Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  An uneasy bond exists among the males of this contingent. Sayers concentrates the bulk of her attention on seven artists: Sandy Campbell, who is dead by the second chapter, and six fellow painters who possessed sufficient motive to do him in. These are manly men, taking pleasure in outdoor pursuits, keeping their women in their places to the extent they can, and resorting to violence all too easily. Campbell gets into four separate fights on the night of his murder. True, he was an unusually quarrelsome type, but the others are not much better. The Englishman, Waters, is more than ready to duke it out with Campbell, Strachan and Farren mix it up out in the hills near the old mine pits, and Ferguson and Campbell have wasted breath over next to nothing on more than one occasion. Jock Graham had a reputation for tweaking anyone who took things too seriously, and even the staid and reserved Mr. Gowan harbored an itch for a good fight. Worse, several of them drank altogether too much. But they were good painters, presumably because their many outlets freed them from the self-absorption characteristic of their Bloomsbury brethren. This was a more traditional British community, full of hard-drinking, hard-playing, fist-waving, overgrown boys. Small wonder that inane jealousies broke out at the least provocation.

  Though the group shares several important attributes, as they must if they are to pose a puzzle of identity to the reader, Dorothy L. Sayers is at pains to furnish each painter a distinct personality. In the Wilkie Collins tradition, each player must remain a distinct and believable character with values and motivations peculiar to himself. Sayers takes special delight in this, creating through the merest suggestion the idea that Strachan is a domestic tyrant with a temper, that Waters is a fiery and none-too-practical whelp, and that Farren is a hen-pecked victim of domestic bliss. Jock Graham is a very bright and very childish imp. Sparring words with Wimsey, Graham imitates the artistic styles of each of his fellow artists in turn, re-emphasizing the individuality of each. These are six men of mixed character, likeable in some ways, repellent in others. Sayers will not make Chesterton’s mistake. These are human beings, and one of them may indeed go to the gallows.

  Or will he? In The Five Red Herrings, for the first time in any Peter Wimsey novel, Sayers creates a situation in which the reader’s sympathies are fully with the murderer rather than the victim. Sandy Campbell is a bad man. He drinks too much, he argues too loud and violently, he has a chip on his shoulder, and he simply itches for trouble. He does not deserve to die by violence, but no one in the novel is very sorry to see him gone. Not even Wimsey can work up much sympathy for the dead man.

  This puts Peter in a particularly awkward position. Though none of the six suspects is an especially noble human being, each is far more likeable than Campbell. This fact in an odd way serves to emphasize the lighthearted nature of the puzzle that Sayers has prepared. Even as Wimsey unravels the whole complex murder plot, the shrewd reader can guess that the culprit, though exposed, will get off lightly. The oppressive weight of Campbell’s ugly personality demands such a resolution.

  But “who done it”? That really is the question in this novel, more so than in any other Wimsey story. Sayers provides the reader more than one avenue to get at the answer. For those who, along with Inspector MacPherson of Kircudbright, take special joy in material clues, there is the matter of the item missing at the falls where Campbell’s body is found. For those with enough artistic knowledge to recognize what has to be missing, the solution may be relatively simple. Wimsey tantalizingly handles the object—in Ferguson’s studio—very early in his investigation. In the meanwhile, those who share a belief in Dorothy L. Sayers’s own dictum—what matters is not so much who but how—can solve the mystery by focusing on method.

  From the outset Sayers goes out of her way to isolate the culprit. Ferguson’s name appears by itself on Peter’s list of suspects as an afterthought to the five possibles clustered on the preceding page. She furnishes telling phrases for the reader’s benefit and emphasizes these by attaching a pointed disclaimer: “Somebody had breakfasted in Campbell’s cottage, and the person who could do that most easily was Ferguson. Alternatively, if it was not Ferguson, Ferguson might have seen whoever it was” (64). There is a fair amount of obfuscation, of course. To really mimic the inductive feat performed by Peter Wimsey, the reader must recognize the existence of a consistent pattern in the midst of much conflicting information. Just about everybody in Scotland had a quarrel with Sandy Campbell; his wake is a trail of bruised egos and angry, offended men. Then there are mysterious bicycles that end up in London, train tickets that should not add up but do, and a Campbell landscape—“thoroughly Campbellish” (219)—that Sandy Campbell did not paint. Finally, the plot is littered with alibis in the tradition of Freeman Wills Crofts. Most of them are genuine and do not matter; Lord Peter breaks the false one with astonishing ease.25

  In a puzzle story such as this one, the skeletal structure of the plot is far more visible and obvious than is usually the case in a Wimsey novel. The Five Red Herrings has a contrived feel—would (or could) anyone really go to this much trouble to disguise an unpremeditated killing? When Campbell falls dead, the plot dictates that his murderer invent and carry out a highly public false alibi, drive the body several miles through the countryside, perpetrate an elaborate fake accident, catch a train at the last second after a cross-country rush on a bicycle, and then complete the falsification of his alibi in Glasgow. How much easier to shove the body in the nearest burn, “discover” it the next morning, and hope for the best. Of course, then there would not have been much of a puzzle for the reader to solve. It seems that the more intricate the puzzle mystery becomes, the more removed from believable reality will be the result.

  The story is hampered as well by Sayers’s conscious decision to avoid complications of emotion. The book is a stark contrast to Strong Poison, where intense emotional reactions to the human drama are integral to the success of the novel. This is best illustrated by the behavior of Wimsey himself. In Strong Poison, he is gnawed by doubt, hampered by the emotional burden of the task he has set himself. In The Five Red Herrings such feelings are nowhere in evidence. This time the entire investigation is essentially a game. Peter baits each of the artists in turn, nonchalantly pushing them to the edge with an endless chatter barbed with calculated insult to the intelligence. His blither is as brisk as ever (“Put on your nightgown, look not so pale. I tell you yet again, Campbell’s dead; ’a cannot come out on’s grave” [210].) He is, in short, relentlessly light. Not even the prospect of hanging a man seems to affect him in any serious way. At story’s end, he sets himself the task of re-enacting the entire murder plot and tying up half the police in Galloway for a full day rather than simply setting them straight with a half hour’s conversation. They are all wrong, and Peter wants to enjoy every minute of his triumph. He has no regrets.

  Though the characters supporting Wimsey are drawn with Sayers’s usual attention to human detail, they do little to increase the work’s human dimensions. These people have real lives—in some ways happy, in some ways painful—but their conditions do not in any way entangle the plot. Strachan’s wife may walk in fear of her husband’s anger, but his king-of-the-castle approach to marriage in no way affects the action of the story. Gilda Farren’s clinging stupidity is merely something Peter must see through to get at Hugh Farren’s whereabouts. The Smith-Lemesurier woman may have falsely sacrificed her reputation to entrap Jock Graham, but this is an embarrassment rather than a complication. Graham needs merely to own up to his real activities on the night of the murder to defeat Mrs. Smith-Lemesurier’s designs. The book is a straight murder puzzle. Human dramas do not much get in the way.

  There are some delicious moments. Early in the story, Peter packs Strachan’s young daughter, Myra, and her nurse into his Daimler for a ride home. Myra is delighted as Peter pushes the speedometer to eighty-five and nearly hits some cows. She is a modern young woman who would like to make the cows run. Peter suspects that “One of these days you’ll be a menace to soci
ety.” “How lovely!” she responds. “I could have a pistol and a beautiful evening dress, and lure people to opium-dens and stick them up. I think I’d better marry you, because you’ve got such a fast car. That would be useful, you see” (36). She is indeed a modern woman.

  At the other end of the scale is wee Helen McGregor, farmer’s child and witness to the fight between Campbell and Gowan. Frightened nearly out of her wits by the violence of the altercation, she hides under the bedcovers when her parents come home, only to wake up three times crying in the night. Poor Helen’s father finally gets the truth out of her, but it is her mother who hauls her down to the police station, threatening to “skelp her ower the lug” if she refuses to tell her story. Inspector MacPherson bribes the child with “a bag of sweeties, which a constable was sent out to procure.” She is perhaps a not-so-modern young woman (95–96).

  Still, The Five Red Herrings is the one long Peter Wimsey story that cannot be called a novel. The characters are sure, the plot intricate. It is just that one has very little to do with the other. Sayers succeeded in her stated goal of producing a traditional detective puzzle. The puzzle is a good one, with enough fully developed red herrings (five of them!) to keep the solution from becoming obvious. But it is the essential humanity of the Wimsey series as a whole that separates the work of Dorothy L. Sayers from that of the other mystery writers of her time. Thankfully, this was the sole story to deviate from that rich and varied humanist approach.

  Victor Gollancz brought out The Five Red Herrings in January 1931, following this with Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Terror, Second Series, in July of that year. In addition to selecting and editing this second set of short stories, Sayers again wrote an introduction, this time focusing on the future of the detective story. Noting a trend toward greater character development and a fuller recognition of the psychological motivations to crime, she cannily predicted that these were the factors that would shape the mystery novel of the thirties and forties. Of course her own novels proved a key element in the development of the style.

  Having given Lord Peter his vacation in Scotland, Sayers spent much of 1931 plotting and writing the first Wimsey novel to fully incorporate the character of Harriet Vane. A victimized bystander in Strong Poison, Harriet emerges from prison to assume a full role as Peter’s investigative partner in Have His Carcase. Writing to Victor Gollancz in January 1931, Sayers promised that she was finished with the mystery-as-puzzle format:

  I will return to a less rigidly intellectual formula in HAVE-HISCARCASE which will turn on an alibi and a point of medicine, but will, I trust, contain a certain amount of human interest and a more or less obvious murderer. But I haven’t made up the plot yet.26

  Much of the human interest, of course, would lie in the development of the relationship between Peter and Harriet.

  The full presence of Harriet Vane in the novel—Sayers builds as much narration on Harriet’s activities as she does on Lord Peter’s—provides her creator an irresistible opportunity to weave the mystery writer’s perspective into the story. By allowing Harriet Vane to continually comment as a mystery writer on the murder scene, the conditions of material evidence, the reliability of alibis, and the relative truthfulness of suspects’ explanations, Sayers is able to deliver her criticisms of mystery structure and content without intruding unduly into the narrative.

  Harriet Vane’s running observations are an elemental part of her character. When Peter and Harriet consider the well-disguised activities of the mysterious Haviland Martin, Harriet suspects “that if I had been inventing a way for a murderer to reach an appointed spot and leave it again, complete with bag and baggage, and without leaving more trail than was absolutely unavoidable, I should have made him act very much as Mr. Martin has acted” (125). Again, when the pair face the daunting task of deciphering the coded letter found in the murder victim’s possession, Harriet notes that in her own books, “I usually make the villain end up by saying ‘Bring this letter with you.’ The idea is, from the villain’s point of view, that he can then make certain that the paper is destroyed. From my point of view, of course, I put it in so that the villain can leave a fragment of paper clutched in the victim’s stiffened hand to assist Robert Templeton” (364).

  In Have His Carcase, such comments carry a dual purpose. They offer a window into Harriet Vane’s thought processes and life work and, at the same time, point the way to the proper solution of the murder. The reason that so much of the activity of the perpetrators sounds to Harriet as if it had been plotted out—essentially written—beforehand is that it was scripted in advance by the conspirators. It is a cunning and multilayered device, this business of writer-as-character participating in a murder mystery.

  On the very first page of Have His Carcase, the reader discovers that Harriet Vane is the author of detective thrillers. She had completed Murder in the Pot while in prison and had since delivered Murder by Degrees. Due to the publicity resulting from her false arrest for murder, sales of these and previous works have boomed, making Harriet comfortably well off. Feeling that she has earned a vacation, she is on a walking tour of the southwest coast of England while developing her next project, The Fountain Pen Mystery. Serial and publication rights are already contracted.

  By intimation, the reader comes to understand the nature of Harriet Vane’s works. They are much closer to those of Edgar Wallace, or perhaps even to the Sexton Blakes, than they are to Austin Freeman’s (she mocks Dr. Thorndyke) or, for that matter, Dorothy L. Sayers’s. This is suggested by the idealized portrait of Harriet’s fictional detective, which she brings to mind whenever she has to do any investigating of her own: “Robert Templeton would examine the body. He was, indeed, notorious for the sang-froid with which he examined bodies of the most repulsive description. Bodies reduced to jelly by falling from aeroplanes; bodies charred into ‘unrecognizable lumps’ by fire; bodies run over by heavy vehicles, and needing to be scraped from the road with shovels—Robert Templeton was accustomed to examine them all, without turning a hair” (15). Generally speaking, bodies do not show up in these kinds of conditions in the puzzle-oriented mystery stories, at least not with appalling regularity. Plainly, some serious adventure was taking place in Harriet’s stories.

  Robert Templeton was a man designed for the rigors of strenuous adventure, “a gentleman of extraordinary scientific skill, combined with almost fabulous muscular development.” The reader soon learns that Templeton is a thorough and determined detective; he has undertaken a full study of medicine to assist him in examining bodies. He is altruistic as well, doing all the hard investigating while secondary characters fall cozily in love. Almost his only failing is his inability to dress with any taste. Knowing nothing about men’s clothing herself, Harriet has avoided the problem by making Templeton a man who does not care about his dress. Lord Peter can only remark with exasperation that “Robert Templeton’s clothes have always pained me.” One can only wonder, has Harriet Vane followed the career of Peter Wimsey through the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers? After all, the alias that Peter assumed to fool Mrs. Forrest in Unnatural Death was none other than Mr. Templeton.27

  All of this is great fun and more than a little mischievous. Harriet spends her spare moments in Have His Carcase working out the plot for her own Fountain Pen Mystery. On her first night in the seaside resort town of Wilvercombe, she divides her time between contemplating the body she has discovered on the beach and puzzling on the thorny problems posed by her own imagination:

  The villain was at the moment engaged in committing a crime in Edinburgh, while constructing an ingenious alibi involving a steam-yacht, a wireless time-signal, five clocks and the change from summer to winter time. . . . The town clock was the great difficulty. How could that be altered. And altered it must be, for the whole alibi depended on its being heard to strike midnight at the appropriate moment. (42)

  The painful thing is that the reader will never discover how all of this turns out. Harriet Vane is a fi
ctional character inventing a twice-removed fictional story—none of this, nor any of her internationally famous bestsellers, will ever see the light of a genuine day. Sayers has created a writer creating a story for the purpose of giving the reader entrance into the mechanics of the detective story. As Harriet works, so too has Sayers worked; the reader must understand this to appreciate the novel to its fullest extent.

  Still, Harriet Vane and Dorothy L. Sayers are not one and the same person, no matter the parallels in their biographies. Sayers has not simply written her own perception of herself into the story. Though both Sayers and Vane have been wounded by life and love, they have chosen to deal with their sorrows in different fashions. This may be a product of the kinds of mysteries each prefers to write. Harriet Vane pens thrillers with little emphasis on character development. In The Fountain Pen Mystery, Harriet confronts her serial editor’s request that her heroine and Robert Templeton’s friend “indulge in a spot of lovemaking”28 by refusing to write it. Peter will take Harriet to task for this pointed avoidance of the human element in Gaudy Night, challenging her “to abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change” (311).

  For Sayers, on the other hand, careful and deliberate characterization is at the heart of her work. When people fall in love, as Flora Weldon so pathetically falls for Paul Alexis or as Peter Wimsey falls for Harriet Vane, the emotional pain is critical to the plot development. Sayers has chosen to wear her wounds on her sleeve.

  One thing that Sayers and Vane did share in common was their approach to the business of writing. While attempting to solve the murder of Paul Alexis, Harriet suffered continual difficulties working out the plot of the latest Robert Templeton story. She fell into habits reminiscent of Sayers attempting to write from the comfort of her automatic chair: