Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  By the 1930s, Sayers had raised the reversal of fact and fiction to a real art, placing the fictional fiction writer Harriet Vane in the text to point up the differences between standard fictional convention and the actions taking place before her eyes. Even in Strong Poison, Harriet Vane the mystery writer becomes a fulcrum for commentary on the craft of writing mysteries. While Peter’s mother wonders if Harriet’s arraignment for murder is perhaps “a judgement” for Harriet’s vocation of writing murder mysteries, Peter is willing to argue that “in detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They’re the purest literature we have.” Early on in Strong Poison, Peter tests a scenario intimating that Harriet might be the murderer by suggesting she write it up as a new detective novel. Harriet hears him out with great interest, and is duly impressed. “That’s really ingenious,” she admits. “An entirely new motive for murder—the thing I’ve been looking for for years.” When Harriet is at last freed from prison and able to take an active part in Peter’s investigations, the mystery writer’s perspective will become integral to the action on the page. Essentially, Sayers is able to insinuate her own commentary on the plot into the weave of the dialogue. And that really is ingenious (30, 127, 70).

  Sayers further reminds the reader that the novels are the purest fiction by implanting references to other mystery writers into the texts. Again, this is a form of reverse psychology—the characters in Sayers’s books argue that the tale they experience differs sharply from recognized fictions; therefore it has to be real. Beneath it all is Sayers, gently pulling the reader’s leg.

  Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective is the most obvious target for this kind of play. The repeated use of the name Sherlock Holmes was meant to summon images of a legacy—every detective, fictional or real, is to some extent the embodiment of Doyle’s creation. To call someone a “Sherlock” is to conjure up an image, real or ironic, of investigative genius. Sayers was laboring in a tradition largely shaped by Doyle—better to acknowledge this openly and have done with it. In addition to the references to Holmes found in Whose Body? they litter the text of Clouds of Witness, Sayers’s second novel. Newspapers refer to Peter as “the Sherlock Holmes of the West End”; Wimsey and Parker deride one another with such comments as “Holmes, how do you do it?” (191, 223) Similar tokens of respect appear in each subsequent novel, gaining renewed emphasis when Peter and Harriet invoke the name of Holmes to mock one another’s obvious deductions. They are treading in the footsteps of the master.

  References to additional mystery writers—more specific and more pointed—abound in the works of Dorothy L. Sayers. The practice began, in a modest fashion, with the publication of Whose Body? In Julian Freke’s written confession addressed to Lord Peter, he acknowledges the attention to detail emphasized in “that well-thought-out little work of Mr. Bentley’s.”10 Freke is referring to Trent’s Last Case, published by E. C. Bentley in 1912. Sayers felt enormous respect for this book, a work that ran contrary to the Doyle-inspired fashion in detective literature by emphasizing character development and introducing a love element involving the detective. In her 1928 essay on the development of the detective story, Sayers argued that “E. C. Bentley, in Trent’s Last Case, has dealt finely with the still harder problem of the detective in love. Trent’s love for Mrs. Manderson is a legitimate part of the plot; while it does not prevent him from drawing the proper conclusion from the evidence before him, it does prevent him from acting upon his conclusions, and so prepares the way for the real explanation. Incidentally, the love-story is handled artistically and with persuasive emotion.”11

  Bentley wrote the book in response to a bet with fellow author Gilbert Keith Chesterton, to whom Trent’s Last Case is dedicated. The goal was to write a successful detective story in which the detective was logically brilliant and totally wrong in his deductions. Bentley succeeded beyond imagination; the book sold out four editions in just five months. As Sayers wrote in the introduction to a 1930 edition, the work “welled up in the desiccated desert of mystery fiction like a spring of living water. No other writer had ever handled that kind of theme with so light and sure a hand.”12 Certainly the book—the supreme model of a detective story that was a novel in the truest sense—stood as a beacon for Sayers herself.

  Dorothy L. Sayers was not always so kind. In Unnatural Death, she began the practice of mentioning the work of other detective authors for the general purpose of illustrating and criticizing their shortcomings. Her first target is “the works of Mr. Austin Freeman,” author of a long series of modern scientific police procedurals featuring his investigative logician, Doctor Thorndyke. Freeman’s works, which began to appear in 1907, were rigidly logical puzzles involving the carefully crafted criminal plots of most inventive ne’er-do-wells. The puzzle is everything, as there is little character development; even Thorndyke is flat and uninteresting as a human being. In Unnatural Death, Sayers suggests the essence of Freeman’s ideas of proper mystery: Mary Whittaker has faked an elaborate kidnapping by superimposing several sets of footprints—all her own wearing different shoes. Inventive but altogether obvious—and tedious.

  In her 1928 essay, Sayers is at pains to explain the problem with the Doctor Thorndyke stories. The reader “knows that, when Mr. Austin Freeman drowns somebody in a pond full of water-snails, there will be something odd and localised about those snails.” The solution to every story is logical, yes, but overreliant on knowledge of arcane minutiae. After reading two or three Thorndykes, the reader will have the method down pat; instead of detecting with the detective, the reader is detecting the author.13

  Sayers also complained that Freeman succumbed monotonously to the temptation to place impertinent romance in his stories: “Some of the finest detective-stories are marred by a conventional love-story, irrelevant to the action and perfunctorily worked in. The most harmless form of that disease is that taken, for example, in the works of Mr. Austin Freeman. His secondary characters fall in love with distressing regularity, and perform a number of antics suitable to persons in their condition, but they do not interfere with the course of the story. You can skip the love-passages if you like, and nothing is lost.”14 Whatever else could be said of Austin Freeman, his stories did not equate with Dorothy L. Sayers’s idea of a true crime novel in the Wilkie Collins tradition.

  The carefully camouflaged barb directed at Freeman was simply an opening salvo. She broadened the scope of her intent in the fourth Wimsey novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. This time the attention to other writers is most plain: Peter discovers a shelf of mysteries in Ann Dorland’s studio and proceeds to read the titles aloud for the reader’s benefit: “Austin Freeman, Austin Freeman, Austin Freeman—bless me! she must have ordered him in wholesale. Through the Wall—that’s a good ’tec story, Charles—all about the third degree—Isabel Ostrander—three Edgar Wallaces—the girl’s been indulging in an orgy of crime!” (277) Again Sayers has singled out authors she does not really like. She offers another take on Freeman, as Charles Parker finds one of his plots “a bit elaborate for the ordinary criminal” (278). There is no further comment in the book regarding Isabel Ostrander, as Sayers had some small respect for this author. In her 1928 essay she condemns her with faint praise, writing in a footnote that her Ashes to Ashes “is a very excellent piece of work which, in the hands of a writer of a little more distinction, might have been a powerful masterpiece.”15 She had almost nothing at all to say about Edgar Wallace in the essay, regarding him as the author of commonplace “sensational thrillers.” She does mention him again in the Bellona Club affair. Ann Dorland and Peter discuss the fact that “When Crippen and La Neve were taken on the steamer, they were reading Edgar Wallace.” Probably Sayers agreed with the summation provided by contemporary American critic Willard Huntington Wright, who argued in 1927 that “Wallace has written too much and too rapidly, with too little attention to his problems and too great an insistence on inexpensive ‘thrills.’” The man published one hundred seventy books betw
een 1905 and 1932. It is more this volume of accomplishment rather than the content of any one book that makes him remembered at all.16

  Presumably having had her full say in the introduction published in 1928, Sayers restrains herself in the next Wimsey novel, Strong Poison. There is just one reference to other mystery authors. Contemplating the role of the detective-fiction writer in real life, Peter’s mother cites two examples by name to contradict her own contention that writers are not much for investigation in real life. There is “Edgar Wallace of course, who always seems to be everywhere and dear Conan Doyle” (30). Doyle seems to have gotten the better of the assessment.

  Following the heady and intimidating complications introduced with Harriet Vane, Sayers felt the need for a break, both for herself and for Lord Peter. Writing to a close friend, she confessed that she was “getting a bit weary of Lord Peter, but I suppose he must be kept going, as he still seems to pay pretty well. But, as you may have noticed, he is growing older and more staid. There are times when I wish him the victim of one of his own plots!”17

  Sayers composed much of her next book while on vacation in Scotland in 1930, staying at the hotel to write through most of the summer while Mac Fleming fished and dabbled at landscape art. The result was an almost total change of pace for the Wimsey series. Virtually devoid of complicating love angles, anguished guilt complexes, or moral dilemmas, The Five Red Herrings emerged as a detective story almost purely in the puzzle tradition.

  Sayers had determined to try her hand at an old-fashioned pure detective puzzle in the conventions of Doyle-Freeman-Chesterton. As she confessed in a letter to Victor Gollancz, she liked “each book to have a slightly different idea behind it. I have also been annoyed (stupidly enough) by a lot of reviewers who observe the identity of the murderer was obvious from the start. . . . Personally, I feel that it is only when the identity of the murderer is obvious that the reader can really concentrate on the question (much more interesting) How did he do it? But if people really want to play ‘spot the murderer,’ I don’t mind obliging them—for once!”18

  Dorothy L. Sayers carried the concept of the puzzle to the extreme of arranging that a page be left blank in the published story. This missing page ostensibly recorded a conversation between Lord Peter and the official police investigator, Sergeant Dalziel. Examining Sandy Campbell’s death scene, Peter has noticed a critical accoutrement missing. If the object is really not there, it can only mean that Campbell was murdered. On the missing page, Peter went on to identify the object. Sayers has carried the puzzle game another step forward.

  She more freely acknowledges the existence of fellow mystery writers in this book than in any other. Allusions and direct quotations are sprinkled liberally throughout the work, a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the investigation at hand. Again, the authors are often those with whom Sayers has some quarrel.

  Not quite halfway through the work, Lord Peter listens to Bunter’s report of a conversation with Betty, maidservant to Gowan, one of the six murder suspects in the case. Betty has glimpsed what she first thought a corpse but now believes to be a sick and bandaged man. Peter’s response is to observe that “As G. K. C. says, ‘I’d rather be alive than not’” (142). It is an amusing enough reaction, even if the reader does not recognize the source.

  Sayers was probably correct in assuming that most of her readers would instantly recognize G. K. C. as none other than Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Roman Catholic apologist and author of the Father Brown detective stories produced between 1911 and 1935. Chesterton was the first to use popular mystery as a vehicle to promote his views on a serious subject, namely proper Christian behavior. Respect for this kind of fiction, which attracted a large international audience, grew as a consequence of his efforts. Still, Sayers was a little skeptical. She became a friend of Chesterton, joining him as a founding member of the Detection Club, but in her 1928 essay she takes him to task for refusing to acknowledge the consequences of a successful criminal investigation: “It is especially hard when the murderer has been made human and sympathetic. A real person has then to be brought to the gallows, and this must not be done too lightheartedly. Mr. G. K. Chesterton deals with this problem by merely refusing to face it. His Father Brown (who looks at sin and crime from the religious point of view) retires from the problem before the arrest is reached. He is satisfied with a confession. The sordid details take place ‘off.’”19 Obviously this was a solution that Sayers strenuously sought to avoid in her own work.20

  Fifty-some pages following the homage to Chesterton, the reader encounters a specific reference to Freeman Wills Crofts. The reason is quite simple and direct. As Strachan, another of the artist-suspects, explains, “I had a book—a very nice book, all about a murder committed in this part of the country. Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, by one Mr. Crofts. You should read it. The police in that book called in Scotland Yard to solve all their problems for them.” Sayers had discovered, as she neared completion of her own book, that by some bizarre coincidence Crofts had set this book, published in 1930, in exactly the same real location as her own. What was more, his book turned “on real distances and time-tables,” exactly like The Five Red Herrings. Fortunately, the plots of the two stories were vastly different.21

  Sayers also had her doubts about Crofts’s approach to the craft of mystery writing. His principal character was Inspector Joseph French, who emphasized “reconstructing his cases from the point of view of time.” Beginning in 1925 Crofts had produced a new French novel every year through 1931, each written to a rigid formula that Sayers disdained. “When one of Mr. Wills Crofts’s characters has a cast-iron alibi, the alibi will turn out to have holes in it,” she warned in her 1928 introduction.22 She used the trick sparingly herself. The Five Red Herrings abounds in alibis, satisfactory and unsatisfactory. And a clever and ironclad alibi is critical to the plot of Have His Carcase, published the year after. Even then, Sayers provided a unique and ingenious twist: the alibi seemingly is for the wrong time.

  As matters turn out, the murderer in The Five Red Herrings possesses a small library of detective stories. There is the much-maligned Austin Freeman again (“He’s always sound and informative”), J. J. Connington, whose Two Tickets Puzzle made the murderer uncomfortable because it too closely paralleled the murder plot at hand, and G. D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole, early but not terribly effective pioneers in introducing a female sleuth. (“But the really brilliant woman detective has yet to be created,” Sayers wrote.) All amusing entertainment, Wimsey intimates, but not good for much more.23

  What positive models did Dorothy L. Sayers have in mind as she wrote? There was Arthur Conan Doyle, of course—Sayers became a charter member of the Sherlock Holmes Society in 1934. At his moment of investigative triumph, Peter could only say that “At last I really feel like Sherlock Holmes.” But The Five Red Herrings is not a Holmes story, any more than it is an austere Austin Freeman knockoff. Sayers pays tribute to her truest inspiration at mid-story, when Lord Peter shares a perspective with his manservant:

  “Bunter,” said Wimsey, “this case resembles the plot of a Wilkie Collins novel, in which everything happens just too late to prevent the story from coming to a premature happy ending.”

  “Yes, my lord.” (95)

  Writing of The Moonstone in 1928, Sayers stated baldly that “By comparison with its wide scope, its dove-tailed completeness and the marvellous variety and soundness of its characterization, modern mystery fiction looks thin and mechanical. Nothing human is perfect, but The Moonstone comes about as near perfection as anything of its kind can be.”24 For all her intention to produce a story in the Austin Freeman tradition in 1931, it is Wilkie Collins and E. C. Bentley who remain her most important models, her writing icons. (Instructively, both authors wove love stories into their detective novels.) Sayers simply could not resist the manifold attractions of really good writing, no matter the venue.

  Nonetheless, The Five Red Herrings is a most curious Peter Wimsey story, a
definite break from the tendencies evidenced in the preceding novels. The reader senses from the first that something is odd, as the book opens with a confrontation at the McClellan Arms, a tavern in Kircudbright, Galloway. Lord Peter is a bystander, a witness to the dust-up, but it is made plain that he is a stranger in this community, though “received on friendly and even affectionate terms” (2).

  The community is decidedly unfamiliar territory for Lord Peter’s regular readers. Far removed from London and 110a Piccadilly, this is a foreign locale, in the most eloquent sense of the term. English is spoken after a fashion, but the laws and customs are passing strange. Even law enforcement operates under a different set of procedures. Wimsey is emphatically a visitor to these surroundings, a vacationer accepted despite his eccentric ways. He is cut off, not only from the familiar haunts of London, but from the large and varied community of stock characters that Sayers had created to assist him over the years. Charles Parker makes a brief appearance to assist the Scots investigators, but he and Wimsey do not interact. Peter must work this one out on his own.

  The Galloway artistic colony that accepts Lord Peter as a harmless visitor is far removed from London by more than geography. After providing her readers an intriguing (and appalling) glimpse of the Bloomsbury artists in Strong Poison, Sayers now sought to capture a different kind of artistic community. The painters inhabiting the environs of Kircudbright are an outdoorsy lot, drawn to Scotland by the long hours of steady and suffused daylight, the spectacular scenery, and the variety of happy distractions. If these people are not painting—and it seems that much of their time is spent far from brush and canvas—they are poaching trout from some private stream, playing a highly competitive round of golf, sailing small boats on the Irish Sea, or doing some serious drinking at one of the local pubs. These are artists content with the conventions of northern life, though they are inventive as landscape painters go.