence, notices something odd about the scene. In order to underline her adherence to fair-play, Sayers inserts a paragraph in which she assures that reader that they have all the information necessary to come to the same conclusion as Wimsey. And so they have.
‘What would we be lookin’ for?’ [Sergeant Dalziel] demanded, reasonably.
(Here Lord Peter Wimsey told the Sergeant what he was to look for and why, but as the intelligent reader will readily supply these details for himself, they are omitted from this page.)
It’s not a ‘spoiler’ to say that a possible title for the novel, suggested by Sayers, was There’s Something Missing.
Murder Must Advertise (1933) draws heavily on Sayers’s Benson’s experience as Lord Peter, working incognito, joins Pym’s Publicity, to investigate the death, some time earlier, of a copywriter. Apart from the ramifications of a clever plot, the reader learns more about office-life in the inter-War years than could be garnered from a dozen social histories. Opinion is equally divided as to whether Sayers’s best novel is The Nine Tailors (1934) or Gaudy Night (1935) and a compelling case could be made for either. The former contains yet another example of Sayers’s resourcefulness at inventing imaginative murder methods – earlier, both Unnatural Death and Strong Poison had shown similar ingenuity – and settings; the background of campanology was unique in the world of detective fiction. Gaudy Night is a fascinating glimpse onto the rarefied pre-WWII atmosphere of all-women education – again drawn from first-hand experience – coupled with an exploration of the vexed, even 80 years ago, question of woman’s place in society, the family and academia. This, surely, is the book that Sayers hoped would be ‘less like a conventional detective story and more like a novel’?
But my favourite Sayers novel remains Have His Carcase (1932). While on a walking-holiday to recover from the broken heart sustained before and during Strong Poison, Harriet Vane discovers a dead body in a pool of blood, as a result of throat-cutting, on the beach at Wilvercombe. With admirable sang-froid she searches the corpse, takes photos, collects evidence and walks four miles to raise the alarm; after which she calls a newspaper and dictates – no mobile phones or laptops – her story. Is it any wonder that Lord Peter loves this woman! And surely these opening chapters bear out P. D. James’s contention that a body found in civilised, peaceful surroundings has a much more powerful dramatic impact than one found in a back alley. Part of the plot of Have His Carcase is predicated on a piece of now well-known medical lore and the clues, all 11 of them, are not just mentioned but, in some cases, brought to the reader’s attention again and again. No accusations of cheating can be levelled at the era’s leading advocate of the ‘fair-play’ rule. But while the detective plot is ingenious, the characters portraits – middle-aged Mrs. Weldon and her search for love, pathetic itinerant barber Mr. Bright, as well as the doomed Paul Alexis – are masterly.
It must be admitted that Lord Peter’s swan song, Busman’s Honeymoon (1937) – which began life as a stage-play the previous year – is, considered as detective fiction, disappointing. Called unequivocally, by its author, ‘a love story with detective interruptions’, it is exactly that. And the interruptions are not convincing. Raymond Chandler in his famous – some would say infamous – essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, was scathing. ‘This is what is vulgarly known as having God sit in your lap; a murderer who needs that much help from Providence must be in the wrong business.’Although I make it a point of principle to disagree with anything, and everything, Chandler wrote about classic detective fiction, I find myself reluctantly siding with him here.
Long after you have finished reading them I guarantee that scenes – chilling, dramatic, hilarious, poignant – from the Lord Peter novels will stay with you. Who could forget the scene on the moors in Clouds of Witness, so reminiscent of The Hound of the Baskervilles; or the sacrosanct atmosphere of the gentleman’s club, as it is contaminated by The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club; or Wimsey as Harlequin in the fountain at Dian de Momerie’s party in Murder Must Advertise; or the Biblical flood at the climax of The Nine Tailors; or the blood-soaked interruption to Harriet’s idyllic reverie in Have His Carcase; or the fate of the magnificent hand-carved chess-set in Gaudy Night; or the sinister Mrs de Forrest trying to seduce Wimsey in her Mayfair flat in Unnatural Death; or Miss Climpson’s stage-managed séance in Strong Poison; or the multi-transport alibi-testing journey that climaxes Five Red Herrings?
It is slightly disillusioning to realise that after the 1939 appearance of the short story collection In the Teeth of the Evidence, Sayers wrote no more crime fiction. (The 1972 collection Striding Folly consisted of three final short stories: ‘The Haunted Policeman’, ‘Striding Folly’, first published in 1939 and ‘Talboys’, written in 1942) Thereafter, she turned her not inconsiderable attention to religion and Dante. She wrote The Zeal of thy House (1937) and The Devil to Pay (1939), both plays with religious themes and, more controversially, The Man Born to be King. This ground-breaking cycle of twelve plays for BBC Radio, broadcast during 1942, told the story of Christ in modern – for 1942 – language. It provoked endless correspondence between the BBC and Sayers as she defended her artistic integrity. Its reception, however, was enthusiastic and the entire enterprise was considered a triumph, both for religious broadcasting in general and for Sayers personally.
Her next focus of attention was the famous Italian writer of the Middle-Ages, Dante Alighieri. In August 1944, as the sirens sounded during the London Blitz, Sayers grabbed a book, to pass the time in the air-raid shelter; and discovered that it was Dante’s Inferno. This was not her first contact with the writer but the masterly combination of Italian poetry and religion that consumed her in that shelter inspired her to undertake a translation. The first volume, Dante’s Hell, appeared in 1949 with Purgatory appearing six years later; and she was still working on Heaven at the time of her death.
Apart from the main series characters, Sayers also created lesser, but no less memorable, minor characters. Lord Peter’s manservant, Mervyn Bunter – even the name is inspired – makes an appearance in all of the novels and in some of the short stories. As imperturbable as Wodehouse’s immortal Jeeves, he can offer sartorial advice and prepare a gourmet meal, as well as he can make discreet enquiries or take crime scene photographs.
Inspector Charles Parker of Scotland Yard is that rare example of a policeman in Golden Age detective fiction not portrayed as totally dependent on the clever amateur. Intelligent, honest and hard-working he meets Lady Mary, Wimsey’s brother, in Clouds of Witness. Ill-advisedly, she had been involved with the victim and Parker, instrumental in solving the case, embarks on a romantic relationship, which continues, mainly off-stage, through a few novels, eventually leading to marriage by the time of Have His Carcase. Solid, sensible, likeable, and very much his own man, as, indeed, he needs to be, he and Peter also form a close bond.
In Unnatural Death, where she makes her first appearance, Wimsey describes Miss Alexandra Katherine Climpson as ‘my ears, my tongue and especially my nose. She asks questions which a young man could not put without a blush.’ Because Wimsey feels that middle-aged women and their natural curiosity and resourcefulness are wasted, he sets up a typing bureau, known as The Cattery, installs Miss Climpson at its head, and calls on its services when involved in enquiries where men might fear to tread. Miss Climpson herself carries out just such an investigation into the death of Rosanna Spearman in Unnatural Death and she makes a further appearance in Strong Poison when she plays an important, albeit very entertaining, role in clearing up the mystery of Philip Boyes’s death. Throughout her investigations on Lord Peter’s behalf she displays a resourcefulness belied by her appearance and demeanour, both of which disguise a mind with a clear-sighted outlook on her fellow men and, crucially in Unnatural Death, women.
Although Montague Egg, a little known Sayers creation, appears in less than a dozen short stories, all of his investigations are neat puzzle tales, turning usually on a small but clever point. As a salesman of fine wines Egg travels the country, involving himself in crime as frequently as salesmanship. He has a saying for every occasion, culled from his Salesman’s Handbook and although it says nothing of his crime-solving abilities, his No. 1 Maxim is ‘To serve the public is the aim Of every salesman worth the name’.
TO BE CONTINUED…
- John Curran
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John Curran is an Irish literary scholar and archivist, best known as an expert on the work of Agatha Christie. He was born in Dublin and for years edited the Agatha Christie newsletter, subscriptions to which are handled through the author's official website. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Christie at Trinity College. He served as a National Trust consultant during the restoration of Christie's Devon residence, the Greenway Estate.
