Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  The past would have remained the past but for Wimsey’s efforts. Jeff Deacon would have remained an unknown corpse, moldering in a soon-forgotten grave. Wholly evil, he had met a much-deserved end. Knowing the extent of his vicious and immoral behaviors, no one would possibly wish to mourn him—let the earth take him. Once again too clever by half, Peter Wimsey unfortunately came to know the actions of every single participant in the whole, sad farce. He knew why the elusive Jean Legros had left France, why Cranton (the London ex-convict) had trekked from London to Fenchurch St. Paul, what Potty Peake had seen in the church, and why William Thoday was so anxious to rise from his sick bed on New Year’s Eve. Only the method and hour of Deacon’s death eluded him; without those elemental facts, he could not positively say whether Cranton, William Thoday, or William’s brother James had done the deed. The village would have been better off left in ignorance. Because of Peter’s inspired efforts, Mary and William Thoday were no longer legally married, William and James Thoday were prime murder suspects, and William wanted to die. Peter can only apologize to the much-distressed Reverend Venables: “I rather wish I hadn’t come buttin’ into this. Some things may be better left alone, don’t you think? My sympathies are all in the wrong place and I don’t like it. I know all about not doing evil that good may come. It’s doin’ good that evil may come that is so embarrasin’. . . . I’m sorry to have made so much unpleasantness, anyhow. And I really would rather go away now. I’ve got all that modern squeamishness that doesn’t like watchin’ people suffer” (214–15). There is no celebration to conclude the investigation into the mystery of Fenchurch St. Paul’s churchyard. There are simply people, bearing up under the evil influences that Jeff Deacon left behind. There is pain and guilt; above all, there is confusion. How did Jeff Deacon die? Wimsey can only feel responsible for the whole, sad, unresolvable mess.

  A detective story might have ended here. For Dorothy L. Sayers, however, there was far more at stake than the simple solution of a murder, no matter how puzzling. Wimsey must return to Fenchurch St. Paul, face up to the responsibility for his endeavors, and accept the consequences. It is not that he has sinned, rather that he is a man of action living in a world of moral ambiguities. Ultimate judgment, for his own actions and those of others, does not rest with Peter Wimsey.

  Peter returns to the village because of Hilary Thorpe. Old Mrs. Wilbraham has died, leaving the recovered emeralds to Hilary; Lord Peter has been designated trustee of the estate. Hilary will not touch the emeralds “with a barge pole” (238), but the inheritance does make her a wealthy heiress. She insists on returning to the old family house for Christmas and begs Lord Peter to come. With his sole other choice Duke’s Denver—where he would endure an eternity of disparaging speculation concerning Harriet Vane—Peter agrees to spend the holidays at Fenchurch St. Paul.

  Judgment comes. On the day after Christmas, the old Van Leyden sluice gives way, as the rector had long feared. The country is flooded six feet deep for miles around, with only the ancient church standing clear. The bells toll out their warning. The water claims Will Thoday; he dies heroically, trying to save another man, but he dies with guilt on his soul. The entire village gathers in the church, and Mary Thoday hears the bitter news. Her agonized tears stab at Wimsey, the dregs of the cup he has prepared. He can think only of escape. Dashing for the bell tower, he seeks the roof, only to be confronted by the bells themselves, ringing warning, ringing judgment: “It was not noise—it was brute pain, a grinding, bludgeoning, ran-dan, crazy, intolerable torment. He felt himself screaming, but could not hear his own cry. His eardrums were cracking; his senses swam away. It was infinitely worse than any roar of heavy artillery. That had beaten and deafened, but this unendurable shrill clangour was a raving madness, an assault of devils” (274–75).

  Clamboring at last onto the roof, clinging to survival and sanity with his remaining strength, Wimsey knows. Jeff Deacon had been imprisoned in the belfry on the night of the New Year’s peal; the bells had killed him. Perhaps this had been God’s own justice. Ringing the peal, Lord Peter and eight solid members of the Fenchurch St. Paul community unwittingly had proved the instruments of Deacon’s execution.

  The solution is truly innovative, a first in the annals of detective fiction, but it is a small thing in the context of this story’s final chapters. Lord Peter’s explanations to the authorities and Reverend Venables come almost as an afterthought. What matters is that Peter must do his part to protect the lives of the villagers. Life does go on—life must go on—and Peter must subsume his own private remorse for the general good. As the flood waters wash clean the village of Fenchurch St. Paul, Peter organizes the men for games and calisthenics while Bunter directs the common kitchen and provides music hall impressions. Peter Wimsey is a man in the human community; whatever the circumstance, he must do his best and accept what comes. By the close of the novel, he can bow to the ultimate truth: “Nine Tailors Make a Man” (280).

  So ended the year 1930 for Lord Peter, the most intensively active year Dorothy L. Sayers ever chronicled for her fictional detective. The process of creating this one year absorbed the author for close to five. Constantly embellishing her craft, Sayers came to use the passage of time in her parallel, imaginary world—“Cloud-Cuckoo Land”—in a variety of intricate and intriguing ways. In the end, she successfully interlayered the full content of two separate novels, splicing to this history portions of two additional novels and a short story. The purpose of this elaborate sequencing of events spread over several works was simple and extraordinarily demanding. Sayers had set out to give Peter Wimsey a lover, a wife. In the process, she discovered that she needed first to provide him a soul.

  The Peter Wimsey that emerges from the pages of The Nine Tailors is recognizable as the Wimsey of Whose Body? As ever, he looks relentlessly forward, embracing the new without utterly rejecting the old. Years have distanced him from the war, but the memories still rise from time to time. Visiting France in search of the mysterious Jean Legros, Peter exhibits painful familiarity with the nightmare events surrounding the third battle of the Marne, June 1918. He remains a skillful, imaginative, innovative investigator who employs all the latest scientific methodology, yet he is curiously reliant on intuition for his most brilliant discoveries. Peter is, as his fictitious surname embodies, still whimsical.

  Yet there is now more to the man. His eccentricities have acquired reason, and his studied lightheartedness masks a vulnerable sensitivity. Occasionally the mask will crack: “Oh God! Shall I ever live down this disastrous reputation for tom-foolery?”57 The care and interest he expresses for others have become genuine; he will do his best to secure the happiness of others, even at his own risk. If he is more virtuous, he is less chivalrous; he is happy to accept women as equal human beings. That process, begun with his recognition that Mrs. Grimethorpe must be her own woman, continued in his encounters with Marjorie Phelps and Ann Dorland and culminated in his surrender to the unhappy fact that Harriet Vane could not marry him on unequal terms. This, undeniably, is the greatest lesson Peter has absorbed through 1930.

  Wimsey has by this time become a distant echo of Theodore Venables. No sense of religion will touch him, of course; his duty to the church is mechanically performed. But he is fully aware of a power greater than his own. In the face of that power, Lord Peter Wimsey has reached within himself and found the capacity to be a truly decent human being. Peter has indeed acquired a soul.58

  4

  Lord Peter Displays His Range

  BY 1931 DOROTHY L. SAYERS HAD ENTRENCHED HERSELF AS one of the leading detective novelists of her era—the “Queen of Crime.”1 Her reputation rested on the Lord Peter mysteries; she had published six longer works and a collection of short stories, with more to follow soon. Her devotion to the field did not end there. She had another novel, The Documents in the Case, to her credit, though she considered it a failure. She had also begun work on a literary biography of Wilkie Collins, a pioneer crime novelist antedatin
g Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes. (The work was never completed, though she did produce a widely respected bibliography of Collins’s works.) 1931 also saw the publication of a new selection of edited mysteries, Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, Second Series. As with everything else in her life, Dorothy L. Sayers had thrown herself into a full-time career as detective novelist with unbounded enthusiasm and unparalleled attention to detail. She fully immersed herself in the subject matter.

  Much of Sayers’s reputation for critical understanding of the detective story rests on the introduction she wrote for her first series of Great Short Stories. Even after World War II, critics regarded the essay as “the finest single piece of analytical writing about the detective story,” containing “all that was to be said about the detective story up to the date of its composition.” The introduction reflects both her devotion to thorough background research for any project she chose and her critical perspective on the mystery story as literature.2

  Sayers regarded the popularity of the detective story as one more example of the strange human predilection for “puzzles and bugaboos” ranging from crossword puzzles to mathematical conundrums. Perhaps it was an expression of the inquiring intellect, perhaps mere perversity. In any case, she traces the roots of the mystery story to the tales of horrors and the supernatural that delighted the ancients, but she acknowledges that credit for the modern form of detective fiction belongs to “the wayward genius of Edgar Allen Poe.” Two elements were necessary in society for the mystery to flourish: the presence of an organized and effective force of police, and popular sympathy for the cause of law and order in conflicts with the exotic criminal. When these conditions came to exist in the nineteenth century, Poe seized the opportunity to combine the chilling horror of some terrible crime with the studied efforts of the detective to expose the perpetrator. The mystery story was born.3

  In Sayers’s analysis, the five detective stories of Edgar Allen Poe stand as the source for two critical forms of development, which she labels the “intellectual” and the “sensational.” In the intellectual story, the plot hinges not so much on the crime as its detection: the puzzle is intricate, the clues for a proper solution present but cunningly disguised, and action, such as it is, focuses on the investigator. As Sayers noted, “The strength of this school is its analytical ingenuity; its weakness is its liability to dullness and pomposity, its mouthing over the infinitely little, and its lack of movement and emotion.” The sensational, on the other hand, sacrifices intricacy for adventure; the detective (and the reader) may have little to go on, but the threat of danger is a constant. “This school is strong in dramatic incident and atmosphere; its weakness is a tendency to confusion and a dropping of links—its explanations do not always explain; it is never dull, but it is sometimes nonsense.” The intellectual and the sensational, therefore, defined the range of the detective story genre, while a third category, the combined puzzle-thriller, represented a kind of golden mean.4

  Sayers traces the evolution of the detective story following Poe by tracking two separate but integral lines of development: the plot of the mystery, and the growth of the investigator as a standard character. She emphasizes the work of two nineteenth-century English writers, Sheridan Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins, both of whom made critical contributions to plot development. Le Fanu, she argued, had a better eye for the sensational—the weird and horrible—but Collins was the truer mystery writer, a master of posing the mystery as a puzzle for the reader to solve along with the participants. At the same time, Collins’s characters exhibited wonderful variety and a sense of genuine presence. Without hesitation, Sayers pronounced Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone “the very finest detective story ever written.” Small wonder she chose Collins as her subject for critical study in 1931.5

  If Poe invented and Collins perfected (at least once), Arthur Conan Doyle crystallized the detective story. Beginning with his introduction in 1887, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes became the master by which all other fictional detectives would be measured forever. Sayers maintains that the reason for this lies less with the genius of Holmes than that of his creator. In many ways, Holmes is the mirror image of Poe’s Inspector Dupin. What makes the Holmes stories come alive, Sayers argues, is the effective interaction between the investigator and the narrator, Doctor Watson. In Watson, Doyle has created a multilayered and sympathetic character who shares the reader’s mystification over Holmes’s latest challenge. He makes the wildly eccentric Holmes an approachable and believable entity.

  Ironically, while the characters of Holmes and Watson are perhaps the most recognizable in all of English literature, the immense popularity of Doyle’s stories actually had the effect of promoting plot at the expense of characterization in the detective story. Holmes is the ultimate logician; the people who consult his practice are simply elements in a puzzle that Holmes must reconstruct. Apart from Sherlock Holmes and John (or is it James?) Watson, Doyle’s characters are largely interchangeable cutouts. The plot is everything.6

  Worse, Doyle’s followers and imitators fastened on just one of Holmes’s salient characteristics: his scientific methodology. Great though the Holmes stories were, Sayers was dismayed by the manner in which “the detective story became swept away on a single current of development.” The difficulty was that Doyle did not consistently “play fair” with the reader—too often Holmes would seize on some clue, receive some important telegram, or hold some critical conversation outside Watson’s hearing. For all the logic of Holmes, there is no chance that readers can exercise their own logic; they do not have the complete information. As time went on, fiction writers in the Doyle tradition became more adept at providing readers the necessary clues, but their detectives grew correspondingly more cold and analytical. The stories became exercises in logic, devoid of any real human element. The potential recognized by Wilkie Collins was left unfulfilled. This, Sayers maintained, was pretty much the way matters stood in the years just before the Great War.7

  The introduction to Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, First Series, next takes up the trends of the modern era. Though it is implicit in every word she writes, Sayers does not actually mention the fact that she is herself a leading practitioner of the art during the twenties. She considers modern developments in the genre from several perspectives, including viewpoint, love interest, methods of murder, and identification of suspects. Sayers is at pains to emphasize that while mystery writers were exploring several intriguing new avenues, the basic concept remained firmly imbedded in the traditions of Poe, Collins, and Doyle. What she did not explore was the influence of recent developments on her own work. She also did not consider her own position with respect to the various categories of mystery writing that she had constructed.8

  Sayers, in fact, was one of the great experimenters with the potentials inherent in detective fiction. She had modelled her great detective in reaction to Sherlock Holmes, but she placed him in situations worthy of Wilkie Collins’s imagination. Like Collins, she was capable of producing a tight, intellectual (and dull) detective puzzle or exploring the sensational. Sayers surveyed the full range of possibilities. At the same time, she was careful to make her audience understand that they were reading mystery stories, that they were indulging in a species of literary sleight of hand.

  Though Dorothy L. Sayers worked hard to create a sense of the real in her novels, mirroring the England she knew and incorporating news items of the current moment, she employed several devices to remind readers that they were reading a story, that none of these horrible, murdering people were real. The most obvious of her tricks was the naming of places and characters. No one would conceive that places with names such as Riddlesdale, Little Dorking, or Little Doddering could actually exist. What better name for a psychotic villain than Freke? For a slow and cautious police superintendent: Mr. Glaisher. Vera Findlater, Bertha Gotobed—who would believe that these were the names of real people? Even the names of some of the
stock characters—Murbles, Sir Impey Biggs—are patently ludicrous. And of course, the most blatant of all is the name of her hero, Peter Wimsey. Sayers had selected the name to suggest the essence of his character: an excessively playful if capricious disposition. Sayers was much surprised to discover that there actually were English people bearing the surname Wimsey; she occasionally received actual obituary notices for Peter Wimseys in the mail.9

  If the names of places and characters did not serve as sufficient reminder, Sayers planted occasional reminders in the text, conversations that pointed up the fictional context of the action. In Whose Body? Parker remarks that “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” (59). Of course, this is a detective story and in no way real life in a London November. Sayers is simply pointing up the fact that she is making things difficult for her characters—and her readers.

  Sayers employed similar devices in subsequent stories. In Unnatural Death, she promises the reader that she will not lower herself to employ the most unfair of murder methods, the “native poisons which slay in a split second and defy the skill of the analyst.” Such things might have passed muster in Arthur Conan Doyle’s heyday, but they were now “familiar to the meanest writer of detective stories.” At the same time, Sayers revealed in this story her ultimate goal as a writer, one she shared with all mystery writers and with all fictional detectives. The strange death of Agatha Dawson was meant to be “The case of cases. The murder without discernable means, or motive, or clue” (97, 131).