In the Golden Age of British detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, four women were universally considered the four Queens—Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers (don’t forget the middle initial, please, she was most adamant about that). She earned that title largely on the strength of eleven extraordinary novels published between 1923 and 1937, featuring the iconic character of Lord Peter Wimsey and, in four of them, the inestimable Harriet Vane, as well as dozens of short stories and one stand-alone novel. Her influence on detective fiction went far wider than that, however.
As an editor, she produced a magisterial three-volume Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (1928, 1931, 1934) and its sequel Tales of Detection (1936), accompanied by cogent analyses of the contents. As a reviewer, she covered more than 350 detective novels for the Sunday Times, and her essays appeared widely in other publications. As a member and the long-term president of the Detection Club, a writers’ association that included Christie and G.K. Chesterton, among many others, she was the driving force behind three collaborative novels and additional collaborative serials broadcast on the BBC. In the field of detective fiction, she was an overwhelming force, and seemingly everywhere.
And then she stopped. With minor exceptions, unpublished in her lifetime, she never again produced a work of detective fiction in any form. Why? We’ll get to that.
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But first the novels! Entertaining, erudite, lucid, filled with ingenious puzzles and even more ingenious solutions, written with grace, elegance, flair, wit, and an acute attention to character and psychological development, these novels combined the best qualities of the detective story with a novelist’s attention to the mores and manners of the day.
She was obsessed with Fair Play—all the clues should be laid in front of the reader, all the deductions should be ones the readers could make, if only they were able. No writer should lie: “Any fool can tell a lie, and any fool can believe it; but the right method is to tell the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is seduced into telling the lie for himself.”
Indeed, some of her principles were codified in the ceremonial oaths she demanded of prospective members of the Detection Club:
“Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on, nor making use of, Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?
“I do.
“Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics; and utterly and forever forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science?
“I do.”
Sayers believed the characters had to be real, the settings had to be real, and the crimes had to be real. George Orwell once chided her for “an extremely morbid interest in corpses,” but for Sayers, the violence of murder was not something that should be papered over, and she could be graphic in her depiction of corpses, autopsies, and exhumations. Murder had real-life consequences, not only for the victims, but for all who knew the victims, and those who investigated the victims’ deaths. As Sayers wrote, “Violence really hurts.” It wasn’t all a jolly game.
This can be seen in the shadings and evolution of her main character, Lord Peter Wimsey. Wimsey, 32 years old when we first meet him, is rich, well-educated, athletic, expert in many things, and as the second son of a Duke, has no family estate to look after—that’s the responsibility of his “beef-witted” older brother, Gerald—so he doesn’t actually have much in his life that he has to do. When first met, he seems somewhat fatuous and silly—the very caricature of a foolish dilettante aristocrat—and indeed there have been some readers who have never tried the Sayers books out of just such an impression.
They would be mistaken. As a friend of Wimsey’s, Marjorie Phelps, who would probably like to be more than a friend, says accusingly, “Peter Wimsey! You sit there looking a perfectly well-bred imbecile, then in the most underhand way you twist people into doing things they ought to blush for” (The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 1928). And in Gaudy Night (1935), Harriet Vane, who is more than a friend, tells a woman who met him once at a dog show and thought he was a “silly-ass-about-town,” “Then he was either frightfully bored or detecting something. I know that frivolous mood, and it’s mostly camouflage.”
Camouflage that can change quickly. In Bellona Club, Wimsey is talking to a doctor about a recently-discovered corpse, and asks if anything about the body struck him as strange. “What sort of thing?” replies the doctor:
“’You know what I mean as well as I do, said Wimsey, suddenly turning and looking the other straight in the face. The change in him was almost startling—it was if a steel blade had whipped suddenly out of its velvet scabbard.”
That monocle he wears? It’s a powerful magnifier. His walking stick contains a sword, its head carries a compass, and the cane is marked off in inches for use as a measuring stick. The silver matchbox he slips into his pocket is actually an electric torch.
Why does Wimsey put on an act? Well, there are elements of it that are true—he does like to amuse himself. But there are two much more important reasons. First, as Harriet notes, it’s a great help when he’s investigating a crime, because he’s completely underestimated: “They think I’m too well-off to have any brains” (Bellona Club).
The second reason is much deeper and darker. In World War I—the Great War—Wimsey served on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, reaching the rank of Major and engaging in a fair amount of espionage work, actually once infiltrating the staff room of a German officer. In Have His Carcase (1932), he’s able to unscramble a code, noting, “It was used during the War. I used it myself, as a matter of fact, during a brief interval of detecting under a German alias.”
The war did not end well for him, however. In 1918, he was blown up and buried in a shell-hole in France, and it was only because some men in his command, including a certain Sergeant Mervyn Bunter (more about him later) were able to dig him out that he survived. It led to a nervous breakdown, a condition then known as “shell-shock” and now as PTSD, and it took him a good two years to recover from it. In fact, he isn’t entirely recovered. Events in Whose Body? (1923) sends it swarming over him again (“Tap-tap-tap—they’re mining us—but I don’t know where—I can’t hear—I can’t. Listen, you! There it is again—“), and he’s similarly shaken every time his actions lead to a murderer going to the gallows. Indeed, for a while, the very giving of orders was impossible for him, because he knew what happened when you gave orders—people died.
All of this was compounded by one other factor. Before the war, he fell deeply in love with a girl named Barbara and wanted desperately to marry her before he went to the Front. When some of his family members convinced him how unfair that might be to her—what if he were killed or mutilated?—he released her from their engagement, only to come home on leave in 1916 and find her married to another officer with fewer scruples: “All he got on landing was a letter, announcing the fait accompli.”
He took it hard, and combined with the trauma of his near-death, changed him completely; it was a time of “dust and ashes” (Clouds of Witness, 1926). He shut everyone out and, when he recovered, adopted a carapace of frivolity. It was only when he was drawn into a case involving a missing necklace—the Attenbury Emeralds—that he began to find a purpose again. As he explains to someone he is interviewing during a case, “I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness…which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an’ suicide” (Unnatural Death, 1927).
His experiences have made him very sympathetic to other veterans similarly afflicted. Britain was full of them. Three-quarters of a million British men died in the Great War, but twice as many came home permanently weakened by wounds or poison gas or traumas such as his. In Clouds of Witness, he encounters a man hit by “the thunderbolt of the Great War, smashing through his safeguards…his life in ruins around him.” In Bellona Club, a man named George Fentiman despairs, “What’s the use of it, Wimsey? A man goes and fights for his country, gets his insides gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year….I can’t help it, Wimsey. I get sick and have to chuck jobs up. Money—I never thought of money before the War, but I swear nowadays I’d commit any damned crime to get hold of a decent income.”
When Fentiman’s grandfather is found dead at the club after who knows how long, in a chair by the fire, Fentiman breaks down. “Take him away! Take him away. He’s been dead two days! So are you! So am I! We’re all dead and we never noticed it.” The senior members his grandfather’s age are all shocked by his outburst: “Only the younger men felt no sense of outrage; they knew too much.”
Fentiman is distraught because he’s unable to work. He’s just as upset that the only one keeping the household afloat is his wife: “It’s pretty damnable for a man to have to live on his wife’s earnings, isn’t it?” In this, he was not alone, and it was another one of the issues to which Sayers was very attuned. When the Great War came and the men marched off, women filled the employment gap, and when the men came back, they were shocked to find that many of these women had no intention of going back to the kitchen. The “modern woman” had been born—she worked in offices, smoked in public, cut her hair short, wore short loose-fitting dresses. What was a man to do with “these hard-mouthed, cigarette-smoking females all over the place, pretending they’re geniuses and businesswomen and all the rest of it” (Bellona Club), with this mania for their new suffrage (“Flapper votes! How can you expect a pack of women to understand the importance of iron and steel?” (Have His Carcase).
Even such very traditional women as Wimsey’s own mother, the Dowager Duchess, now cast a gimlet eye on male presumption. When Wimsey compliments her “detective instinct” after an astute observation, she replies tartly, “My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I’m an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it’s so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes” (Clouds of Witness).
Into all this strides the remarkable figure of Harriet Vane. An advertising writer and author of detective novels—many people have accused her of being a stand-in for Sayers herself, to which I reply, “So what?”—we meet her in the prisoner’s dock where she is being tried for murder in Strong Poison (1930). The victim is her ex-lover, a novelist and free-love advocate named Philip Boyes, dead of arsenic poisoning. Why was he her ex-lover? Because after years of living with him and listening to him rail stridently against the principle of marriage, he’d turned around and proposed exactly that to her: “I couldn’t stand being made a fool of. I couldn’t stand being put on probation, like an office-boy, to see if I was good enough to be condescended to. I quite thought he was honest when he said he didn’t believe in marriage—and then it turned out that it was a test, to see whether my devotion was abject enough. Well, it wasn’t. I didn’t like matrimony offered as a bad-conduct prize.”
Wimsey not only leaps to her defense, he falls for her hard, even though people keep telling him, “The girl’s not even pretty.” It’s quite clear they are well-matched—their conversation has an easy give-and-take, even in grim prison surroundings—but she refuses his offer of marriage, and keeps on refusing it, even after he helps obtain her acquittal. She is grateful, but for her, gratitude is a terrible reason to get married—their relationship would always be on a profoundly uneven basis. The only man she can marry now is someone with whom she is on an equal and independent basis.
And Sayers provides that for her. In Have His Carcase, Harriet discovers a body, and she and Peter solve the case together. However, that is still not enough. It is not until Gaudy Night, which is almost wholly a Harriet Vane book, with her investigating a series of ugly incidents at Oxford University, and Peter entering only in the last third, that she is finally able to admit to herself, and to the world, that they are indeed equal and that Wimsey is sincere when he says so. “He’ll never make up your mind for you,” says a woman adviser. “You’ll have to make your own decisions. You needn’t be afraid of losing your independence; he will always force it back on you.” Of course, that woman adds, “A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.”
Peter and Harriet get to try out that proposition for themselves in the final Wimsey novel Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), subtitled “A Love Story with Detective Interruptions.” Married now, it’s still a period of adjustment.
A few other continuing characters in Sayers’ books must be pointed out, and they, too, illuminate aspects of their times.
“One of these days, it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings, too.”Equality of the sexes was a very important matter to Sayers. In fact, she wrote two seminal essays about it in a book called Unpopular Opinions (1946), which were later republished in a book of their own in 1971 called Are Women Human? My favorite passage from it: “A man once asked me…how I managed in my books to write such natural conversations between men when they were by themselves….’I shouldn’t have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing.’ I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the speaker; he said no more….One of these days, it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings, too.”
Lines between Upstairs and Downstairs were starting to blur. The younger generation was pushing back hard against the way “thing have always been done”—in Clouds of Witness, Wimsey’s sister Mary discusses a Lord who “doesn’t understand that the present generation is accustomed to discuss things with its elders, not just kow-tow to them.” In addition, the merchant class, once scorned, was becoming more prosperous and relevant than the aristocracy itself, even though the latter still muttered with horror about “self-made men” and young noblewomen running off to marry, “horrid to relate—a prosperous manufacturer. Buttons, in fact” (Bellona Club). In Gaudy Night, Wimsey says to Harriet in despair about his class, “Our kind of show is dead and done for. What the hell good does it do anybody these days?”
Wimsey’s good friend, Detective Inspector Charles Parker, is a case in point. He’s made his way from modest beginnings and risen through the ranks “rather by a combination of hard work, shrewdness, and caution than by spectacular displays of happy guesswork” (Clouds of Witness). According to Wimsey, “He’s the one who really does the work. I make imbecile suggestions and he does the work of elaborately disproving them.” Indeed, “it was an understood thing that anything lengthy, intricate, tedious and soul-destroying was done by Parker” (Unnatural Death). But Parker admires Wimsey’s leaps of intuition and breadth of knowledge, and they are not only a mutual admiration society, Parker “was possibly Lord Peter’s most intimate—in some ways his only intimate friend” (Bellona Club).
And it is in Clouds of Witness, in which Wimsey’s brother Gerald, the Duke of Denver, is accused of the murder of Wimsey’s sister, Lady Mary’s, fiancé that Parker falls in love with Mary. When Peter finds out, he startles Parker by giving his blessing, which Parker refuses to believe: “You needn’t be insulting. I know she’s Lady Mary Wimsey and damnably rich, and I’m only a common police official with nothing a year and a pension to look forward to, but there’s no need to sneer about it.” Peter retorts, “I can’t imagine why anybody should want to marry my sister, but you’re a friend of mine and a damn good sort.” The relationship blossoms, but Parker still can’t get over the idea that Peter considers the whole thing unsuitable, until Wimsey confronts him: “You’re making Mary damned unhappy, Charles, and I wish you’d marry her and have done with it” (Strong Poison). And he does. The “beef-witted” Duke isn’t happy about it, of course, but Peter tells him point-blank to get over it: “Charles is one of the best.”
Another one of the best is Mervyn Bunter, Wimsey’s valet, “confidential man and assistant sleuth” (Clouds of Witness). Bunter not only takes care of Wimsey’s every need with solemn dignity and just a hint of sarcasm, he’s also an accomplished photographer and fingerprint-duster, and is adept at following suspects, checking alibis, and chatting up servants in other households for information. He knows Wimsey’s mind sometimes before Wimsey does—he instantly sensed, for instance, that Wimsey’s interest in Harriet Vane, unlike any of Wimsey’s other dalliances, is permanent and matrimonial. A startled Wimsey asks him how he knows. “I ventured to draw an inference, my lord.” Nonplussed, Wimsey says, “This comes of training people to be detectives” (Strong Poison). In The Nine Tailors (1934), we also discover that Bunter is “extraordinarily good at music-hall imitations,” causing Wimsey to sigh, “What I don’t know about Bunter would fill a book.”
But it’s what he does know about Bunter that’s important. Bunter was Wimsey’s batman, or personal servant, during the War. As mentioned before, it was he, among others, who dug Wimsey out when Wimsey was buried alive. When Wimsey came home a broken man, it was Buner who nursed him back to recovery—a role he still fulfills whenever Wimsey has flashbacks. When Wimsey falls to pieces in Whose Body?, it is Bunter who assures him that the enemy is not mining the trenches, that’s just “our sappers at work…you come and lay down a bit, sir—they’ve come to take over this section.” He guides Wimsey back to bed and stays till he’s asleep. “’Thought we’d had the last of these attacks’…An affectionate note crept into his voice. ‘Bloody little fool!’ said Sergeant Bunter.”
And then there is Miss Katharine Climpson. Miss Climpson is a spinster woman, and in the England of that time, women like her were ignored, shunted off into boarding-houses, or forced into hotels and hostels to become “companions.” They were invisible—“superfluous women” was the phrase—which to Wimsey is just another example “of the wasteful way in which this country is run.” In Unnatural Death, he takes Parker to meet her, the latter worried that he’s being taken to meet some mistress of Wimsey’s. Instead, he meets “a thin, middle-aged woman, with a sharp, sallow face and very vivacious manner” (that’s an understatement—Miss Climpson is very fond of italics and exclamation points). Wimsey’s hired her as an inquiry agent. “She is my ears and tongue, and essentially my nose. She asks questions which a young man could not put without a blush. She is the angel that rushes in where fools get a clump on the head. She can smell a rat in the dark.” Instead of a man with large flat feet and a notebook, he sends “a lady with a long, woolly jumper on knitting needles and jingly things round her neck. Of course she asks questions—everyone expects it. Nobody is surprised. Nobody is alarmed.”
Miss Climpson features in only two of the Wimsey novels, Unnatural Death and Strong Poison, with a mention in Gaudy Night, but her impression is indelible, as she helps worm out the evidence that helps solve an old woman’s death in the first book, and saves the life of Harriet Vane in the second. By Strong Poison, in fact, her one-woman operation has grown into an enterprise filling up an entire house with women just like her. Besides Miss Climpson herself, Wimsey also hires one of her agents, Miss Murchison, and embeds her in a suspect’s office. “Do you know how to pick a lock?” Wimsey asks her. “Not in the least, I’m afraid.” “I often wonder what we go to school for,” Wimsey muses, and sends her to someone who teaches her expertly.
Miss Climpson, meanwhile, finds that another one of her talents has come in handy. “A quaint little man from the Psychical Research Society” had once stayed at the same boarding-house as her and showed her some of the tricks mediums pulled. “Under his guidance she had learnt to turn tables and produce explosive cracking noises; she knew how to examine a pair of sealed slates for the marks of the wedges which let the chalk go in on a long black wire to write spirit-passages,” and a great deal more besides. She puts all that to use at a series of séances in Strong Poison which must be read—they constitute a genuine tour de force.
These aren’t the only issues Sayers dealt with. Matters small and large popped up throughout—the hard times and financial scandals of the late 1920s (The Five Red Herrings (1931), Murder Must Advertise (1933), Strong Poison), Depression-era loansharking (Bellona Club), the Fascist threat (Gaudy Night), the complication of a brand-new inheritance law (Unnatural Death), the Chinese civil war (Unnatural Death), the abolition of the coast guard service (Murder Must Advertise), women’s education (Gaudy Night), and much else. However, I don’t want to leave the impression that this was all that Sayers cared about. She cared about the characters and the prose and every one of her readers just having a good time.
Take a look at this excerpt from a scene-setting breakfast table at a noble house after a murder has been discovered the night before in Clouds of Witness:
“The Duchess of Denver was pouring out coffee. This was one of her uncomfortable habits. Persons arriving late for breakfast were thereby made painfully aware of their sloth. She was a long-necked, long-backed woman, who disciplined her hair and her children. She was never embarrassed, and her anger, though never permitted to be visible, made itself felt the more.
“Colonel and Mrs. Marchbanks sat side bv side. They had nothing beautiful about them but a stolid mutual affection. Mrs. Marchbanks was not angry, but she was embarrassed in the presence of the Duchess, because she could not feel sorry for her. When you felt sorry for people you called them ‘poor old dear’ or ‘poor dear old man.’ Since, obviously, you could not call the Duchess poor old dear, you were not being properly sorry for her. This distressed Mrs. Marchbanks. The Colonel was both embarrassed and angry—embarrassed because, ‘pon my soul, it was very difficult to know what to talk about in a house where your host had been arrested for murder; angry in a dim way, like an injured animal, because unpleasant things like this had no business to break in on the shooting-season.
Read this discussion of the latest Book of the Moment pick at a literary cocktail party in Gaudy Night. The extended dissection of that party is simply hilarious, but much too long to quote here, but do please find it (it’s in Chapter XI). Meanwhile, here is a discussion of that book pick, Tasker Hepplewaite’s Mock Turtle:
“’But what’s Mock Turtle about?’ inquired Harriet.
“On this point the authors were for the most part vague; but a young man who wrote humorous magazine stories, and could therefore afford to be wide-minded about novels, said he had read it and thought it rather interesting, only a bit long. It was about a swimming instructor at a watering-place, who had contracted such an unfortunate anti-nudity complex through watching so many bathing-beauties that it completely inhibited all his natural emotions. So he got a job on a whaler and fell in love at first sight with an Eskimo, because she was such a beautiful bundle of garments. So he married her and brought her back to live in a suburb, where she fell in love with a vegetarian nudist. So then the husband went slightly mad and contracted a complex about giant turtles, and spent all his spare time staring into the turtle-tank at the Aquarium, and watching the strange, slow monsters swimming significantly round in their encasing shells. But a lot of things came into it—it was one of those books that reflect the author’s reactions to Things in General. Altogether, significant was, he thought, the word to describe it.”
And this passage from Murder Must Advertise speaks for itself:
“All over London the lights flickered in and out, calling on the public to save its body and purse: SOPO SAVES SCRUBBING – NUTRAX FOR NERVES – CRUNCHLETS ARE CRISPER – EAT PIPER PARRITCH – DRINK POMPAYNE – ONE WHOOSH AND IT’S CLEAN….The presses, thundering and growling, ground out the same appeals by the million: ASK YOUR GROCER – ASK YOUR DOCTOR – ASK THE MAN WHO’S TRIED IT – MOTHER’S! GIVE IT TO YOUR CHILDREN – HOUSEWIVES! SAVE MONEY – HUSBANDS! INSURE YOUR LIVES – WOMEN! DO YOU REALIZE? – DON’T SAY SOAP, SAY SOPO! Whatever you’re doing, stop it and do something else! Whatever you’re buying, pause and buy something different! Be hectored into health and prosperity! Never let up! Never go to sleep! Never be satisfied. If once you are satisfied, all our wheels will run down. Keep going – and if you can’t, Try Nutrax for Nerves!
So, if Dorothy L. Sayers was enjoying herself so much—why did she stop? Let’s back up a little.
* * *
Sayers was born in 1893 and grew up in a vicarage. Her father was a chaplain at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, but soon became the rector in the small village of Bluntisham-cum-Earith in Huntingdonshire. The church, the Fens, and the nearby River Great Ouse would later feature heavily in Sayers’ The Nine Tailors.
Sayers was educated at a boarding school in Salisbury—a fellow student remembers her as “not at all a pretty girl” (as was said about Harriet Vane) and fond of reciting speeches from Shakespeare, loudly, with much animation, on the landing. There, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, one of the first all-women colleges, and won first-class honors—even though it wasn’t until 1920, five years later, that women were allowed to become full members of the university and she received a formal degree. Somerville would become Shrewsbury College in Gaudy Night.
After a couple of books of poetry and a short stint as a junior editor at the publisher Blackwells, she moved to London in dire need of a job and found it at an advertising agency that would become the model for Pym’s in Murder Must Advertise. There, she blossomed. “It pays to advertise”? That was hers. The famous Guinness campaign featuring zoo animals and rhyming doggerel that can still be found today here and there? Also hers. And in 1926, mysterious bus posters started appearing asking, “Has Father joined the Mustard Club?,” soon followed by ads about the Mustard Club and its members, a club newsletter, club badges (500,000 of them were ultimately distributed), a recipe book, and spoof newsreels about club activities. All of them were created by Sayers for Colman’s Mustard, and lasted until 1935. In Murder Must Advertise, there is a fleeting reference to “the biggest advertising stunt since the Mustard Club.” She’s entitled to it.
“I do not as a matter of fact remember inventing Lord Peter Wimsey. He walked in complete with spats and applied in an airy don’t-care-if-I-don’t-get-it way for the job of hero.”
She badly needed to make more money, though, and she wasn’t going to get it writing poetry and ad copy, so she read the newspapers to see what people liked to read about. Two subjects jumped out at her—detectives and the aristrocracy. “There is a market for detective literature if one can get in,” she wrote to her parents, “and he [Wimsey] might go some way towards providing bread and cheese.” Later, she wrote, “I do not as a matter of fact remember inventing Lord Peter Wimsey. He walked in complete with spats and applied in an airy don’t-care-if-I-don’t-get-it way for the job of hero.”
She especially liked making him rich, because spending his money “cost me nothing, and at the time I was particularly hard up…When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room, I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare, I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it.”
She was thirty years old when she sold Whose Body? and she never looked back, becoming one of the paramount figures of British detective fiction in all the different ways mentioned at the top of this piece. Her personal life, however, was much more of a mess.
A passionate affair with a Jewish Russian writer named John Cournos ended bitterly. He believed in free love, she believed in marriage, and even after she slept with him against her religious principles, he deserted her and went on to marry someone else (a crime writer!). “I dare say I wanted too much,” she wrote him. “I could not be content with less than your love and your children and our happy acknowledgement of each other to the world…you went out of your way to insist you would give me none of them.”
Things did not get much better with an unemployed motor-car salesman named Bill White. She slept with him, too, got pregnant, and when she told him about it, he stormed out “in rage and misery.” Sayers felt she couldn’t tell anybody about her pregnancy, least of all her parents. She took eight weeks’ leave from the advertising agency and went alone to a “mother’s hospital” in Hampshire, where her son, John Anthony, was born in January 1924. She couldn’t brazen things out—her religious principles wouldn’t let her—so she arranged for him to be raised by a cousin, Ivy Shrimpton. At first, she told her cousin only that the boy was a “friend’s”—it was only when Ivy agreed to take him that she sent a letter revealing the truth and swearing her to secrecy. Sayers’ parents never found out about him.
Two years later, she married a journalist named Oswald “Mac” Fleming and they adopted John…but he never lived with them, nor did she tell him she was his mother. They stayed in close contact and she provided him with a good education, but it was only when he obtained his birth certificate while applying for a passport that he knew the truth. He died in 1984 at the age of sixty.
The marriage to Fleming was odd in its own way. He was an alcoholic and, due to being gassed in the War, was too ill to earn a living, and she eventually moved him to a house she bought in Essex. He was not introduced to her friends. What seemed clear, wrote a biographer who knew her “was that this was by no means a normal marriage.” He died in 1950.
Meanwhile, she was growing rich and famous from her detective fiction—and then she stopped. One reason was the new war. From November 1939 to January 1940, she published a series of pieces in The Spectator about the early days of the war, purporting to be letters from members of Wimsey’s family, plus friends and associates and a couple of characters from her books. In one of them, the Dowager Duchess tells Harriet that, responding to a woman who wanted to know when the next Harriet Vane murder-story would be out, she replied, “I said you thought the dictators were doing quite enough in that way.” Sayers herself said in a letter, “I have turned to other work, feeling that with so much violence and sudden death about, a few private corpses are something of a superfluity.”
There is also this, from Gaudy Night. After a gala dinner at Harriet’s old Oxford college, “Two phrases rang in her ear: the Dean’s ‘It’s the work you’re doing that really counts;’ and that one melancholy lament for eternal loss: ‘Once, I was a scholar.’” Sayers had always loved the scholarship of which she’d been a part at Somerville College, and her involvement with Christianity and the Church of England was getting deeper all the time. She had the money now. She could follow her passion.
Hell was published in 1949, Purgatory in 1955, and she was still working on Paradise when she died in 1957. It was finished by another and published in 1962. Sayers considered her work on Dante to be her finest achievement.
In 1929, she’d already published a translation from the medieval French of the poem Tristan, and she’d later do one of The Song of Roland. But now she threw herself into Dante. In August 1944, she’d grabbed a book to take down with her to the air-raid shelter, and discovered it was Dante’s Inferno. Entranced by its language, she undertook to translate The Divine Comedy on her own. Hell was published in 1949, Purgatory in 1955, and she was still working on Paradise when she died in 1957. It was finished by another and published in 1962. Sayers considered her work on Dante to be her finest achievement.
She also dived deep into religious literature with an outpouring of books, poems, plays, and radio plays, the best known of the latter being The Man Born to be King, a twelve-play cycle for BBC Radio in 1942 that told the story of Christ in contemporary language. The concept was controversial, but the reception was enthusiastic. The Church of England was so pleased by it and her other Christian writings that in 1943 the Archbishop of Canterbury offered her an honorary doctorate in divinity. She declined, but in 1950 did accept an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Durham. Her essay, “The Tools of Learning,” had become a guiding force for several American schools as a basis for the revival of classical education.
She also wrote a far more controversial essay in 1945. Asked to contribute to a symposium about Jews in England, she sent in a piece symptomatic of what one commentator has called her “increasingly idiosyncratic Christian theology,” that said the coming of Christ had been “the turning-point of human history” and the “Jewish nation” had “missed that turning-point and got stranded.” The essay was withdrawn after several Jewish contributors refused to allow their work in print alongside it.
There has been a long-simmering debate about whether Sayers was anti-Semitic. Her biographers come down on both sides and many papers have been written. Of course, we all know that there tended to be a distressingly high amount of casual anti-Semitism in British society and among the British intelligentsia at that time—and sadly not just them and not just then. Many people have pointed out that both of Sayers’ publishers were Jewish, her agent was Jewish, and the chief rabbi of Great Britain was a friend. And even in the books, Wimsey’s good friend Freddie Arbuthnot marries a Jewish woman in a synagogue, and Wimsey stands in as his best man: “You keep your hat on, don’t forget,” says Freddie.
But Freddie also says, regarding any children, “it would be all to the little beggars’ advantage to be in with the Levy and Goldberg crowd, especially if the boys were to turn out anything in the financial way” (Strong Poison). Ouch. There’s a lot to cringe about here, and it isn’t always “casual.”
But I’ll let you explore that for yourself. This piece today is about all the things she did right—which is basically everything else. I’m going to give the final word about her life and work to some of her peers.
Ruth Rendell: She had a “great fertility of invention, ingenuity, and a wonderful eye for detail.”
P.D. James: “She brought to the detective novel originality, intelligence, energy, and wit. Gaudy Night is one of the most successful marriages of the puzzle with the novel of social realism and serious purpose. It tells me, as a writer of today, that it is possible to construct a credible and enthralling mystery and marry it successfully to a theme of psychological subtlety, and this is perhaps the most important of Dorothy L. Sayers’ legacies to writers and readers.”
C.S. Lewis: “She aspired to be, and was, at once a popular entertainer and a conscientious craftsman: like (in her degree) Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, or Moliere. I have an idea that, with a very few exceptions, it is only such writers who matter much in the long run.”
In 1990, the UK Crime Writers’ Association published a list of the Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time. She had four of them, topped by Gaudy Night at #4. In 1995, the Mystery Writers of America published their own list of 100 novels—and she had five.
There is a plaque on her house in Essex, which has been preserved, and a little bronze statue outside. On October 8, 1985, the Times of London announced the Golden Wedding anniversary of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane in its Society page. And to celebrate the 100th birthday of Lord Peter on November 24th, 1990, a portrait of a twenty-one-year-old Wimsey was presented to Balliol College, Oxford University. On accepting it, the Master of Balliol congratulated the Dorothy L. Sayers Society on its celebration of “Lord Peter Wimsey, a graduate of this college.”
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The Essential Sayers
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With any prolific author, readers are likely to have their own particular favorites, which may not be the same as anyone else’s. Your list is likely to be just as good as mine—but here are the ones I recommend.
Strong Poison (1930)
There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.
We are in court, Harriet Vane is in the dock, and it doesn’t look good for her. Her ex-lover is dead from arsenic poisoning, and the defendant, a murder mystery novelist, has admitted buying several different poisons beforehand, including arsenic, she says for her research.
For the first two chapters, the judge painstakingly summarizes the case before the jury, just as painstakingly leaving no doubt on which side of the verdict he stands. “The old man clasped his hands one over the other upon the sheaf of notes and leaned a little forward. He had it all in his head….he held it pinned down flat under his wrinkled fingers with their gray, chalky nails.”
The only one who believes Vane is Peter Wimsey, sitting in the gallery. Well, almost the only one. The verdict is expected to take twenty minutes. Instead, after six hours, there’s a hung jury. Someone on the panel—a certain Miss Climpson—refuses to convict her. Wimsey has his chance, but a damned small one—the retrial is only one month away.
His contempt for the barrister is clear: The defense “probably couldn’t trace a herd of black cattle over a snow-bound field in broad noonday with a microscope.” His attraction for Vane is even clearer, and though she is taken aback by his declaration of love, she does sense something there: “If anybody ever marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle….I used to piffle rather well myself,” she adds sadly, “but it’s got knocked out of me.”
It is up to Wimsey, Miss Climpson, and her intrepid cohort Miss Murchison to find out the truth about the murder—but the clock is ticking, and Wimsey becomes furious at himself for not making more progress “to save the woman he imperiously wanted from a sordid death by hanging. And he had thought himself clever at that kind of thing.”
Tick-tock, Peter. A wonderful introduction to Harriet Vane, a great use of supporting characters, and an excellent mystery in itself.
The Nine Tailors (1934)
“Toll-toll-toll; and a pause; toll-toll-toll; and a pause; toll-toll-toll; the nine tailors, or teller-strokes, that mark the passing of a man. The year is dead, toll him out with twelve strokes more, one for every passing month. Then silence.”
Character is everything in The Nine Tailors, and the character that counts the most is the landscape itself: the Fens, that vast area of unnervingly flat land in Eastern England between Lincoln and Cambridge that always seems on the brink of being inundated by the river. The second greatest character is the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul, magnificent, glorious, and the cause of two mens’ deaths already. And the third is that of a body found in a grave, and not the one that belongs there. Its face is mutilated, the hands cut off at the wrist. Who is he? Why is he there? The bells know, and, as Wimsey discovers, the secret they keep is gruesome, one that for the first time makes him consider that perhaps some mysteries are best left unsolved, because the solution may cause more pain than relief.
The information Sayers provides about campanology, the art of bell-ringing, is fascinating; the portraits of the village’s inhabitants are delightful; but nothing can beat the haunting presence of that brooding landscape, especially in the catastrophic finale.
“The whole world was lost now in one vast sheet of water. He hauled himself to his feet and gazed out from horizon to horizon. To the south-west St. Stephen’s tower still brooded over a dark platform of land, like a broken mast upon a sinking ship. Every house in the village was lit up: St. Stephen was riding out the storm. Westward, the thin line of the railway embankment stretched away to Little Dykesey, unvanquished as yet, but perilously besieged. Due south, Fenchurch St. Peter, roofs and spire etched black against the silver, was the center of a great mere. Close beneath the tower, the village of St. Paul lay abandoned, waiting for its fate. Away to the east, a faint penciling marked the corner of the Potters Lode Bank, and while he watched it, it seemed to waver and vanish beneath the marching tide.”
Gaudy Night (1935)
“Well, Miss Vane, you have had some very varied experiences since we saw you last.”
Harriet has been persuaded, against her own better judgment, to come back to her old college at Oxford for a “Gaudy”—a reunion dinner. Since leaving there, she reflects ruefully, she has “broken all her old ties and half the commandments, dragged her reputation in the dust and made money,” and she really doesn’t know how she’ll be received. Warmly, it turns out…except for the note she finds slipped into her gown: YOU DIRTY MURDERESS, AREN’T YOU ASHAMED TO SHOW YOUR FACE?
This won’t be the last such shock. Over the next few months, Shrewsbury College has many such incidents—no one is murdered, but there is definitely an attempt at it, plus another near-death, and any number of ugly events: poison pen letters; vicious, obscene graffiti; vandalism; effigies; blackmail; malevolence in many forms. Invited back to investigate, Harriet must determine who’s responsible, but there’s a great deal more going on in the novel than just an unusual mystery. It is here that Harriet must finally resolve for herself her relationship with Wimsey; to figure out the balance between love and work, heart and brain; to explore responsibility, commitment, friendship, and the need to find the one true thing you’re willing to defend, no matter what the cost. Both aided and buffeted by an extraordinary cast of supporting characters, mostly women—dons, deans, and former students, all infused with histories, contradictions, favors, faults, and cross-currents—she is Sayers herself at both her intellectual and emotional best, probing not only love and equality, but women’s place in society, and Sayers’ own work .”You haven’t yet written the book you could write if you tried,” Wimsey tells Harriet. “And you’ll get no peace until you do.”
For Sayers, this is that book, the one, she later wrote, in which she found herself saying “the things that, in a confused way, I had been wanting to say all my life.” It is raw, provocative, and deeply moving, and I love everything about it.
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Book Bonus
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Much to talk about here!
Sayers’ one non-Wimsey novel was The Documents in the Case (1930), co-written with an eminent doctor, Robert Eustace, who suggested the particular scientific twist at the heart of the book. It is indeed told through documents—letters, statements, notes, news items—and though Sayers herself was disappointed with the book, it’s worth reading.
Sayers also wrote 44 short stories—21 with Wimsey, 11 featuring a traveling wine salesman named Montague Egg, and 12 others. Taken together, these stories range all over the map, from the puzzle-oriented (“The Queen’s Square,” “The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will,” “The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question”) to the Hitchcockian (“Suspicion,” “The Fountain Plays,” “Dilemma,” “The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran”) to the light and playful (“The Milk-Bottles,” “An Arrow O’er the House,” “The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste”) to blood and thunder (“The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba”) to outright horror (“The Abominable History of the Man with the Copper Fingers”). There are also two sweet and delightful tales featuring Wimsey, Harriet, and their family—“The Haunted Policeman,” in which we see a thoroughly nonplussed Wimsey at the birth of his first son (see Nonplussed Bonus below), and “Talboys,” in which they now have three sons. This last story was unpublished in her lifetime and was found in her papers. The short stories were published in four collections—Lord Peter Views the Body (1928), Hangman’s Holiday (1933), In the Teeth of the Evidence (1939), and Striding Folly (1972)—and in a fifth collection, Lord Peter (1972) that brings together all the Wimsey stories in one book.
Sayers was also a contributor to and the engine behind three books written with members of the Detection Club. The Floating Admiral (1931) had thirteen writers, each of whom wrote a chapter—and a confidential solution to the case—before passing the torch to the next one. In Ask a Policeman (1933), six writers swapped protagonists to solve a murder—Sayers took on Anthony Berkeley’s detective, while Berkeley did Lord Peter Wimsey. And in Six Against the Yard (1936), six of them devised a “perfect murder,” while a real-life Scotland Yard superintendent examined each story for flaws. Sayers was reportedly quite offended by his criticisms of her contribution, “Blood Sacrifice.” You can decide for yourself—it was also included in In the Teeth of the Evidence. It seems pretty good to me, but what do I know? I’m no Scotland Yard superintendent.
In addition, after her death, a partial novel called Thrones, Dominations, abandoned in 1936, was found in a safe at Sayers’ literary agency. A writer named Jill Paton Walsh was brought in to complete it, and its publication in 1988 was met with enough approbation that she continued on to write three more, A Presumption of Death (2002), The Attenbury Emeralds (2010), and The Late Scholar (2013).
Finally, for those who are curious, four volumes of Sayers’ letters from 1899 through 1957 have been published. As you’ve seen from just the few brief excerpts included in this piece, her correspondence style was vivid and she held little back. Definitely worth a look for the insights into her life and work, and for the writing itself.
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Movie and TV Bonus
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Only two Wimsey movies were ever made, for good reason, as you’ll see. The first, The Silent Passenger (1935), was from an original story she wrote for Ealing Studios. It featured Wimsey on a train from London to the English Channel; an acquaintance is accused of murder and Wimsey sets out to find the real killer. Wen she read the script itself, she wrote to Peter Haddon, the actor who played Wimsey, “they have…turned Wimsey into a kind of Gaiety-Bar lounger,” instead of the “straight, high-comedy part on the ‘great gentleman’ lines that I have tried to lay down for him.” She demanded they change Wimsey’s character back. They didn’t. When Haddon wrote her later about doing another Wimsey movie, she replied, “There could not be a worse moment than this for letting film-minded people tamper with Peter. I will see the whole bunch of fools and liars at Elstree and Ealing in hell first.”
In 1940, MGM made a movie of Busman’s Honeymoon starring Robert Montgomery and Constance Cummings. That novel had first been a play in London before she turned it into a book, and the movie, retitled as Haunted Honeymoon in the U.S., bore little resemblance to either. She refused even to see the film.
With television, she had much better luck, albeit not till well after her death. From 1972 to 1975, the BBC made four-to-five-episode mini-series out of five of the Wimsey novels, featuring the great English comic actor Ian Carmichael. It was a passion project for him, and it took him several years to convince the BBC that it would work for both British and American audiences: “The overseas sales advisors expressed the view that the subject would, and I quote, ‘by no means be an easy sale across the Atlantic.’” As it turned out, when they were shown on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, they were such a huge hit that they led PBS to create the series Mystery!,which has run ever since.
Carmichael was eager to film all of the Sayers novels, but after the fifth one was finished, the BBC stopped. “From that day to this,” he wrote in 1984, “I have heard no more from my employer. The series has been abandoned, and Harriet Vane has never appeared on a TV screen.” Someone must have seen the light, however, because in 1987, the BBC made a ten-part series of just that: Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, and Gaudy Night, with Edward Petherbridge as Peter, and Harriet Walter as, well, Harriet. It had been noted that, with all of his skill, Carmichael had been a little long in the tooth, at the age of 56, to play Wimsey in his 30s. Petherbridge, at 41, was closer to the mark and as The New York Times wrote, he “not only looks the part, but also manages to convey the darker tones beneath the surface frivolity of the character.”
Speaking for myself, I saw the series of both gentlemen when they were broadcast, and loved them both. Hunt them down, they’re still available. And Carmichael went on to make nine of the Sayers books for BBC Radio, including two of the Vanes; if he couldn’t do it one way, he did it another.
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Meta Bonus
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Harriet besieged at the Gaudy: “Heavens! Here was that awful woman Muriel Campshott coming up to claim acquaintance. Campshott had always simpered. She still simpered. And she was dressed in a shocking shade of green. She was going to say, ‘How do you think of all your plots?’ She did say it. Curse the woman.”
- Gaudy Night
Wimsey tells Harriet he’s thought of a plot for a detective story: “You know, the sort people bring out and say, ‘I’ve often thought of doing it myself, if I could only find time to sit down and write it.’ I gather that sitting down is all that is necessary for producing masterpieces.”
- Strong Poison
Harriet find someone on the beach, sleeping (or so she thinks): “Now if I had any luck, he’d be a corpse, and I should report him and get my name in the papers. That would be something like publicity. ‘Well-Known Woman Detective Writer Finds Mystery Corpse on Lonely Shore.’ But these things never happen to authors.”
- Have His Carcase
“’If only I knew why they wanted to know about Monday night.’
“They want to find the last person who saw the man alive,’ said Wimsey, promptly. ‘It’s always done. It’s part of the regular show. You get it in all the mystery stories. Of course, the last person to see him never commits the crime. That would make it too easy. One of these days I shall write a book in which two men are seen to walk down a cul-de-sac, and there is a shot and one man is found murdered and the other runs away with a gun in his hand, and after twenty chapters stinking with red herrings, it turns out that the man with the gun did it after all.’”
- The Five Red Herrings
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Nonplussed Bonus
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“’Good God!’ said his lordship. ‘Did I do that?’
“’All the evidence points that way,’ replied his wife.
“’Then I can only say that I never knew so convincing a body of evidence produce such an inadequate result.’
“The nurse appeared to take this reflection personally. She said in a tone of rebuke:
“’He’s a beautiful boy.’
“’H’m,’ said Peter. He adjusted his eyeglass more carefully. ‘Well, you’re the expert witness. Hand him over.’
“The nurse did so with a dubious air. She was relieved to see that this disconcerting parent handled the child competently; as, in a man who was an experienced uncle, was not, after all, so very surprising. Lord Peter sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed.
“’Do you feel it’s up to standard?’ he inquired with some anxiety. ‘Of course, your workmanship’s always sound—but you never know with these collaborative efforts.’
“’I think it’ll do,’ said Harriet drowsily.
“’Good.’ He turned abruptly to the nurse. ‘All right; we’ll keep it. Take it and put it away, and tell ‘em to invoice it to me.’”
