Snobbery With Violence

by Colin Watson

  (Lord Peter Views the Body)

  Bunter’s sartorial sense is perfect, but there is more to it than that. He is a sort of priest, charged with the maintenance of ritual and ornament which reflect the immutability of the social structure. Fashion is a word Bunter would have disdained. Fashion implies change, and change is not to be thought of so long as duchesses are receiving at Park Lane and a Duke dines still at Denver. Bunter is concerned not with fashion but with style – a very different thing. And in this, his instinct is never faulted. Nor is it wanting when the capricious appetites of his master need to be divined:

  ‘Bunter!’

  ‘My Lord?’

  ‘No bacon this morning. Quite the wrong smell.’

  ‘I was thinking of buttered eggs, my lord.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  One has seen how Bunter’s sense of propriety automatically sent him to the back entrance of the Medway residence in Park Lane. A more difficult test awaited him one Sunday afternoon ‘in that halcyon summer of 1921’ when he accompanied Lord Peter to the altogether unfamiliar milieu of Bloomsbury. It was a poor district in those days, to judge from the declaration by a resident ‘struggling general practitioner’ that ‘there are times when even a half-crown visit makes all the difference between making both ends meet and having an ugly hiatus’ and also from the author’s mention of the Bloomsbury ‘swarm’ of infants, ‘presumably within-doors, eating steamy Sunday dinners inappropriate to the tropical weather.’

  Lord Peter Wimsey and his host sat down to table, and the doctor expressed a hope that Mr Bunter would sit down with them. That correct person, however, deprecated any such suggestion. ‘If I might venture to indicate my own preference, sir,’ he said, ‘it would be to wait upon you and his lordship in the usual manner.’

  And so he did, handing the salad (no steamy, unseasonable food would get past him) and pouring out water ‘with a grave decency appropriate to a crusted old tawny port’.

  It would be naïve to suppose that Miss Sayers span out her high life fantasies without once slipping tongue in cheek. She was an intelligent and educated woman and, although her sense of humour was deficient and sometimes unattractive, her phrasing of many of the Wimsey and Bunter passages shows that she enjoyed writing them and intended them to entertain. Was John Strachey missing this point when he declared that by 1930 she had almost ceased to be a first-rate detective writer and had become ‘an exceedingly snobbish popular novelist?’ His error, if he was making one, was to assume the two states to be mutually exclusive. If Miss Sayers was a first-rate writer of detective stories in, say, 1928, when she was considered a sufficiently eminent author to be entrusted with the selection for Gollancz of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, she surely had not fallen far from grace by 1934, the publication year of The Nine Tailors, which was to be reprinted twenty-two times in the following twenty years. Of course she was snobbish: the fun she allowed herself in putting into Bunter’s mouth the pomposities of a late Victorian butler is altogether innocent of social criticism, while she treated Wimsey, even at his most inane, with an auntie-like indulgence that amounted almost to fawning. But her public showed by continued support that they found nothing reprehensible in her attitude. The probability is that they rather enjoyed a bit of snobbery themselves and were more inclined to identify with a clever lord-ling and his resourceful valet than with characters who suffered, as they did, the limitations of real life.

  If Bunter was an entertaining myth for readers, he also perhaps was a compensatory one for his author. More than once in her correspondence Miss Sayers blamed slowness of progress with her latest novel upon domestic crisis. Having sacked the current set of servants, she was obliged to do all the cooking herself until she could get some new ones. The vision of an imperturbable, ever reliable Bunter must have shimmered above her hot stove like a Saharan mirage.

  Not all thriller writers were able entirely to sublimate their concern over the servant ‘problem’, as it was called, into the creation of an idealized factotum. Sydney Horler provided his hero, Tiger Standish, with a faithful valet but he could never dismiss one of his own domestics without an outburst of righteous indignation.

  One takes these people from their back street hovels, one gives them every comfort, the best of food and even doctors, and after that they’ll spend all their time in trying to take fresh advantages. If I had my way, I’d see that every maid who was dismissed for one of the many gross faults peculiar to the tribe was sent to earn her living in a North of England cotton factory or some such place for a period of not less than three months.

  Strictly Personal

  Servants could be difficult about money, too. This won them no friends among those whose natural thrift enabled them to be instrumental in providing employment for others. In an article in the Daily Mail entitled ‘The Life of the New Poor’, E. Phillips Oppenheim drew attention to the plight into which he had been forced by the cupidity of the lower orders.

  My chauffeur, content with thirty shillings a week before the war, now demands a weekly wage of three pounds ten. My indoor servant, to whom I paid a pound a week, now requires two … It is the class representing the brains of the country who, faced with an income tax eating into the very vitals of their earnings and an exorbitant increase in the cost of living and wages, must languish and decline under an impossible burden.

  These words were written in all seriousness by a man whose income from American sales alone averaged three hundred pounds a week during the eight worst years of the Depression.

  CHAPTER 12

  Girls who kept cool

  The role of heroine in crime fiction has never been an altogether comfortable one. She tends to be an encumbrance. Until very recent times, it was deemed that women could not run fast enough nor hit hard enough to keep up with the male characters. Their parts were passive. A woman might inspire and, within limits, sustain a hero – perhaps cut a bond or two for him at an opportune moment – but she was barred from violent intervention on his behalf. In return, she enjoyed immunity from vulgar assaults such as kicks, punches and blows on the head. Being locked in cellars, attics and crypts was in order; so was abduction by homicidal maniacs. But no matter how desperate or unprincipled her captors were supposed to be, it was never suggested for a moment that sexual conquest figured among their plans.

  There was strong objection until the end of the 1930s to the introduction into mystery stories of what is now understood by ‘love interest’. Several critics, including W. Somerset Maugham as we have seen, denied the possibility of a good thriller being able to support a romantic theme. This contrasted with Victorian tradition. Through the dark convolutions of the gothic thriller, there always had been discernible a golden thread of true love. A book without a heroine would have been as dubious a publishing proposition before 1914 as would one with an anti-hero. At least two highly successful mystery-adventure writers whose work bridged the Victorian and Edwardian and the post-war eras – William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim – never did abandon their faith in the necessity of a heroine. Yet there is noticeable evidence in this description in The Gamblers by Le Queux of compromise with a new fashion:

  Ulrica was a typical woman of the up-to-date type – pretty, with soft, wavy, chestnut hair and a pair of brown eyes that had attracted a host of men … yet beneath her corsets, as I alone knew, there beat a heart from which, alas! all love and sympathy had long ago died out.

  By 1920, hard hearts and shrewd little heads were the mode. A certain world-weariness was acceptable. It perhaps was felt to go well with emancipation. Romantic love was liable to be consigned to the area designated in the new jargon of the day as ‘all that rot’. Of course, a fashion, if not a virtue, was being made of necessity. The war had slaughtered a million more or less virile men and maimed or driven mad at least another million. There were far more women in the country than could hope to obtain partners. The pretence that marriage was an irrelevant indulgence was a comfort
to the deprived. It appealed also to the increasing number of working women. A big proportion of these owed their jobs to their mobility and their willingness to work for less money than men. In the eyes of employers, including local authorities, a married, and therefore potentially pregnant, woman was an unreliable piece of equipment. In the industrial areas there was strong resentment among male workers against women whom they considered not only to be helping depress wage standards and contributing to unemployment but to be doing these things without even the excuse of having to support themselves. White-collar workers were only slightly less rigid in their opposition. Office collections for wedding presents expressed goodwill of a decidedly valedictory kind. Many private firms and all education committees automatically dismissed women employees when they married.

  Economic discrimination was hard enough to bear, but women who wanted to take advantage of new educational opportunities in order to enter professions were also liable to encounter political hostility and moral indignation. Dorothy Leigh Sayers must have been well aware of this unsympathetic climate by the time she created Harriet Vane, the fictional projection of herself who symbolically avenged womankind in general by snubbing in book after book the zealous, if rather supercilious courtship of Lord Peter Wimsey.

  Born seven years before the death of the Good Old Queen, Dorothy Sayers was the daughter of a clergyman-schoolmaster. After a childhood in East Anglia, she went to Somerville College (the model for her Gaudy Night) and was one of the first women to receive an Oxford degree. To take top honours in mediaeval literature cannot have been regarded in 1915 as a normal feminine accomplishment. Nor was there anything conventional about her choice of job on coming down from university: she became a copywriter in a London advertising agency. She married in the year of the General Strike, 1926, but Lord Peter had been at large for three years by then and the money was beginning to come in. In 1930, Wimsey cleared Harriet Vane of a murder charge in Strong Poison and there began the long tussle for Harriet’s agreement to become Lady Wimsey that some readers deplored as getting in the way of the detection.

  Miss Vane, resolutely unwed, continued to voice her creator’s opinion concerning the modern role of women in society. In Have His Carcase (1932), a tea-dance in Victorian costume moved her to the reflection that

  the slender-seeming waists were made so not by savage tight-lacing but by sheer expensive dressmaking. Tomorrow on the tennis court the short, loose tunic-frock would reveal them as the waists of muscular young women of the day, despising all bonds.

  Were men really stupid enough, Harriet wondered, to believe that milliners’ fashions could bring back the old days of submissive womanhood?

  Lord Peter, who carried ten gold sovereigns in his pocket – not to spend, but because ‘they feel pleasant, don’t they?’ – had his own methods of winning a girl’s acquiescence. If the girl was of good family, as was Harriet Vane, he had only to draw on his past experience with the Quorn and the Pytchley and get into a saddle.

  Harriet was silent. She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well read, amusing, and enamoured, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of utter inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But now she realized that there was, after all, something god-like about him. He could control a horse.

  If, on the other hand, the intended conquest was of a working-class girl, the advice of the omniscient Bunter was necessary.

  ‘I wish to appear in my famous impersonation of the perfect Lounge Lizard – imitation très difficile.’ ‘Very good, my lord. I suggest the fawn-coloured suit we do not care for, with the autumn-leaf socks and our outsize amber cigarette-holder.’ ‘As you will, Bunter … we must stoop to conquer.’

  Lord Peter’s object in the second instance, it need hardly be said, was information and not venery. His highly developed detective instinct could always be relied upon to protect him from involvement in a misalliance. Witness how, in Have His Carcase, he divined from the evidence of a single piece of notepaper the true social origin of its sender:

  Wimsey took the blue sheet of paper and cocked a knowing eye at it. ‘Very dainty. As supplied by Mr Selfridge’s fancy counter to the nobility and gentry … Olga Kohn – who sounds like a Russian Jewess – is not precisely out of the top drawer, as my mother would say, and was obviously not educated at Oxford or Cambridge …’

  Miss Sayers, of course, was; and passages such as this suggest that she never quite overcame the need to remind herself of the fact. Nor could she resist making the kind of observation that was calculated to reflect her own intelligence, good taste, and racial purity. Thus, Olga Kohn’s room was described as having a general air of semi-artistic refinement and containing, before its empty fireplace, a dark-haired young man of Semitic appearance, who acknowledged the introductions with a scowl and subsequently failed miserably to understand Wimsey’s subtle jokes about the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

  Harriet Vane was no heroine in the romantic sense. For one thing, she was supposed to be a detective novelist and therefore more interested in people as potential book characters than as human beings. She was aware of the value of publicity and lost no opportunity of getting herself interviewed by the journalists assigned to cases that Lord Peter was investigating. Bodies held no horrors for her. On one occasion she searched with absolute impassivity the pockets of a corpse whose neck had been hacked through to the backbone with a razor. She later shared in Wimsey’s heavily facetious jesting about the victim’s lack of dress sense (he was a foreigner) and abominable taste in shoes. Even the cut throat was made the subject of humorous back-chat. A police sergeant,

  who had gaped in astonishment at the beginning of this exchange, now burst into a hearty guffaw. ‘That’s very good,’ he said indulgently. ‘Comic, ain’t it, the stuff these writer-fellows put into their books?’

  Comic, indeed – or so it must have been generally agreed at the time, for the sales and reputation of Miss Sayers rose steadily, with scarcely a single dissenting voice among the critics. The Daily Express was inspired to announce in 1934 that she had already ‘eclipsed Edgar Wallace and Conan Doyle as the master writer of detective fiction’.

  Other authors of the period were less severe in the delineation of heroines. They lacked, perhaps, the toughening effects of a Somerville education. Agatha Christie was too busy perfecting her formula of the Least Likely Person to create unconventional young female characters. Sydney Horler, who suggested acidly that Miss Sayers spent ‘several hours a day watching the detective story as though expecting something terrific to happen’, did not approve of any deviation from the English Rose standard of womanhood. Nor did Edgar Wallace, although his heroines needed to be rather more athletic than most in order to survive encounters with mad master criminals, escape from collapsing caverns, and extricate themselves from gas-filled pits. One curious feature of the typical Wallace heroine is her close family relationship to the villain or one of his henchmen. The theme of guilty father and innocent daughter is one that seems to have haunted Wallace. George Orwell thought he detected ‘a fearful intellectual sadism’ in Wallace’s plots, which, according to Orwell, commonly included arrangements for the villain to be hanged on the same day as the heroine was married. This may be a misinterpretation. Hanging did fascinate Wallace but more probably for the right than the wrong reasons: he was a gentle and generous-hearted man, and in more than one passage describing prisons and the execution shed the impression is given that the obscene paraphernalia of capital punishment revolted and distressed him.

  If not actually immortal, like her evil master, Fu-Manchu, Sax Rohmer’s heroine was wondrously durable. Only a slave girl was Karamaneh, but

  seemingly, with true Oriental fatalism, she was quite reconciled to her fate, and ever and anon she would bestow upon me a glance from her beautiful eyes which few men, I say with confidence, could have sustained unmoved. Though I could not be blind to the emotions of th
e passionate Eastern soul, yet I strove not to think of them. Accomplice of an arch-murderer she might be; but she was dangerously lovely.

  (The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu)

  In book after book she appeared and reappeared in order to set Dr Petrie’s senses reeling (on no recorded occasion did he get them under sufficient control to achieve physical contact with her) and to lead him and Nayland Smith out of the latest trap patiently prepared by the diabolical Doctor. How so perversely inclined an accomplice as Karamaneh could remain so long on the Fu Manchu payroll is one of the enduring mysteries of crime fiction. Perhaps she kept her job through the personal representation of Arthur Sarsfield Ward, whose Irish charm and chivalry impressed his friends much more favourably than did his literary style. Ward, when he was not being Rohmer, wrote for the theatre, travelled – chiefly in America but significantly little in the East, and was happily married.

  E. Phillips Oppenheim bequeathed no memorable heroines. He seems not to have been much interested in personality; with him, plot and furnishings were all. His enormous readership, which for many years included the most substantial section of the magazine public in the United States, did not complain. It was enough for them, apparently, that women should exist in Oppenheim’s novels as creatures so refined by wealth and gracious living as to have become virtually disembodied. Those elegant, perfumed wraiths were described as doing all sorts of impressive-sounding things. They could capture hearts, make pulses race, command the attention of an entire assembly, wither by a glance, melt (very, very occasionally) into arms. Yet none was ever depicted in a way that brought her to life as a human being. Oppenheim was not, of course, the only popular author who was unable or unwilling to portray characters in terms that had any relevance to common experience. But he was a vigilant businessman and a hard worker: he would not have left unremedied any deficiency of style or construction that demonstrably affected his sales. We may be sure that the Oppenheim heroines remained impossible because his customers preferred them so.