His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.
(Chapter 1)
‘Hate anything tiresome happenin’ before breakfast. Takes a man at such a confounded disadvantage, what?’
(Chapter 1)
Lord Peter’s library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London.
(Chapter 2)
‘Worse things happen in war. This is only a blinkin’ old shillin’ shocker.’
(Chapter 2)
‘I don’t think much of your burglary, Bunter,’ said Lord Peter. ‘Competent, of course, but no imagination. I want imagination in a criminal.’
(Chapter 5)
‘When anybody comes blackmailin’ you, Gerald, or your first deserted wife turns up unexpectedly from the West Indies, you’ll realize the pull of havin’ a private detective in the family. ‘Delicate private business arranged with tact and discretion. Investigations undertaken. Divorce evidence a specialty. Every guarantee!’
(Wimsey mocking his hobby to his brother Gerald, Chapter 9)
Parker and Lord Peter were at 110 Piccadilly. Lord Peter was playing Bach and Parker was reading Origen when Sugg was announced.
(Origen! The very highbrow references which sit oddly beside Wimsey’s upper-class attitudes)
The surest and simplest method of making a thing appear to have been done is to do it.
(A murderer’s advice, Chapter 13)
Posh
I knew Lord Peter Wimsey was posh – obviously that’s indicated by his title – but I didn’t realise quite how much of a posh caricature he was:
‘Good-night, sir—good-night, dear lady—it’s simply rippin’ of you to let me drop in like this.’
Wimsey’s comedy, stagey upper-classness is really rammed home on every page, what with his loyal butler, his fastidiousness about clothes and cuisine, his comically upper class family with a village fete-opening dowager duchess for a mother, and so on and so on. Indeed every time he opens his mouth it’s to drop his h’s in the classic upper-class huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ manner.
‘Six bloomin’ medicos contradictin’ each other in the box, an’ old Impey elocutin’ abnormal cases from Glaister and Dixon Mann till the eyes of the jury reeled in their heads!’
And everywhere the effortless confidence of the natural-born aristocrat to handle any situation and any person, no matter how unpleasant, without losing his poise.
‘I don’t, fathead,’ said Lord Peter, with the easy politeness of the real aristocracy.
Peter’s profile
Lord Peter Wimsey is the second son of Mortimer Wimsey, the 15th Duke of Denver, deceased, and his wife, now the Dowager Duchess of Denver. She resides at the family home, the Dower House, Denver Castle, along with her eldest son, Gerald, who inherited the title and became the sixteenth Duke of Denver. His appearance?
The fingers were long and muscular, with wide, flat joints and square tips. When he was playing, his rather hard grey eyes softened, and his long, indeterminate mouth hardened in compensation. At no other time had he any pretensions to good looks, and at all times he was spoilt by a long, narrow chin, and a long, receding forehead, accentuated by the brushed-back sleekness of his tow-coloured hair. Labour papers, softening down the chin, caricatured him as a typical aristocrat. (Chapter 3)
The name?
‘We always have a Peter, after the third duke, who betrayed five kings somewhere about the Wars of the Roses, though come to think of it, it ain’t anything to be proud of. Still, one has to make the best of it.’ (Chapter 4)
Peter had ‘the finest education’ – Eton and Balliol – and now resides at 110 Piccadilly West, in an apartment overlooking Green Park. He is attended by his loyal butler, Mervyn Bunter, as fastidious about Lord Peter’s clothes and shoes, ties and buttonholes and cane and hat, as Jeeves is for Bertie Wooster’s. For which he is paid the princely salary of £200 per annum.
Their relationship is explained a bit when we learn that Peter was a Major during the war and Bunter was his sergeant and batman. And even more, that Wimsey has shell-shock, and has vivid waking nightmares of life in the trenches, when Bunter has to calm him down, see him back to bed, and administer a sedative…
As to that cane:
‘I measured it with my stick—the gentleman-scout’s vade-mecum, I call it—it’s marked off in inches. Uncommonly handy companion at times. There’s a sword inside and a compass in the head. Got it made specially.’
Wimsey is a member of the Marlborough Club. He smokes a pipe.
With no work to occupy him, Lord Peter’s hobby is collecting rare books. But his real interest is an amateur activity as a freelance investigator or detective, a dilettante who solves mysteries for his own amusement, Wimsey is an archetype for the British gentleman detective. As the provincial solicitor Mr Wicks puts it, he is ‘a distinguished amateur of crime.’ And his mother:
The Duchess was always of the greatest assistance to his hobby of criminal investigation, though she never alluded to it, and maintained a polite fiction of its non-existence. (Chapter 1)
His motivation?
‘It’s a hobby to me, you see. I took it up when the bottom of things was rather knocked out for me, because it was so damned exciting, and the worst of it is, I enjoy it—up to a point. If it was all on paper I’d enjoy every bit of it. I love the beginning of a job—when one doesn’t know any of the people and it’s just exciting and amusing. But if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don’t seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin’ in, since I don’t have to make my livin’ by it. And I feel as if I oughtn’t ever to find it amusin’. But I do.’ (Chapter 7)
These classic detectives tend to have a dim police officer as a foil: for Sherlock Holmes it’s Inspector Lestrade, for Hercule Poirot it’s Chief Inspector Japp. For Peter, its Inspector Sugg at Scotland Yard, narrow, unimaginative, inflexible and always wrong. Wimsey has even coined a term, ‘Suggery’, to describe obtuse, clue-missing dimness (Chapter 10).
On the plus side, Wimsey is good friends and works well with a completely different type of copper, young Detective Charles Parker.
To an outsider
Late in the story, Parker secures the services of a medical student, Piggott, who he takes to Wimsey’s apartment where he is overawed by the luxury. Here’s how he sees Wimsey:
The friend was embarrassing; he was a lord, to begin with, and his clothes were a kind of rebuke to the world at large. He talked the most fatuous nonsense, certainly, but in a disconcerting way. He didn’t dig into a joke and get all the fun out of it; he made it in passing, so to speak, and skipped 189away to something else before your retort was ready. He had a truly terrible man-servant—the sort you read about in books—who froze the marrow in your bones with silent criticism. (Chapter 10)
Quotes and literary references
Agatha Christie had an erratic education and did not go to university. Dorothy L. Sayers very much did go to university. Outstandingly clever at her boarding school, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with first class honours in medieval French.
(Despite her examination results, she was ineligible to be awarded a degree, as Oxford did not formally confer them on women. When the university changed its rules in 1920, Sayers was among the first to have her degree officially awarded.)
This is important because the Wimsey stories differ from Christie and others in the field, not just because Wimsey is such an extraordinarily posh upper-class caricature – but because he and other characters, and the narrator, continually drop cultural references left, right and centre.
It starts with the way Wimsey is a bibliophile i.e. a collector of rare original editions of rare and ancient books. In fact the opening scene of the first novel depicts Wimsey en route to an auction of precious books and briefing his butler about which ones matter to him:
‘The Folio Dante nor the de Voragine—here you are—see? ‘Golden Legend’—Wynkyn de Worde, 1493—got that?—and, I say, make a special effort for the Caxton folio of the ‘Four Sons of Aymon’—it’s the 1489 folio and unique.’ (Chapter 1)
Other quotes and references include:
what Lord Beaconsfield described as a masterly inactivity
The golden mean, Sugg, as Aristotle says, keeps you from bein’ a golden ass.
‘you know, dear—just the proverbial way of putting things—like ‘a saint abroad and a devil at home’—only the other way on, reminding one of the Pilgrim’s Progress.’
‘He’s tough, sir, tough, is old Joey Bagstock, tough and devilish sly’ from Dickens
Sayers has Freke cite ‘Sludge the Medium’, the dramatic poem by Robert Browning. A little later Tennyson appears, then Shakespeare (OK, Christie regularly quotes the obvious Shakespeare). But even her dim socialite characters are relatively well-read.
‘One demands a little originality in these days, even from murderers,’ said Lady Swaffham. ‘Like dramatists, you know—so much easier in Shakespeare’s time, wasn’t it? Always the same girl dressed up as a man, and even that borrowed from Boccaccio or Dante or somebody. I’m sure if I’d been a Shakespeare hero, the very minute I saw a slim-legged young page-boy I’d have said: ‘Odsbodikins! There’s that girl again!’’ (Chapter 7)
And the quotes aren’t just throwaway show-off references, they are frequently part of the woof and web of the character’s thoughts, for example the way the quote from Coleridge’s Xanadu crystallises the wider thought process going on in his mind:
He [Wimsey] traced out this line and that line of investigation—rivers running into the sand. They ran out from the thought of Levy, last seen at ten o’clock in Prince of Wales Road. They ran back from the picture of the grotesque dead man in Mr Thipps’s bathroom—they ran over the roof, and were lost—lost in the sand. Rivers running into the sand—rivers running underground, very far down—
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
At the breakthrough moment of the plot, Wimsey quotes the early Christian theologian Tertullian, entirely appositely.
Lord Peter Wimsey was not a young man who habitually took himself very seriously, but this time he was frankly appalled. ‘It’s impossible,’ said his reason, feebly; ‘credo quia impossibile,’ said his interior certainty with impervious self-satisfaction. (Chapter 8)
Later, after he cross-questions the medical student Piggott, Wimsey remarks that he remembers everything, ‘like Socrates’s slave’, a reference to Plato’s dialogue Meno.
In other words, the quotes aren’t bolted onto the narrative, but are a natural expression of how it thinks, of How Wimsey thinks. Of how the highly literate Sayers thought.
Even the unflamboyant professional, Parker, has surprisingly highbrow tastes.
Parker was sitting in an elderly but affectionate armchair, with his feet on the mantelpiece, relaxing his mind with a modern commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. (Chapter 7)
Music
And not just quoting literature, nursery rhymes, folk songs and limericks; also music.
Lord Peter finished a Scarlatti sonata, and sat looking thoughtfully at his own hands. The fingers were long and muscular, with wide, flat joints and square tips. When he was playing, his rather hard grey eyes softened, and his long, indeterminate mouth hardened in compensation. At no other time had he any pretensions to good looks, and at all times he was spoilt by a long, narrow chin, and a long, receding forehead, accentuated by the brushed-back sleekness of his tow-coloured hair. Labour papers, softening down the chin, caricatured him as a typical aristocrat.
‘That’s a wonderful instrument,’ said Parker.
‘It ain’t so bad,’ said Lord Peter, ‘but Scarlatti wants a harpsichord. Piano’s too modern—all thrills and overtones.’
This is the high culture that an expensive education buys you.
Freud
He roused himself, threw a log on the fire, and picked up a book which the indefatigable Bunter, carrying on his daily fatigues amid the excitements of special duty, had brought from the Times Book Club. It happened to be Sir Julian Freke’s Physiological Bases of the Conscience, which he had seen reviewed two days before. ‘This ought to send one to sleep,’ said Lord Peter; ‘if I can’t leave these problems to my subconscious I’ll be as limp as a rag tomorrow.’
Intellectual
Sayers goes out of her way to make Wimsey seem like an upper-class fool and yet, at other moments, he is given intensely intellectual cerebrations (i.e. ways of thinking).
And then it happened—the thing he had been half-unconsciously expecting. It happened suddenly, surely, as unmistakably, as sunrise. He remembered—not one thing, nor another thing, nor a logical succession of things, but everything—the whole thing, perfect, complete, in all its dimensions as it were and instantaneously; as if he stood outside the world and saw it suspended in infinitely dimensional space. He no longer needed to reason about it, or even to think about it. He knew it.
There is a game in which one is presented with a jumble of letters and is required to make a word out of them, as thus:
C O S S S S R I
The slow way of solving the problem is to try out all the permutations and combinations in turn, throwing away impossible conjunctions of letters, as:
S S S I R C
or
S C S R S O
Another way is to stare at the inco-ordinate elements until, by no logical process that the conscious mind can detect, or under some adventitious external stimulus, the combination:
S C I S S O R S
presents itself with calm certainty. After that, one does not even need to arrange the letters in order. The thing is done.
Or take the elaborate passage in Chapter 5, where Wimsey lays out all the possible scenarios which could explain the murder, in terms of five carefully worked-out hypotheses. But it isn’t just a brief paragraph, it goes on for page after page, it’s massive. And note how the posh huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ dropping of g’s and other upper-class mannerisms have completely disappeared. It reads like a textbook of logic. Here’s just part of it:
‘Yes,’ said Wimsey. ‘Then Possibility No. 3 is knocked on the head. There remain Possibility No. 1: Accident or Misunderstanding, and No. 2: Deliberate Villainy, of a remarkably bold and calculating kind—of a kind, in fact, characteristic of the author or authors of our two problems. Following the methods inculcated at that University of which I have the honour to be a member, we will now examine severally the various suggestions afforded by Possibility No. 2.
This Possibility may be again subdivided into two or more Hypotheses. On Hypothesis 1 (strongly advocated by my distinguished colleague Professor Snupshed), the criminal, whom we may designate as X, is not identical with Crimplesham, but is using the name of Crimplesham as his shield, or aegis. This hypothesis may be further subdivided into two alternatives.
Alternative A: Crimplesham is an innocent and unconscious accomplice, and X is in his employment. 97X writes in Crimplesham’s name on Crimplesham’s office-paper and obtains that the object in question, i.e., the eyeglasses, be despatched to Crimplesham’s address. He is in a position to intercept the parcel before it reaches Crimplesham. The presumption is that X is Crimplesham’s charwoman, office-boy, clerk, secretary or porter. This offers a wide field of investigation. The method of inquiry will be to interview Crimplesham and discover whether he sent the letter, and if not, who has access to his correspondence.
Alternative B: Crimplesham is under X’s influence or in his power, and has been induced to write the letter by (a) bribery, (b) misrepresentation or (c) threats. X may in that case be a persuasive relation or friend, or else a creditor, blackmailer or assassin; Crimplesham, on the other hand, is obviously venal or a fool.
The method of inquiry in this case, I would tentatively suggest, is again to interview Crimplesham, put the facts of the case strongly before him, and assure him in the most intimidating terms that he is liable to a prolonged term of penal servitude as an accessory after the fact in the crime of murder— Ah-hem! Trusting, gentlemen, that you have followed me thus far, we will pass to the consideration of Hypothesis No. 2, to which I personally incline, and according to which X is identical with Crimplesham.
This goes on for page after page – and even after the main disquisition is over, there’s a further discussion in similar tone and detail of whether Wimsey or Parker should go down to Salisbury to visit Mr Crimplesham.
‘Very well,’ said the detective, ‘is it to be you or me or both of us?’
‘It is to be me,’ said Lord Peter, ‘and that for two reasons. First, because, if (by Possibility No. 2, Hypothesis 1, Alternative A) Crimplesham is an innocent catspaw, the person who put in the advertisement is the proper person to hand over the property. Secondly, because, if we are to adopt Hypothesis 2, we must not overlook the sinister possibility that Crimplesham-X is laying a careful trap to rid himself of the person who so unwarily advertised in the daily press his interest in the solution of the Battersea Park mystery.’
Notice anything about the style? Gone are all the dropped h’s and upper-class affectations. Instead this is the plain prose of pure logic. It’s a revelation that this is what Wimsey, and Sayers, can be like when they want to.
Plot summary
Lord Peter Wimsey is on his way to an auction of antique books when his mother calls to say that an architect (actually a builder) named Thipps, has just found a naked corpse in his bath, in an apartment in Battersea. Intrigued, Wimsey gets his valet, Bunter, to go to the auction in his place while he takes a cab to Battersea.
Sure enough there is a naked man in Thipp’s bath, naked apart from a gold pince-nez on a chain. The police investigation is led by Inspector Sugg for whose slowness and obstinacy Wimsey has a healthy contempt. It’s Sugg who wonders whether the body is that of the well-known City financier Sir Reuben Levy, who has been reported missing from his house on the same night.
The investigation into Sir Reuben’s disappearance is being led by Inspector Charles Parker who is a friend of Wimsey’s.
Although the body in the bath superficially resembles Sir Reuben’s it quickly becomes clear that it is not him, and it initially appears that the cases may be unconnected.
Now Thipps’s flat is near a teaching hospital, St Luke’s, which suggests the possibility that the body might have been put in Thipp’s bathroom as a student prank. But this is contradicted by the surgeon and neurologist Sir Julian Freke, in charge of St Luke’s, who says no corpse is missing from his dissecting room.
In fact the body in the bath is eventually identified as the inmate of Chelsea workhouse who’d had an unpleasant accident (some scaffolding fell on his neck) and died a lingering death…
One red herring follows another, the biggest one being when Wimsey advertises in The Times for the owner of the pince-nez and gets a response from an elderly solicitor in Salisbury who he travels down to visit, with the comic effect that the old man refuses to believe Wimsey’s who he claims to be, until Wimsey is vouched for by his younger colleague. For a while one or either of them are suspects…
Another red herring relates to Thipp’s maid, Gladys Horrocks, who is discovered to have slipped out with her fancy man, Williams the glazier, and gone to a nightclub in Soho, which leads unimaginative Inspector Sugg to immediately arrest her.
And another one concerns a brash and confident American businessman based in London, one Mr John P. Milligan, who is a fierce business rival of Reuben’s and, at one stage, considered a suspect for this reason – despite the fact that he is charmed by the old Duchess into making a donation to the fund to restore her local parish church, and even to attend one of her village fetes.
We learn that bunter has an informed interest in cameras and uses the latest one that Wimsey buys him to take photos of fingerprints on suspect surfaces, then blow them up for analysis. A handy hobby for a gentleman detective’s man-servant.
A recurring comic thread is the loud, fearless abuse emitted by Thipp’s deaf old mother at anyone who goes near her.
There’s a long, long verbatim description of the inquest into the body in the bath, as attended by Parker and Wimsey’s mother, the Dowager Duchess.
Slowly out of the fog of details, and Wimsey’s own flippant attitude, clarity emerges until all the evidence starts to point towards the surgeon, Freke. Wimsey’s mother fills us in on some crucial backstory when she tells her son that Freke was in love with a young woman named Christine Ford, of a good country family, but that she fell in love with young handsome Levy and eloped with him, infuriating Freke, well… we have our motive, even though it happened 20 years earlier.
Slowly a series of circumstantial details create more links between the two cases, the unknown body in the bath and the mysterious disappearance of Levy.
It is Wimsey who connects the two but rather than go straight to the police, instead he goes to visit Freke in his capacity as nerve specialist, and tell him about the symptoms of his ongoing shell shock or PTSD, picked up in the recent war. This is another long dramatic scene because Wimsey manages to hint, through his answers to Freke’s extended questioning, that he (Wimsey) knows Freke is guilty. it leads up to a genuinely tense moment as Freke casually advises injecting a tranquiliser, and actually has a hypodermic in his hand and is about to stick it in Wimsey’s arm, when the latter grabs his hand in a vicelike grip (sic) and decides he won’t have the injection after all. Just as well; later, Freke confirms that it contained a lethal poison.
This is swiftly followed by another set-piece scene, in the cemetery where the dead man from the Chelsea workhouse was allegedly buried, which is the setting for his ghoulish disinterment. Various officials supervise the digging up of the coffin, its moving to an outbuilding, the bringing of a lamp and opening of the coffin, investigation of the body. The body is, as Wimsey predicted, not that of a pauper but of Reuben Levy.
But what really matters about the scene is the deliberately dramatic style Sayers writes it in, more Dickens than 1920s, with its gravel crunching underfoot and uneven headstones looming up out of the swirling fog, and the abrupt transition from the placid third-person narrator of most of the novel to a bracing second person.
The vile, raw fog tore your throat and ravaged your eyes. You could not see your feet. You stumbled in your walk over poor men’s graves.
The feel of Parker’s old trench-coat beneath your fingers was comforting. You had felt it in worse places. You clung on now for fear you should get separated. The dim people moving in front of you were like Brocken spectres.
‘Take care, gentlemen,’ said a toneless voice out of the yellow darkness, ‘there’s an open grave just hereabouts.’
(Chapter 12)
The identification of Reuben’s body, swapped for that of the pauper, clinches Freke’s guilt and so Wimsey tips off old Sugg who goes to make the arrest. In fact the cops are only in the nick of time because Freke, realising the game was up, was writing a complete confession and then planned to commit suicide by injecting the same poison he had intended for Wimsey.
Instead Freke is arrested and taken to prison, while Parker brings Wimsey the long suicide note the guilty man had written – which has the happy dual purpose of explaining every single detail of Freke’s cleverly-laid plan and thus tying up all the loose ends in a bow.
Except that, maybe it’s me but, I didn’t understand it. Even after carefully reading the ‘confession’ twice I have no idea why Freke went to the enormous trouble of lugging the corpse of the injured workhouse inmate up onto the roofs of the apartment block adjoining his hospital, and no idea at all why he then, for the lolz, decided to haul it through the open window of one of them, which he discovered was a bathroom.
What an idiot! The River Thames runs about 200 yards away from Prince of Wales Road where the hospital and Thipp’s apartment block were situated – why not dump it in there, last resting place of thousands of drownees and suicides. Why draw attention to a mysterious death right on his own doorstep?
In fact I don’t understand why he didn’t just murder Reuben and dump his body in the river. Why the whole elaborate and painstaking swapping of him for the body of the pauper, especially when Reuben was Jewish and so circumcised, while the body in the bath wasn’t.
If you understand why Freke did this and how the whole plot hangs together, please drop me a line to explain it, but until then I find the actual plot puzzlingly stupid. Good thing I don’t read detective stories for the plot but for the style, characterisation, themes and ideas and social history. The plots are nearly always pants.
Cast
- Lord Peter Wimsey
- Bunter – his valet
- The Dowager Duchess – his mother – ‘She was a small, plump woman, with perfectly white hair and exquisite hands. In feature she was as unlike her second son as she was like him in character; her black eyes twinkled cheerfully, and her manners and movements were marked with a neat and rapid decision’
- Gerald ‘Jerry’ Wimsey, sixteenth Duke of Denver – ‘a good, clean Englishman, sturdy and conventional, rather like Henry VIII in his youth’ – ‘The Duke considered his cadet rather degenerate, and not quite good form; he disliked his taste for police-court news’:
‘I do wish you’d keep out of the police courts,’ grumbled the Duke. ‘It makes it so dashed awkward for me, havin’ a brother makin’ himself conspicuous.’
‘Sorry, Gerald,’ said the other; ‘I know I’m a beastly blot on the ’scutcheon.’
-
- Mr Thipps – working class builder living at 59, Queen Caroline Mansions, Battersea, opposite Battersea Park, who finds the dead body of a naked man in his bath
- Gladys Horrocks – his maid
- William Williams – Gladys’s ‘young man’, a glazier
- Mr and Mrs Appledore – Thipps’ disapproving neighbours in the Mansions
- Sir Reuben Levy – City financier, self-made man, a Jew, who disappears mysteriously from his house the same night the body is found in Thipps’s bath
- Lady Reuben Levy née Christine Ford
- Mrs Pemming
- Miss Mabel
- Mr Graves, valet
- Inspector Sugg – obstinate unimaginative copper, Wimsey’s foil
- Constable Cawthorn
- Sir Julian Freke – directs the surgical side of big new St Luke’s hospital in Battersea, situated right behind Mr Thipp’s block of flats – in addition, known in Harley Street as a distinguished neurologist with a highly individual point of view, as expressed in the recently published book, Physiological Bases of the Conscience – ‘He was not only a distinguished man, but a striking figure, with his wide shoulders, upright carriage and leonine head’ – and Wimsey perceives him as: ‘A man taller than himself, with immense breadth of shoulder, and wonderful hands. A face beautiful, impassioned and inhuman; fanatical, compelling eyes, bright blue amid the ruddy bush of hair and beard’
- John Cummings – Freke’s man-servant
- William Watts – the dissecting-room attendant at the hospital
- Dr Grimbold – police doctor
- Detective Charles Parker – happy to work with Wimsey – ‘Mr Parker was a bachelor, and occupied a Georgian but inconvenient flat at No. 12A Great Ormond Street, for which he paid a pound a week’
- Mrs Munns, who did for him by the day
- Mr John P. Milligan – American businessman – London representative of the great Milligan railroad and shipping company – in some sense a rival of Reuben Levy
- Mr Crimplesham – ancient solicitor in Salisbury – his pince-nez is found on the corpse in the bath
- Mr Wicks – junior in Crimplesham’s office
- Lady Swaffham – friends of the Duchess
- Mrs Tommy Frayle – especially dim friend of the Duchess: ‘Dear me!’ said Mrs Tommy Frayle, with a little scream, ‘what a blessing it is none of my friends have any ideas at all!’
- Mrs Freemantle – ‘wife of an eminent railway director, and celebrated for her ignorance of the world of finance. Her faux pas in this connection enlivened the tea parties of City men’s wives’
- Mr Piggott – medical student
- Mr Levett – represents the Home Secretary at the disinterment
- The Master of the Workhouse
- Dr Colegrove – the Workhouse doctor
Bookish
I thought it was just Agatha Christie who did this but Sayers, too, lards the book with characters who themselves refer to detective fiction, crime novels and so on. So I’m beginning to think it’s a feature or rule of the detective story genre itself that its characters are constantly referring to detective stories.
‘Look here, Wimsey—you’ve been reading detective stories; you’re talking nonsense.’ (Chapter 2)
‘No, I ain’t,’ said Lord Peter, sleepily, ‘uncommon good incident for a detective story, though, what? Bunter, we’ll write one, and you shall illustrate it with photographs.’ (Chapter 2)
‘I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn’t a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there’d have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara.’ (Chapter 4)
‘In this case, the method of inquiry will be to pump the respectable gentleman in Balham, and if he should happen to be a single gentleman with a deaf housekeeper, it may be no easy matter to impugn the alibi, since, outside detective romances, few ticket-collectors and ’bus-conductors keep an exact remembrance of all the passengers passing between Balham and London on any and every evening of the week.’ (Chapter 5)
‘The neuroses, you know, are particularly clever criminals—they break out into as many disguises as—’
‘As Leon Kestrel, the Master-Mummer,’ suggested Parker, who read railway-stall detective stories on the principle of the ’busman’s holiday. (Chapter 6)
Sherlock
And none of these authors can seem to escape the overarching shadow of Sherlock Holmes. They feel compelled to namecheck him, as if warding off an evil spirit. Here’s Wimsey giving a running commentary on himself as he cancels plans to go to a rare books auction and instead gets dressed to investigate a new case.
‘Exit the amateur of first editions; new motive introduced by solo bassoon; enter Sherlock Holmes, disguised as a walking gentleman.’ (Chapter 1)
Here he is joking with Detective Parker:
‘I give you full credit for the discovery, I crawl, I grovel, my name is Watson.’ (Chapter 4)
Here’s his servant, Butler, complaining to Lady Levy’s servants:
‘Many’s the time I’ve sat up till three and four, and up again to call him early to go off Sherlocking at the other end of the country.’ (Chapter 4)
Wimsey himself, again:
‘Y’see,’ said Lord Peter, balancing a piece of duck on his fork and frowning, ‘it’s only in Sherlock Holmes and stories like that, that people think things out logically. Or’nar’ly, if somebody tells you somethin’ out of the way, you just say, ‘By Jove!’ or ‘How sad!’ an’ leave it at that, an’ half the time you forget about it.’ (Chapter 7)
And:
‘Hurray!’ said Lord Peter, suddenly sparkling. ‘I’m glad I’ve puzzled Parker. Gives me confidence in myself. Makes me feel like Sherlock Holmes. ‘Perfectly simple, Watson.’ (Chapter 9)
‘What’s the matter?’ asked the Duke, getting up and yawning.
‘Marching orders,’ said Peter, ‘back to town. Many thanks for your hospitality, old bird—I’m feelin’ no end better. Ready to tackle Professor Moriarty or Leon Kestrel or any of ’em.’ (Chapter 9)
And:
Lord Peter settled down to a perusal of his Dante. It afforded him no solace. Lord Peter was hampered in his career as a private detective by a public-school education. Despite Parker’s admonitions, he was not always able to discount it. His mind had been warped in its young growth by ‘Raffles’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes‘, or the sentiments for which they stand. (Chapter 11)
The constraints of fiction
‘And in short stories,’ said Lord Peter, ‘it has to be put in statement form, because the real conversation would be so long and twaddly and tedious, and nobody would have the patience to read it. Writers have to consider their readers, if any, y’see.’
Antisemitism
I have – maybe rather tiresomely – pointed out all the instances of what I take to be antisemitism in the novels of Agatha Christie, her repeated use of anti-Jewish tropes and stereotypes, even after the Second World War when you would have thought everyone would have been more sensitive on the issue.
Disappointingly, something similar is true of Sayers. Why is the City financier a Jew? There were plenty of Gentile millionaires. Why is he a self-made man who prompts contempt in a more aristocratic person like Freke? And why is he depicted as marrying the good Gentile girl Christine Ford, stealing her from Freke? To be charitable, it speaks to the way detective stories are made of clichés and stereotypes. To be less charitable, it shows that Sayers was happy to deploy antisemitic tropes, pandering to the values of the day, in order to give her story recognition and popularity.
The anti-Jewish animus is conveyed in a long speech given to the posh Dowager Duchess explaining the rivalry between Sir Reuben Levy and Julian Freke over the girl Christine:
‘Christine Ford, she was then, and I remember so well the dreadful trouble there was about her marrying a Jew. That was before he made his money, of course, in that oil business out in America. The family wanted her to marry Julian Freke, who did so well afterwards and was connected with the family, but she fell in love with this Mr Levy and eloped with him. He was very handsome, then, you know, dear, in a foreign-looking way, but he hadn’t any means, and the Fords didn’t like his religion. Of course we’re all Jews nowadays, and they wouldn’t have minded so much if he’d pretended to be something else, like that Mr Simons we met at Mrs Porchester’s, who always tells everybody that he got his nose in Italy at the Renaissance, and claims to be descended somehow or other from La Bella Simonetta—so foolish, you know, dear—as if anybody believed it; and I’m sure some Jews are very good people, and personally I’d much rather they believed something, though of course it must be very inconvenient, what with not working on Saturdays and circumcising the poor little babies and everything depending on the new moon and that funny kind of meat they have with such a slang-sounding name, and never being able to have bacon for breakfast…’ (Chapter 3)
But it isn’t just the Duchess’s view. Here’s Wimsey’s man, Bunter, buttering up Sir Reuben’s valet:
‘I agree with you, Mr Graves—his lordship and me have never held with being narrow-minded—why, yes, my dear, of course it’s a footmark, this is the washstand linoleum. A good Jew can be a good man, that’s what I’ve always said.’ (Chapter 4)
And here’s Wimsey himself, towards the end, explaining Freke’s long, long-standing resentment of Levy.
‘People are opinionated about side-issues, you know. I see red if anybody questions my judgment about a book. And Levy—who was nobody twenty years ago—romps in and carries off Freke’s girl from under his nose. It isn’t the girl Freke would bother about—it’s having his aristocratic nose put out of joint by a little Jewish nobody.’ (Chapter 10)
I know Bunter and Wimsey are broadly sympathetic to the Jewish character, I’m just left wondering why Sayers had the murdered financier be a Jew if she wasn’t catering to the crudest, melodramatic stereotypes.
A little feminism
‘Some blighter said hell knew no fury like a woman scorned. Stickin’ it on to women, poor devils. Sex is every man’s loco spot—you needn’t fidget, you know it’s true—he’ll take a disappointment, but not a humiliation.’
‘Stickin’ it on to women, poor devils.’ Well, it’s a gesture towards understanding how women were blamed in this culture. There’s not much of this kind of thing though. (In 1938 Sayers gave an address to a Women’s Society satirically titled ‘Are Women Human?’ which I hope to get round to reading and summarising, as an accompaniment to Virginia Woolf’s classic A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.)
The Great War and PTSD
It’s not only Wimsey who has prolonged shell shock or post-traumatic stress disorder. In the waiting room of Dr Freke, he sees:
By the fireplace sat a soldierly-looking young man, of about Lord Peter’s own age. 212His face was prematurely lined and worn; he sat bolt upright, his restless eyes darting in the direction of every slightest sound.
And then gets talking to a refugee from revolutionary Russia:
‘And you, monsieur? You are young, well, strong—you also suffer? It is still the war, perhaps?’
‘A little remains of shell-shock,’ said Lord Peter.
‘Ah, yes. So many good, brave, young men—’
(Chapter 11)
Credit
‘Whose Body?’ by Dorothy L. Sayers was published in 1923 by T. Fisher Unwin.
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