Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  Two Dantesque shapes with pitchforks loomed up.

  “Have you finished?” asked somebody.

  “Nearly done, sir.” The demons fell to work again with the pitchforks—no, spades.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  The sound of the spades for many minutes. An iron noise of tools thrown down. Demons stooping and straining.

  A black-bearded spectre at your elbow. Introduced. The Master of the Workhouse.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  A mutter of voices. The lurching departure of the Dante demons—good, decent demons in corduroy. (223–25)

  Then comes confirmation of all the horror Peter Wimsey has surmised. The body exhumed by the Dante “demons”—the gravediggers at a pauper’s cemetery—is none other than Sir Reuben Levy, murdered and dissected by Sir Julian Freke. The good doctor is a denizen of the deepest parts of hell.

  The extent to which Whose Body? anchors the entire body of Peter Wimsey material is striking. Sayers employed many of the characters appearing in the stories time and again, providing Peter a stock community of family, friends, and acquaintances who support his activities. On those later occasions when Wimsey stepped outside the normal bonds of this community, it generally signified that Sayers was allowing Peter room to grow.

  Probably the most important of the supporting cast introduced in Whose Body? is Police Inspector Charles Parker, Wimsey’s only real friend. Parker is Wimsey’s complement—a pleasant, generally unexcitable, professional investigator. He lives a rather spartan life. Single, occupying a drab flat in Great Ormond Street, served by an openly judgmental woman who comes in on days, Charles is dependent on the meager salary he earns at Scotland Yard. Wimsey finds him unimaginative and maddeningly cautious, a welcome check to his own flamboyant air. Charles Parker is not Conan Doyle’s Doctor Watson nor his Inspector LeStrade. He and Wimsey are genuinely a team. Parker—steady, plodding, but very intelligent—is capable of performing the grinding police work that Wimsey cannot. His sole source of recreation is reading theological works, commentaries on the Epistles and such. This, he states amiably, is how he learned caution. As Wimsey grows and changes in subsequent novels, Parker grows as well yet remains a touchstone of reality for Peter (26, 67, 156).

  Sayers intended Inspector Sugg to be a foil for her team of clever and determined detectives. He is the exact opposite of everything Wimsey and Parker represent, a paragon of bullying stupidity. Presumably Sayers intended Sugg to provide a form of low comedy for the story, a fool engaged to reflect the brilliance of the master. With the presence of Parker at Wimsey’s side, however, the ploy does not come off well. It is not that the official police are stupid (Charles disproves that); it is only that Sugg is stupid. Sayers allows him a modicum of dignity in the end and uses him only incidentally thereafter (18, 24).

  Two characters appearing briefly in Whose Body? recur in several additional works. Early in the novel, Peter and Charles discuss a recent court performance by the brilliant barrister, Impey Biggs. We learn little more here than that Biggs used the inherent uncertainty of medical evidence to secure the acquittal of an almost certainly guilty man, but Biggs is a character Sayers will employ several more times (35).

  The reader catches a somewhat fuller glimpse of a character personally closer to Wimsey: his financial friend, the Honourable Freddy Arbuthnot. Freddy’s antecedents are by no means clear, but he has money and the peculiar ability to make more at will. His specialty, apparently his sole interest, is the stock exchange, which he knows intimately. He shares with Peter an appreciation of wealth, a fine taste in men’s fashion, and a discriminating palate. But Wimsey never spends much time with him, in this story or any other. Freddy does not possess the wide-ranging intellectual curiosity that drives Wimsey (74–78).

  Family ties are important in Whose Body? Sayers will later broaden and flesh out Peter’s relations, but we learn fairly quickly that his father is dead, that his brother is every inch the narrow-minded country squire his father was, and that (unlike Sherlock Holmes) Peter has a mother, one who takes an active interest in his adventures. The Dowager Duchess of Denver is one of Dorothy L. Sayers’s most memorable characters. After a few pages with her, it is not difficult to discern the source of Peter’s ability to prattle on. Small, plump, and good-humored, she is not nearly as circumvolved in speech in this first novel as she will later become, but she is very elliptical, jumping from one subject to the next as thoughts strike her, not quite at random (52, 277):

  By the way, such an odd thing’s happened about the Church Restoration Fund—the Vicar—oh, dear, here are these people coming back again; well, I’ll tell you afterwards—do look at that woman looking shocked, and the girl in tweeds trying to look as if she sat on undraped gentlemen every day of her life—I don’t mean that—corpses of course—but one finds oneself being so Elizabethan nowadays—what an awful little man the coroner is, isn’t he? (115)

  For all that, she is shrewd and quick to think on her feet as well as a fountain of strength in a crisis. Charles Parker calls her “wonderful,” and Peter agrees. She is the first of several strong older women that Sayers will introduce, eventually establishing a discernible pattern of interpretation. Dorothy L. Sayers admired Victorian women with spirit; they pointed the way to the “new woman” of the twenties (223).

  One last critically important stock character takes shape in Whose Body? We do not yet learn that Bunter has a mother in Kent and that he was one of eleven children, but we do come to understand very quickly that the presence of this most capable manservant is crucial to Peter Wimsey’s survival. It is not simply that Bunter buttles, that he supervises Wimsey’s wardrobe, that he cooks and cleans for him, that he serves as technical assistant in Wimsey’s investigation. Mervyn Bunter takes care of Lord Peter with carefully cloaked affection. This is no small thing, once the reader comes to understand Wimsey’s precarious emotional health. Severely correct, “a truly terrible manservant,” Bunter understands his place and has no desire to transgress his role. When Peter threatens to sack him, merely to provide him the opportunity of venting an honest opinion of his master, Bunter allows that even then the wall of servitude would not crumble. He is a servant and must never express an ill opinion of his noble employer.

  The relationship of manservant to master was one of the few remaining anachronisms from days of rigid social hierarchy then rapidly disappearing. There was real inequality here. Even “in these democratic days” of the early twenties, Lord Peter and Bunter would never meet eye to eye as equals. Yet they would be intimate associates in a long string of adventures.

  Although Bunter is a servant, this is not to say he is servile. Sayers drew him as a capable and complex individual, dropping hints from the start that Bunter is a man of many talents. Most obvious is his skill and devotion to the craft and art of photography. Bunter’s work with the lens provides a material basis for the connection of the two ends of the Battersea mystery. This is something he is quite passionate about; one of the few cracks in his otherwise correct facade occurs when he respectfully proposes the purchase of a “Double Antistigmat with a set of supplementary lenses.” The care he takes in photographing evidence appalls others of his caste. To destroy a possible clue is to do “as much as my place is worth,” but one gets the impression that the sentiment is even more Bunter’s than his master’s.

  For all his formidable correctness, Bunter is capable of exercising great charm within the context of his own class. A few soft and encouraging words make Mabel (Sir Reuben Levy’s kitchen maid) his steady assistant. Bunter will exhibit his way with women in several more stories. But he is able to gain the confidence of male servants as well. With a little show of friendly drink and comaraderie, Bunter induces Cummings (Sir Julian Freke’s man) to relate a detailed picture of events in the household. Sayers employs this episode so as to elicit not only clues to the mystery, but to demonstrate by comparison
how truly superior Bunter is as a manservant. Bunter’s letter also certifies his unswerving, unquestionable loyalty to his master, the “bloody little fool,” Wimsey: “May I take this opportunity of expressing my grateful appreciation of your lordship’s excellent taste in food, drink, and dress? It is, if I may say so, more than a pleasure—it is an education, to valet and buttle your lordship.” (178) Note the perfect correctness of Bunter’s grammar—in every sense (25, 64, 179–85).

  Taken together, this company of stock characters lends dimension to Peter Wimsey’s imagined life. Moving among a community of familiar figures, Wimsey’s activities present the reader with a sense of returning to familiar ground with each future story. Peter is more than a detective; he is a human being with a close, if trying, family. His investigative work brings him into close contact with the official police, but he has other friends as well. The supreme loyalty of so superior a servant as Bunter also implies an important fact about Wimsey: he is a superior individual.

  Dorothy L. Sayers worked on Whose Body? throughout much of 1921, finishing the manuscript in November and paying seven pounds she could ill afford in order to have it typed. She was not terribly sanguine about its prospects, writing her mother on November 8 to say, “I don’t suppose anything will come of it. I haven’t the least confidence in the stuff, which is a pity, because I really enjoy turning it out.” She had already begun work on a second novel.46

  Her skepticism seemed justified for a painfully long while. Lord Peter made the rounds of publishing houses, was taken up by an agent who promptly died, and got nowhere through the first half of 1922. Finally an American publisher nibbled. After some protracted agonies, the book was brought out by Boni and Liveright, New York, in May 1923, and T. Fisher Unwin, London, in October. Response was modest but enough to continue. Peter Wimsey was on his way.47

  2

  Lord Peter Discovers the Possibilities

  MUCH OF THE ORDER AND GOOD SENSE TO BE MADE OF A life comes in retrospect. The triumphs grow in magnitude, the small agonies of existence assume a proper proportion, and the sense of grind and ennui dominating the day-to-day reality are forgotten. By 1928 Dorothy L. Sayers had achieved national recognition as a popular author. It would be easy to fasten onto the stepping stones to this success, overlooking the agonies of her life history. For Sayers, altogether too much of the previous seven years was spent in her own carefully fashioned purgatory. Portions of that bleak reality found their way into the works she produced during the period.

  If the years 1922 to 1928 were too often a kind of private hell for Sayers, they were a time of restless transition for England as a nation. The modernizing trends apparent in British society at the close of the Great War accelerated in the middle twenties. The old political order underwent severe modification as the parties embraced democracy; the economy adjusted unevenly to the rise of new expectations, and the disappearance of others. All in all, the world seemed to go faster.

  Though evolving over several decades, democracy was altogether a recent innovation in English life. The political privilege of hierarchy was banished; the people supposedly governed their own fate through their elected representatives. When Parliament lowered the voting age for women to twenty-one in 1928, adult suffrage became nearly universal. The newly created political context was bound to be unstable; Britain changed prime ministers six times during the 1920s.

  Somehow, greater political power did not translate into happier lives or even increased economic security for the mass of people. Recovery from the slump of 1922 was slow and sporadic. Growth enterprises such as entertainment and the motor industry did all right, but the industrial backbone of the nation, the mines and the transportation systems, staggered from one crisis to the next. In many ways, regulating the economy was out of British hands entirely. As long as Europe forced Germany to make reparations, the economic health of that nation severely affected the economic vitality of the rest. When recession left Germany too poor to make the required payments in 1923, the French army occupied the Ruhr Valley, extracting the cash through main force. This made matters that much harder for the Germans and, in the end, for everyone.1

  Responding to the demands of a democratized electorate, Parliament did what it could to ease the persistent unemployment at home. In 1923 it passed a Housing Act intended to grant public subsidies for construction and alleviate the chronic housing shortage; in 1925 it passed a Widows Pension Act. The Electricity Act of 1926 extended public funds to provide the entire nation the convenience of modern electrification. By 1928 the government had to face up to the fact that poverty had become endemic and was not likely to go away. A “De-rating” Act altered the national tax collection system, bringing much-needed relief to distressed areas in the form of lower taxes.

  All of this was well intended, but what the government dispensed with one hand, it withdrew with the other. This was still Britain, a nation that saw itself as the world’s bank, the very birthplace of fiscal responsibility. True to the rock-hard nineteenth century credo that the only real money in the world possessed intrinsic value, Britain was returned to the gold standard in 1925. Gold had been abandoned temporarily as a wartime measure, allowing circulation of a freer money supply to promote industrial growth. Restoring the gold standard naturally had just the opposite effect: a bad economic situation got worse. In July of the same year, Parliament compounded the problem, legislating an end to the subsidization of the coal industry.2

  Britain’s laborers were hit hard by these measures, the miners especially so. Already reeling from the lockout of 1921, a new round of wage reductions, coupled with increased production demands, drove them to the wall. On April 26, 1926, the miners went out on strike. The rest of organized labor in Britain followed them.

  Throughout the early twenties, there had been considerable discussion of the newfound political power of labor. With all laboring men (and some women) enfranchised, the Labour party had assumed genuine national importance. Their man, Ramsey MacDonald, had briefly occupied the position of prime minister in 1924, only to be ousted by a slender margin later that same year. With the conservatives firmly in charge of the traditional political machinery, it seemed time to flex laboring muscle, to see who really was, or should be, in control. The miners’ plaint became a shared burden of every union member. The Trades Union Council called a general strike of all unions for May 3, 1926.

  The general strike lasted nine tumultuous days. Amid dire press warnings of Bolshevism run rampant, the union rank and file obeyed the summons almost universally. They not only shut down most heavy industry but also the public transportation system and the regular newspapers. Initially London was in mass confusion. Commuters could not get to the office in the usual way, traffic snarls became immense, and some had to walk as far as twenty miles to work from the suburbs. Rumors of socialist revolution mushroomed, as there were few newspapers to provide accurate information. The conservative middle-class paper, the Daily Mail (Sayers consistently referred to a paper called the Daily Yell in her novels), was printed in France and flown to England bearing such headlines as “The Pistol at the Nation’s Head.” Indeed, one of the chief logistical mistakes of the strikers was their inability to properly publicize their side of the story. All the sympathetic newspapers were victims of the strike.3

  If this was revolution, it was of a curiously amiable kind. For all the high feelings and massive inconvenience, there was little violence. Strikers destroyed some property but not much; scabs damaged more by trying to run machines they did not understand. The strikers made no attempt to shut down vital services or government functions; the government used no military force to bring matters to a close (despite advice to this effect from Winston Churchill). The general strike was a nine-day wrangle. No one would ever forget it, but it did not leave much of a visible mark.

  Divisions within the ranks of labor brought the thing to a rapid end. Political labor leaders including Ramsey MacDonald thought the general strike was disastrously bad t
actics, while others had doubts about its legality. The Trades Union Council began negotiating with government representatives almost immediately and soon decided to abandon the Miners Union to its fate. They called off the general strike as of May 13. A few trades, more embittered than the rest, held out for an additional five days. Breathing a national sigh of relief, Britain slowly returned to business as usual.

  The miners, more radical and more desperate, surrendered after six months. The wage reductions left them scratching a living from inadequate gardens and stolen livestock. By the early 1930s, more than a quarter million miners had emigrated. For those who remained, poverty in the mining districts dug itself in for a long stay. Parliament responded by adopting the Trade Union Act, making national strikes in sympathy with local union actions illegal. No more general strikes would be allowed. Organized labor raised no objection. The general strike was a rousing confirmation of British tradition: the people would not surrender to the demands of labor. They would just muddle through peaceably, putting up with whatever was necessary so life could go on pretty much as always. The times might be changing, but forcing change along was not the English way.4

  Given Dorothy L. Sayers’s keen eye for contemporary detail and her determination to give her books a sense of immediacy, it seems peculiar that none of her novels so much as mentions the general strike of 1926. She does make curious reference to news of rioting in far-off China, in Unnatural Death. “Everybody seems to take it very casually,” her character states. “If all this rioting and Bolshevism was happening in Hyde Park, there’d be a lot more fuss made about it.”5 This observation is ostensibly uttered in the spring of 1927, one year after the general strike. The comment is curiously reminiscent of the strike, yet somehow it seems unrelated to the great events of the previous year.

  In later stories Sayers makes consistent note of the economic hardships plaguing the nation, but she seems more attentive and sympathetic to the problems of agriculture. Lord Peter essentially makes no contact with the organized working man or woman, though he does at times meet working people.