The images of the Yorkshire countryside are reminiscent of the nineteenth century if not far earlier. The people of Stapley have been touched by the Great War, have dedicated a monument to the fallen, but it is a tasteless oddity to the eye of Peter Wimsey. The rhythms of the village are intensely agricultural; at any time but market day the streets are mostly deserted. The people are clamlike. When they do speak, it is in a terse local dialect approaching rudeness to a southern ear. The only person with whom Lord Peter can truly communicate is Timothy Watchett, an innkeeper born and raised in London.
Moving from Stapley into the countryside is to step further back in time. The moors are drawn as forsaken wasteland, fit habitat only for birds and rabbits. Trails (much less roads) are almost nonexistent; unpredictable fogs make the going treacherous in the extreme. At the far end of the moor (for Peter and Bunter, at least) lies Grider’s Hole and its deadly bog, “Peter’s Pot.” The bog comes straight out of The Hound of the Baskervilles and suggests how little Sayers knew of such places. Real bogs do not behave at all in the manner she describes.
Grider’s Hole—the very name suggests sinking backwardness—is something out of the unlamented agricultural past. The operation is a large one, embracing a variety of meat and dairy productions, driven with an iron fist by the black-hearted Mr. Grimethorpe. His wife and child live in mortal terror of his wrath; the hired help tread softly in his presence. It is a smoky, dark, and tyrannical domain, rejecting such signs of modernism as electricity or the consideration of women’s roles. In practical reality, Mrs. Grimethorpe has as much recourse as a slave.
The tragedy that takes place at Riddlesdale is of course the responsibility of the local officials, but it is not a community event. The hunting party are outsiders in trouble—one dead, another accused of his murder. The locals will draw considerable entertainment from their predicament (“Why, it’ll be better’n a funeral to ’em,” (39) as Freddy Arbuthnot observes), but it will not in any way affect their lives. It is horribly easy to envision families like the Grimethorpes living on in that quasi-feudal fashion for decades after the Riddlesdale mystery fades from memory.
The initial police investigation exemplifies the local perspective. Before the Scotland Yard man arrives to take charge of the investigation, the coroner and the local constable “were already as thick as thieves, had fixed the inquest for that morning—which was ridiculous—and arranged to produce their blessed evidence as dramatically as possible” (43–44). Here was an opportunity to get one back at an aristocracy frivoling in the midst of people working hard to make ends meet.
It is not merely that the local officials are spiteful. Toiling out in the backwaters of modern Britain, they are also just a little bit backwards. Despite Peter Wimsey’s fame as an investigator, he is received “frigidly” by the police superintendent at Ripley. Peter is hoping to obtain his cooperation in following up a Riddlesdale clue. He ends up telling the man how to do his job:
Lord bless us and save us, man . . . you’re not goin’ to waste your time lookin’ for the number-plates. . . . Now, forgive me, Superintendent, for shovin’ along with my opinion, but I simply can’t bear to think of you takin’ all that trouble for nothin’—draggin’ ponds an’ turnin’ over rubbish-heaps to look for numberplates that aren’t there. You just scour the railway-stations for a young man six foot one or two with a No. 10 shoe, and dressed in a Burberry that lost its belt, and with a deep scratch on one of his hands. (76)
One can almost hear Wimsey pining for the efficiency of the London police force. When Scotland Yard does get its chance, they turn up the man among the teeming millions of London in less than twenty-four hours.
The mystery that begins in the traditional climes of Yorkshire ends in the bustling international world of the twenties. Charles Parker crosses to Paris where he unravels the sad tale of Dennis Cathcart’s financial miseries in the wake of the Great War. Another clue turns up at an elegant jewelry shop on the Rue de la Paix. Still, Charles is relieved to return to London. Paris is perhaps a little too advanced—the hotel rooms are all centrally heated.
For better and worse, London forms the center of Dorothy L. Sayers’s modern world. Here is Wimsey’s home and his study, the very essence of civility with its black and primrose walls, vases of chrysanthemums, and latest editions of all the papers. Here too is the Soviet Club, with its abominable food, its Bohemian atmosphere, and its free-thinking clientele, amiably freeing literature “from the superstition of syntax” while plotting to convert “the Army and Navy to Communism” (141, 139). The distance from London to Yorkshire is more than geographical.
In this novel at least, Peter Wimsey is far more at home in up-to-date London than in the Yorkshire countryside. Although brought up in rural surroundings at Denver, he is astonishingly maladroit in his investigations up north. His usual blither makes no impact at all at Ripley or Grider’s Hole, and he is fully responsible for losing himself and Bunter in the fog on the moor. He really should have known better.
In London, Peter is on a first-name basis with the chief of Scotland Yard, Sir Andrew Mackenzie. All of the facilities of the law are at his disposal. Moreover, he moves easily and efficiently across the range of London scenes, demonstrating a cultured taste at the Inns of Court, amicably adjusting to the unusual service and fare of the Soviet Club, and dealing ingenuously with the demands of the modern press. He is most decidedly a town man, willing to brave the deprivations of York-shire to prove his brother’s innocence but preferring the comfort and variety of city life.
The story’s conclusion finds Wimsey a most modern man indeed. The final bit of evidence necessary to clear Gerald turns out to be in America. After rushing about to secure the necessary travel papers in less than a day’s time (“and they say the English can’t hustle” [229]), he boards a passenger liner bound for New York. The return journey edges even closer to the limits of the possible; he flies the Atlantic in a two-seater plane piloted by a pioneer airman. This is January 1924, more than three years before Lindbergh’s solo flight to Paris. Teams of pilots had achieved the feat a couple of times at that point, but it was surpassingly dangerous, especially in winter.
Examined in the context of all eleven novels, the Wimsey character of Clouds of Witness stands apart in interesting ways. He is somewhat consistent with the Wimsey of Whose Body? The essential biographical details remain the same, and he is still given to the same maddeningly breezy chatter, even at the most serious moments. He has learned not to look on detection as a game, at least where his brother’s innocence is concerned, and he does take somewhat greater care in examining material evidence. Still, he relies on intuition, on chance connection of unrelated details, to see his way to a solution. And, true to his name, he remains a study in lightness:
To Lord Peter the world presented itself as an entertaining labyrinth of side-issues. He was a respectable scholar in five or six lang-uages, a musician of some skill and more understanding, something of an expert in toxicology, a collector of rare editions, an en-tertaining man-about-town, and a common sensationalist. He had been seen in Hyde Park in a top hat and frock coat, reading the News of the World. His passion for the unexplored led him to hunt up obscure pamphlets in the British Museum, to unravel the emotional history of income-tax collectors, and to find out where his own drains led to. (93)
In the one moment of serious reflection Sayers allows him, Peter contemplates “(1) The vanity of human wishes; (2) Mutability; (3) First Love; (4) The decay of idealism; (5) The aftermath of the Great War; (6) Birth-control; and (7) The fallacy of free-will” (90). Certainly there was a great deal for a pensive man to consider as the challenge of the modern world unfolded. In Clouds of Witness Sayers simply did not allow her hero to think about such conundrums very much.
In fact, Lord Peter differs most in this novel in that he has become intrepid. One gets the feeling that Dorothy L. Sayers must have read one Sexton Blake too many. The story begins quietly enough, with Peter merely exhausted
after a twenty-four hour journey by air, railroad, and automobile just to reach Riddlesdale. Before the novel is half over, he has been shot, breaking his collarbone and taking a severe knock to the head in his fall. He is infernally cheerful the following morning, despite a roaring headache. The collarbone apparently requires no sling or bandage, as Peter is investigating in Stapley three days later without visible hindrance. The upshot of that inquiry is to fall into the bog at Grider’s Hole, coming oh so close to dying. He is saved by main strength, hauled out by his arms. The pain to that broken collarbone must have been excruciating, but no mention is made of it. And then, of course, the story ends with Peter flying the Atlantic in foul weather, risking his neck one more time to bring back the evidence that will absolutely clear his brother. Sexton Blake must have wept with pride when he read about it.
Peter is a markedly more sexual animal in Clouds of Witness as well. We catch the merest glimpse of the personal catastrophe that had left him so fragile the previous year; he had “got the chuck from Barbara”(49), apparently in 1918. But he had spent three months in 1923 admiring “the wild beauty of Corsican peasant-women” from afar, returning then to Paris to heed “the call of the blood”(9)—poor Peter. Called to Riddlesdale before he could get fairly unpacked in Paris, he came up first against the spectacular Mrs. Grimethorpe and then the even more spectacular Simone Vonderaa. “I seem to be gettin’ so susceptible,” he muses.
“When Barbara turned me down—”
“You’re cured,” said his friend brutally. “As a matter of fact, I’ve noticed it for some time.”
Lord Peter sighed deeply. “I value your candour, Charles,” he said, “but I wish you hadn’t such an unkind way of putting things.” (282)
Lord Peter’s blood must have been absolutely screaming by the time Gerald was cleared.
Charles Parker proves himself susceptible in this novel as well. Perhaps hoping that at least in fiction two decent people might find happiness in each other, Sayers created the bare beginnings of a romance between Parker and Mary Wimsey. Charles is smitten with Mary from the very first, to the point that it actually affects his detective judgment—an exceedingly rare thing. Blind to the worst of Mary’s lies and subterfuge, he defends her actions in the face of the brutal facts that Peter sets forward. A horrible moment comes when Mary actually confesses to Cathcart’s murder. Charles knows she is doing it to shield another man; he knows she is lying, and he knows that it is highly irregular for him even to listen without cautioning her. A difficult situation for a man in love. A worse moment comes when Peter catches on; Charles is naturally defensive, and an ugly scene ensues before Peter assures his friend that all is well, at least as far as he is concerned.
An intrepid Wimsey, a romantic Parker—the Lord Peter series would have been vastly different had these trends continued. The climax of the story proves another aberration, a four-alarm ending with a verdict from the House of Lords, an attempted murder, a car crash, and finally Wimsey and Parker getting stone cold drunk with Freddy Arbuthnot. The fragile, sensitive Wimsey, mindful of the consequence of his discoveries, is virtually nonexistent in this novel.
This anomaly among the Wimsey novels took four years in the making; for the most part they were the most miserably unhappy years of Dorothy L. Sayers’s life. That might well explain the story’s curious turns. Bereft of romance and adventure in her own life, she turned to fiction to supply what she ached for most.
Two additional stock characters make important impressions in Clouds of Witness. Sir Impey Biggs, casually mentioned in the first novel, becomes a major player in the second. The barrister primarily responsible for Gerald Wimsey’s defense before the House of Lords, Biggs proves a formidable figure. Shrewd, sagacious, and bullying, he will stop at nothing to obtain an acquittal—he does not want the truth, he wants to win the case. Lord Peter is confirmed in his belief “that the professional advocate was the most immoral fellow on the face of the earth” (178). After he gets Denver off with what turns out to be the truth, Sayers employed Sir Impey Biggs in significant roles in at least two more of Wimsey’s cases.
The Wimsey family solicitor, Mr. Murbles, is a lawyer of a decidedly different stripe, “a real gentleman of the old school.”18 As a retained attorney, his job is to provide the family good counsel in the legal aspects of day-to-day living. Murbles is perfectly attuned to the task, a cautious and wise man with a keener devotion to abstract justice than has Sir Impey. The solicitor is a throwback, an older man firmly ensconced in the conservative traditions of the Victorian age. Lady Mary is the first woman to dine in Murbles’s chambers in twenty years—women traditionally had little need or comprehension of a lawyer’s services, and Murbles was not one for feminine companionship.
Sayers made ample use of this newly drawn figure, as did Peter Wimsey. For all the differences in their age and outlook, the two men share opinion on the most fundamental things of life: excellent food and discriminating drink. In the two novels to follow, this “wise old bird”19 becomes an integral part of the investigating team headed by Lord Peter Wimsey and Charles Parker. Peter must rely on Murbles’s impeccable knowledge of wills to find a reason for the “unnatural death” Sayers invented for her third novel.
In her last letter to John Cournos, dated October 18, 1925, Dorothy L. Sayers admitted to being “rather nervous” over a new mystery story she was preparing to write. The letter was in fact devoted exclusively to the craft of mystery writing, a cold departure from the bitter anguish of her past correspondence. Sayers had by this time gotten to know Mac Fleming, achieving a happiness that would cure the bittersweet passion she had poured into the Cournos letters. More assured of her own worth, she seized the opportunity to discuss the challenge of the mystery novel with the “jaded intellect” of her former lover.
Sayers argued that the best detective stories to date had been two dimensional, citing the work of Conan Doyle, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Austin Freeman as examples. Even an ostensible novel such as The Moon-stone by Wilkie Collins “was not intricate and not altogether in the round.” Detective stories were “on the whole most effective when done in the flat and on rather broad lines.” Yet, it was in this letter that she confessed her daring intention to break with this most productive tradition, to write a story “combining the appeal to the emotions with the appeal to the intellect.” The new story showed signs of “becoming ’round.”20
This new story was to become The Dawson Pedigree, more generally known as Unnatural Death. Although Sayers initiated work on this third novel just as her personal life began to show signs of improvement, the effects of the preceding years of unhappiness are readily apparent. The “roundness” of Unnatural Death is manifest in its darkness. For all that the novel is set in springtime, the world Sayers creates is largely cheerless, beset by tragedy, greed, and steady, creeping evil.
Mary Whittaker is the most cunning and determined villain that Dorothy L. Sayers ever created, a woman who stops at nothing. Sayers enhances the sense of Whittaker’s evil presence by providing only the merest glimpses of her person. The reader sees her once through the eyes of Miss Climpson (Peter’s operative), and twice again—although we are not made aware of it—in her disguise as the soon-to-be-divorced Mrs. Forrest. For the rest, she operates at a distance, committing abhorrent crimes with cold-blooded determination. She murders her great aunt for her money and two young women to keep that fact hidden. She tries also to polish off the lawyer who provided innocuous advice, then Wimsey, disguised as the over-nervous Mr. Templeton. Her greed extends to cutting off a poor relation—a clergyman, yet!—without a farthing, and then attempting to pin all her crimes on him. Mary Whittaker is the ultimate rapacious female, the “new woman” run amok.
That Whittaker is a thoroughly modern woman is emphasized from the very beginning. The first description Peter Wimsey hears makes no bones about it: “Oh, a very nice, well-educated, capable girl, with a great deal more brain than her aunt. Self-reliant, cool, all that sort of
thing. Quite the modern type. The sort of woman one can trust to keep her head and not forget things.”21
Mary Whittaker is in fact a professional woman, a nurse trained in London at the “Royal Free.” Her status as the “new woman” is subsequently confirmed by the discerning eye of Peter’s confederate, Miss Alex andra Climpson: “She was totally out of place among the tea-tables of S. Onesimus. With her handsome, strongly marked features and quiet air of authority, she was of the type that “does well” in City offices. She had a pleasant and self-possessed manner, and was beautifully tailored—not mannishly, and yet with a severe fineness of outline that negatived the appeal of a beautiful figure” (59). By story’s end this nice, handsome woman will be revealed as evil incarnate, in part because of her sex.
“When a woman is wicked and unscrupulous,” said Parker, sententiously, “she is the most ruthless criminal in the world—fifty times worse than a man, because she is so much more single-minded about it.”
“They’re not troubled with sentimentality, that’s why,” said Wimsey, “and we poor mutts of men stuff ourselves up with the idea that they’re romantic and emotional. All punk, my son.” (245)
Two men make these observations in the context of the story, but a woman wrote it all. Here, in a sense, is the ultimate argument for equality of the sexes—a woman is just as capable as a man of appalling malevolence.22
Sayers had several themes in mind as she painted the repellant career of Mary Whittaker. As a budding writer of detective fiction, Sayers hoped to create a new kind of criminal mastermind whose deeds were so subtle in motive and means as to be almost undetectable. For more than half of Unnatural Death, it is questionable whether any crime has been committed. When a motive for murder at last introduces itself, it is still unclear how in the world Whittaker actually killed her aunt. Had she not plunged into criminal lunacy, attempting to murder every person with information about her motives, Mary would never have seen the inside of a jail.
Conundrums for the Long Week-End Page 8
