A Wimsey century, but not in cricket

At times of tension one returns to the old, familiar, and comforting, and so it was that I spent the early part of 2022 re-reading Terry Pratchett and Dorothy Sayers.

Sayers was born in 1897, and her first detective novel featuring Lord Peter Wimsey was published just about a century ago. Popular novels from that era often feel dated, and certainly there are many period phrases, situations, and descriptions in the Sayers books, but here they add to the richness of the novel rather than detract.

Whose Body? is the first Wimsey novel. It has a clever and original plot while introducing us to several of the main characters that appear in the books. Wimsey is the son of a Duke, and has all the privileges that come with his position: wealth, an education, and extensive travel. As the second son, conveniently, he has no hereditary responsibilities, leaving him completely free to pursue a career as an amateur detective. His devoted sidekick is Mervyn Bunter, formerly Wimsey’s sergeant in WWI, now Wimsey’s valet. Chief Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard makes his first appearance here too: stolid, calm, hardworking, cautious — he becomes one of Wimsey’s best friends.

Over the course of the novels, Wimsey develops more and more sterling qualities. The incisive mind is a given, but he is also very athletic (a quality he retains over a decade or two, despite never apparently indulging in any kind of regular exercise), an extraordinary cricketer, a connoisseur of food and wine, a scholar and expert on Reformation documents, an excellent pianist who also sings well, witty, charming, erudite, adored by all. By Busman’s Honeymoon his perfection becomes distinctly annoying.

Even more remarkable is Bunter. Not only was he an exceptional sergeant during WWII, but he becomes an astonishingly capable ‘gentleman’s gentleman’. He has detailed and precise knowledge of the right outfit — ‘morning coat’, ‘lounge suit’, or ‘Norfolk tweed’ with specific shirts and ties — for each occasion, he can mend and clean clothing, and he can manage a household. He can cook, even in dire situations which require washing and cleaning fish under an outside tap (Five Red Herrings) or producing meals in a house with no working fireplace or gas (Busman’s Honeymoon). And given his employer’s job as an amateur detective, it luckily turns out that he can also stealthily follow people (multiple changes of headgear and suchlike required, as in Have His Carcase), collect fingerprints, and take and develop photographs as needed. Honestly, Harriet Vane (Wimsey’s love interest) should have chosen the far more competent Bunter! Except, of course, that Bunter cannot quote effortlessly from the English canon as can Wimsey, and there is that matter of class…

Not all of Sayers’ books are equally good. Five Red Herrings is a particular miss: set in a small town in Scotland, everyone except Wimsey and Bunter speaks in a heavy brogue, and the entire plot revolves around the minutiae of train timings and how long it will take to cycle from A to B. There is little of the personality development that makes the other books so interesting.

The three novels I’d pick as her best are:

• Strong Poison. Harriet Vane, a writer of detective novels, is accused of murdering her lover. And Wimsey falls for her, adding a layer of emotional complexity to the detecting.
• Gaudy Night. Set in an Oxford women’s college during an alumni gathering and after, it is a wonderful description of cerebral women in the 1920s, and loaded with social commentary.
• Murder Must Advertise. Here’s where Wimsey is at his best, and the descriptions of life in an advertising agency are quite delicious.

It’s probably not a coincidence that all three novels reflect Sayers’ own life experiences: as a writer of detective novels who had an affair with a poet, as an early woman student at Oxford, and as an advertising copywriter.

A century after the books were written, Sayers’ depiction of women is quite fascinating. There is clear admiration for intellectual women, and her main female character, Harriet Vane, is an Oxford graduate who is an intellectual equal to Wimsey. At the same time, there are frequent critical comments about women, especially their appearance:

[ a young woman] in a green frock with a badly made-up face [Gaudy Night]

Leila Garland was a regular little gold-digger and as vain as a monkey. [Have His Carcase]

the sloppy sort of woman with her head in the clouds all the time [The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club]

He thought what an unattractive girl she was, with her sullen manner and gracelessness of form and movement. She sat huddled on one end of the sofa, in a black dress which made the worst of her sallow, blotched complexion. [The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club]

a singularly plain girl, with a face like a weasel [The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club]

It must have been bold for the time to have a woman protagonist like Harriet Vane who is unapologetically unvirginal., and a male protagonist who does not demand virginity from his beloved. Sayers goes only so far, though, when it comes to sexual equality — it is clear that Wimsey is far more sexually experienced than Harriet Vane. She has had one unhappy affair, he has apparently left a trail of satisfied lovers across the Continent who still recall him with affection.

It’s early days for women’s education in England, and even the Dean of (fictional) Shrewsbury College is grateful that they are allowed to study.

[Dean Martin]: I think it’s perfectly noble of [men] to let us come trampling over their University at all, bless their hearts. They’ve been used to being lords and masters for hundreds of years and they want a bit of time to get used to the change.

Gaudy Night

The educated characters write and speak in most beautifully complex sentences. Lord Peter’s nephew writes to him asking for money, and in response Lord Peter writes:

My dear [..]

You suggest that I should accommodate you by backing your bill at six months; failing which, you will either (a) ‘try Levy again’ (b) blow your brains out. The former alternative would, as you admit, increase your ultimate liability; the second, as I will myself venture to point out, would not reimburse your friend but merely add disgrace to insolvency.

Gaudy Night

Some may find this pretentiously long-winded, but I enjoyed unwinding the sentences.

Sayers has a marvellous vocabulary. There were words I had to look up — ‘ukase’,’commination’ — and in the later books Wimsey and Vane toss out plentiful French phrases and quotes, but Google Translate is an invaluable resource for such moments.

And there is plenty of time- and place-specific language: ‘gated’, ‘blotto’, ‘boiled shirt’. People send telegrams. People walk a mile to the nearest village in which one resident has a telephone, and then “wait for a call to be put through”. All quite delightful.

Less delightful are the racial comments. Have His Carcase is particularly full of these.

Mr Antoine, the fair-haired gigolo was, rather surprisingly, neither Jew nor South-American dago, nor Central European mongrel, but French.

Where are you going to find a rajah who doesn’t understand Bank of England notes? These fellows aren’t savages, not by any means. Why, lots of them have been to Oxford.

One never knew, of course, with these slinky people of confused nationality.

The jury must bear in mind that the deceased was Russian by birth, and therefore excitable, and liable to be overcome by feelings of melancholy and despair. […] Suicide was of frequent occurrence among the members of that unhappy nation. We who enjoyed the blessing of being British might find that difficult to understand.

The reader who wants to enjoy old novels must find a way of getting past such unpleasant comments, perhaps by ascribing them to the ignorance of the author and her times, or perhaps seeing them as a reminder that most modern writing has thankfully evolved past such prejudices.

Some things have changed: the non-students in Gaudy Night, ranging in age from 32 up, are described as ‘a bunch of middle-aged seniors’. In Busman’s Honeymoon, a sixty-five-year-old is described as ‘an oldish man’.

Some things have not changed: the conflicts for women between marriage/family and intellectual pursuits. It’s clear which side Sayers comes down on (again, in parallel with her own personal history as an early college graduate). Her character Harriet describes another Oxford alum who gave up the life of the intellect for marriage and farming as a ‘Derby winner making shift with a coal-cart’.

Here’s Harriet Vane talking to a young male undergraduate, making a point that still holds:

You haven’t the guts to say No when somebody asks you to be a sport. That tom-fool word has got more people in trouble than all the rest of the dictionary put together. If it’s sporting to encourage girls to break rules and drink more than they can carry and get themselves into a mess on your account, then I’d stop being a sport and try being a gentleman.

Americans appear in cameos, and rarely do they come off well. They are loud, hearty, shamelessly rich (as opposed to the genteel elegance of the British aristocracy), tactless and direct. They have ‘strident’ or ‘piercing’ voices, and are determinedly impervious to subtle English put-downs.

Sayers’ plots are clever and complex, and she does a very good job of slowly unpeeling the murder onion. She is also an excellent writer who can produce witty and sparkling dialogue as well as vivid description.

A small inconvenient cubicle, crowded at the moment to bursting point. A plump girl in glasses, with head tilted back and brows twisted to keep the smoke of a cigarette out of her eyes, was rattling off the names of Derby runners on her type-writer, assisted by a bosom-friend who dictated the list from the columns of the Morning Star. A languid youth in shirt-sleeves was cutting the names of sweep-subscribers from a typed sheet, and twisting the papers into secretive little screws. A thin, eager, young man, squatting on an upturned waste-paper basket, was turning over the flimsies in Miss Rossiter’s tray and making sarcastic comments upon the copy to a bulky, dark youth in spectacles, immersed in a novel by P.G. Wodehouse and filching biscuits from a large tin. Draped against the door-posts and blocking the entrance to all comers, a girl and another young man, who seemed to be visitors from another department, were smoking gaspers and discussing lawn-tennis.

Murder Must Advertise

April was running out, chilly and fickle, but with the promise of good things to come; and the city [Oxford] wore the withdrawn and secretive beauty that wraps her about in vacation. No clamor of young voices echoed along her ancient stones; the tumult of flying bicycles was stilled in the narrow strait of the Turl; in Radcliffe Square the Camera slept like a cat in the sunshine, disturbed only by the occasional visit of a slow-footed don.

Gaudy Night

There’s a reason the novels have been republished time and time again for a century.