Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  As a matter of fact, Peter in that week drove off to celebrate New Year’s Eve with friends at Walbeach in East Anglia, only to involve himself in an automobile accident near the tiny Fens village of Fenchurch St. Paul. The automobile had nothing seriously wrong, just a broken axle. Forced to stay overnight at the church rectory, Peter takes part in the New Year’s bell peal, “no less than fifteen thousand, eight hundred and forty Kent Treble Bob Majors.”38 Unbeknownst to Wimsey or anyone else, he takes part in killing a man in the process. Thus begins the story Sayers lays out, with great affection and sensitivity, in The Nine Tailors. Again she is most careful to emphasize the exact dates of the adventure. There can be no doubt that this is New Year’s Day, 1930. Sayers makes no reference to the events of Strong Poison in The Nine Tailors, although Lord Peter and Bunter do enter into an interesting exchange. Peter wishes to know if his manservant has ever rung a church bell:

  “Only once, my lord, and on that occasion an accident was only narrowly averted. Owing to my unfortunate lack of manual dexterity I was very nearly hanged in the rope, my lord.”

  “That’s enough about hanging,” said Wimsey, peevishly. “We’re not detecting now, and I don’t want to talk shop.” (13–14)

  Presumably, the doom threatening Harriet Vane was very much on his mind.

  By two o’clock on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, Wimsey and Bunter are once more on the way to Walbeach. As this first of four sections of the story ends, the two meet an ex-convict walking toward Fenchurch St. Paul, but they think little of the incident.

  Lord Peter’s participation in Strong Poison picks up following the successful mission of Miss Climpson. He now sets in motion the machinery that will reveal the real killer of Philip Boyes, the exact motive, and most importantly, the method. Harriet Vane goes free. As the novel ends, she and Peter most decidedly do not fall into one another’s arms; Dorothy L. Sayers is much too good a novelist to allow that to happen. Much bitterness of feeling will have to be resolved before Peter will have any chance with Harriet. Sayers eventually gave some inkling of the early days following Harriet’s freedom from prison, in Gaudy Night:

  During the first year or so after her trial, she had not wanted to appear anywhere, even had she then been able to afford the frocks to appear in. In those days, he had taken her to the quieter and better restaurants in Soho, or, more often, carried her off, sulky and rebellious, in the car to such roadside inns as kept reliable cooks. She had been too listless to refuse these outings, which had probably done something to keep her from brooding, even though her host’s imperturbable cheerfulness had often been repaid only with bitter or distressful words. (62)

  In the Wimsey chronology, the action returned to occurrences recorded in the second and third parts of The Nine Tailors. Events pick up in Fenchurch St. Paul as Easter nears. One of the most respected members of the community, Sir Henry Thorpe, has died, and the sexton must reopen the grave where Sir Henry’s wife had been interred just a few months before. Overturning the earth, he discovers a strange, unidentifiable body hidden in the grave. Church and law enforcement are perplexed; Peter Wimsey is invited to investigate. Over the next two months, he unravels as snarled a string of events as he will ever face; the solution is a sad nightmare for all concerned. He would as soon leave Fenchurch St. Paul behind forever, but he has, in the process of the investigation, become the executor for a large fortune bequeathed to Sir Henry’s daughter, Hilary Thorpe. The obligation weighs heavily.

  The late summer of 1930 finds Lord Peter vacationing with Bunter at Kircudbright in Scotland. Peter is a familiar character in those parts, turning up annually to take advantage of the fine weather, spending his time alternately fishing or playing very decent golf. Kircudbright is the kind of brilliant, mellow, almost wild country that readily attracts the landscape painter; Peter is accepted by the considerable artistic community as a harmless if untalented eccentric. When one of the artists, the truly obnoxious Campbell, falls prey to murder, Wimsey gets an opportunity to display the talents he does possess. Seeing through The Five Red Herrings, he successfully traces the killer’s every movement, something five different local police officials cannot duplicate.

  Insofar as Wimsey’s life story is concerned, this particular investigation does not amount to terribly much. True, Wimsey does refer to his inductive triumph as “the proudest moment of my life,” one in which he can at last “feel like Sherlock Holmes” (260). But the case is barren of the psychological and social conundrums that mark so many of the novels. In fact, The Five Red Herrings would scarcely be worth mentioning in the context of this most emotionally challenging year of Lord Peter’s fictional life, save for one incident. Unravelling the disappearance of Farren, one of Campbell’s many enemies, Peter enters into a long conversation with Mrs. Farren regarding the necessary elements for a successful marriage. In view of the tempestuous time he was having with Harriet Vane, strategies for pursuing wedded bliss must certainly be on his mind.

  The year 1930 approaches its close. Out of loyalty and respect for young Hilary Thorpe, Peter returns to Fenchurch St. Paul to celebrate Christmas. The Nine Tailors reaches an apocalyptic climax as the murderer is at last revealed. The strange, unhappy chain of events claims another victim, and the Fens are flooded, washing away the sin and exposing once again the fragile stupidity of humankind.

  Dorothy L. Sayers employed a short story, three full novels, and a small portion of a fourth to tell the story of those horrendous fourteen months. By the time she had completed the tale, the Peter Wimsey that emerged had become almost her perfect model of a human being. He was a man after her own heart, exceedingly talented, everlastingly cheerful, and, in the depths of his soul, very unhappy. His greatest asset was supreme patience, aided by a calm acceptance of what was.39

  For a period in 1929 and early 1930, Strong Poison became almost a stepchild of Sayers’s fertile imagination. While she lavished attention on The Documents in the Case, the latest Wimsey novel seems to have bumped along, plaguing her sense of artistic fair play. Perhaps, as she later claimed, she did enter into the story “with the infanticidal intention of doing away with Peter; that is, of marrying him off and getting rid of him.”40 If so, she discovered in the process the stubborn depths of her own conscience as an author. She discovered also what a resilient and well-polished character Peter had become. He simply refused to marry the woman as matters stood.

  The novel that she sent (without fanfare) to Victor Gollancz in April 1930 was conceived as an integrated detective fiction and love story. As a mystery, the plot is an intriguing return to old ground. For the third novel in a row, an elderly woman’s will provides the motive for murder; this time a lawyer becomes the professional consumed by temptation. Norman Urquhart has lost his cousin’s legacy gambling on the Megatherium Trust. His only hope of avoiding discovery, therefore, is to do away with the cousin—Philip Boyes. As in Unnatural Death, the perpetrator of the crime becomes obvious to the reader rather quickly. The difficulty is, how was the murder done? Sayers has left clues all through the novel for those with knowledge and imagination. From the very first, Urquhart is described as possessing “smooth dark hair,” while his “skin was pale and curiously clear, except for a number of little freckles, like sun-spots” (111). These were the visible symptoms of his habitual intake of arsenic, and in the end they will betray him.

  For reasons dictated more by the romantic side of the story, Peter is unusually helpless in Strong Poison. The climax is vintage, as Wimsey works late into the night to assemble the pieces necessary to comprehend Urquhart’s crime. The scene is reminiscent of Whose Body? where Peter, alone in his study, surrounded by literary clues, suddenly and intuitively understands the whole of the Battersea mystery. Yet this is practically the only valid comparison between the two cases. In Strong Poison, Peter does not crumple with nervous shock. More importantly, he does not ferret out the disparate puzzle pieces himself; they are carried to him by a series of operatives. He relies on Charl
es Parker to retrace Philip Boyes’s last night in Bloomsbury, Marjorie Phelps to guide him through London’s Bohemia, Miss Murchison to investigate Urquhart’s law office, Blindfold Bill to teach Miss Murchison the use of burglar’s tools, and Bunter to investigate Urquhart’s household. Above all, he relies on the endlessly resourceful Kitty Climpson to get a look at the will in question, the last testament of the notorious Cremorna Garden. Peter can only stand and wait, an endless agony of waiting for the others to do what is necessary. Small wonder he thought of becoming a hermit.

  As Peter’s operative, Miss Climpson is much the same character as in Unnatural Death, though her responsibilities have grown immensely. She began work for Lord Peter as a lone agent late in 1926; three years later she is in charge of a “cattery” employing dozens of “superfluous women” (49–50) in a variety of investigations. Still, when the work to be done is critical, Peter will rely on no one else but Miss Climpson herself. Ordering her to drop all usual assignments, Peter orders her to Windle, in Westmoreland, where she must again consign herself to boarding house life, becoming just another elderly spinster looking for friendship.

  Kitty Climpson’s conscience has come a long way since the Mary Whittaker investigation. She now assumes the role of invading spy without the least flicker of remorse (save on Sunday!), and she embarks on a campaign of deliberate falsehood completely at odds with her religious beliefs. In short, Miss Climpson poses as a spiritualist medium. A paranormal investigator has taught her all the tricks of the spiritualist charlatan’s trade. She has learned her lessons well, completely taking in Miss Booth, Cremorna Garden’s foolish nurse.

  The long passages describing the series of seances carefully orchestrated by Miss Climpson seem a bit out of step with the rest of Strong Poison, as if Dorothy L. Sayers had an axe to grind and was seizing an opportunity. Sayers’s position is manifestly clear: “The apparatus of planes and controls, correspondences and verdical communications, astral bodies, auras and ectoplastic materialisations” (181) were an insult to the intelligence. The descriptions of seance become one long demonstration of how the shrewd can easily dupe the guileless. Miss Climpson, cloaked in spiritualist disguise, gains access to Cremorna Garden’s will by the most obvious falsehoods. The nurse, perfectly faithful and anxious to communicate with the spirit world, never suspects a thing.

  Perhaps Sayers felt it her duty to set the mystery-reading public to rights regarding the paranormal. It had to be more than a little embarrassing that the most famous detective author of all time, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had become an evangelical spokesman for spiritualism. The man was so easily fooled: he pronounced genuine the most obviously doctored photographs of little girls “playing with fairies”; he endorsed and defended patently fraudulent mediums; and he proclaimed his second wife to be a strong medium, though no less a person than Harry Houdini knew she was fooling herself.41

  In the modern world of the 1920s, belief in spiritualism was something of a throwback. Spiritualism had flourished originally during the Victorian era, a weird kind of rationalist approach to the subject of afterlife. Advocates referred to it as “paranormal science,” an attempt to fuse standard Christian belief with Darwinian discoveries. The Church of England condemned the idea, as did the biological and physical scientists. Spiritualism appealed to a small but steadfast subset of the population.

  Until the Great War. When more than three-quarters of a million young men died abruptly and horribly, when loved ones had not even the opportunity to view them in death or to say a proper farewell. Arthur Conan Doyle’s own case stood for many. His son Kingsley died in combat, as did his brother-in-law and his own brother. When a close acquaintance told him that she had received mediumistic messages from her three brothers, all killed at the front, Doyle was ready to believe. He attended seances in which he believed he spoke with his son. Healed in part by the experience, he began to spread the word. As the creator of the ultimate rationalist, Sherlock Holmes, Doyle inspired many to believe it was all true. Spiritualism gathered strength in the early twenties.42

  Sayers had lost no one close to her in the war. Death did not touch her much at all until the sudden loss of both parents in 1928 and 1929. Now, during the writing of Strong Poison, death was very much on her mind. Plainly, spiritualism was no answer for her. Lord Peter may have been less the rationalist than Sherlock Holmes, but his creator had her head screwed on right. Like Miss Climpson, Sayers knew the tricks, and she “had wondered greatly at the folly and wickedness of mankind” (182).

  Yet by ruthlessly playing on the folly of Miss Booth, Kitty Climpson managed to successfully complete her mission for Lord Peter in just eight days. Did the end justify the means? Miss Climpson can only fervently hope so and salve her conscience by warning Miss Booth to look out for charlatans. Peter is not even bothered by the question. By whatever means necessary, by whatever tools available, human or otherwise, he must triumph. Ten years of devotion to the cause of justice demanded no less. And there was also the romantic aspect to consider.

  Strong Poison provided the first genuine love angle for Lord Peter Wimsey. Obviously he had panted after women before but, in Harriet Vane, Sayers sought to create the ultimate woman for Wimsey. For reasons not immediately made clear, Peter falls for her at first sight (perhaps the two years spent as the ex-footman Rogers have increased his susceptibility). His thoughts after actually speaking to her for the first time suggest how completely she mirrors his dreams of desirable womanhood:

  Her skin is like honey—she ought to wear deep red—and old garnets—and lots of rings, rather old-fashioned ones—I could take a house, of course—poor kid, I would damn well work to make it up to her—she’s got a sense of humour too—brains—one wouldn’t be dull—one would wake up, and there’d be a whole day for jolly things to happen in—and then one would come home and go to bed—that would be jolly, too—and while she was writing, I could go out and mess around, so we shouldn’t either of us be dull. (47–48)

  Peter’s thoughts perhaps embody Sayers’s own ideas of the necessary ingredients for a successful marriage.

  So who is this Harriet Vane? The reader learns a few salient facts during the judge’s summing up at her murder trial. Her eyes were “like dark smudges under the heavy square brows” (1). Comments on her physical attractiveness throughout the novel are much influenced by questions of her guilt, but she is definitely not beautiful in any classic sense. She was born in 1901; at the time of the trial, both her parents had been dead for six years. She made her living as a detective novelist. Peter’s mother thought her books “rather clever” (30); they sold steadily if unspectacularly. As a popular writer, she moved easily among the Bloomsbury crowd, attracting several close friendships and, eventually, the amorous attentions of Philip Boyes. Boyes had made a career of his advanced ideas on issues including free love—he would not marry Harriet but wished her to live with him. After much anguished hesitation, she consented, only to see Boyes alter his own views after a year, asking her hand in marriage. Showing herself to be the true denizen of modernist society that he had implored her to be, she took his proposal as an insult and left him.

  In sum, Harriet Vane is a rather plain woman with brains and a good deal of mental toughness. The loss of her parents had been a difficult blow, but she was making ends meet, dependent on no one. Her principles are Bohemian, but they are principles and she sticks to them. She is an enigma and a paragon of the modern woman. She most decidedly would not be every man’s dream of feminine companionship; her brains alone would repel more than half of maledom. But she is the perfect answer to the enigma that is Lord Peter—perfect in every way except, of course, for the fact that she is on trial for murder.

  Harriet is in many ways an amalgam of the three young women caught in the light by the Bellona Club affair. Like Ann Dorland, Harriet is not physically striking, though she does seem to carry herself with more grace. She is also bereft of parental advice, making her own way in the world and making mistakes. B
ut, like Marjorie Phelps, she is a successful Bohemian, dependent on nothing but her own skill to support herself. She is capable of deep and passionate love, but it must be on terms acceptable to her. And, like Sheila Fentiman, she knows the pain of a mentally abusive relationship, however much her partner may actually love her. Add to these attributes a large dollop of Dorothy L. Sayers’s own personality—Harriet is a mystery writer who has suffered much wounding of the emotions—and the character to emerge sums up much of her creator’s views on the problems of women in the postwar era.

  Knowing what will eventually come of the Wimsey-Vane macabre waltz of the emotions, it is very tempting to read backward from later books to assess the Harriet Vane of Strong Poison. In this novel she is not quite the mirror of Dorothy L. Sayers that she will later become. There is, for example, no mention of her attending Oxford University nor of her being raised in a remote village. The most autobiographical aspect to Harriet in this story is the repellent tale of her relationship with Philip Boyes.

  Philip Boyes was the devil of an excrescence, a conceited, self-absorbed prig who demanded not love but worship from all who knew him. He had talent as a writer but used it to offend more than to enlighten, expressing the most “advanced” views in a clever but tasteless fashion. Believing that a talent such as his own should be supported by his lesser friends and relatives, he sponged without shame as a kind of natural right. Peter Wimsey almost wishes the man alive, just so he could have the pleasure of kicking his bottom.