Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  Peter’s life never becomes quite this adventurous (or arduous) in Murder Must Advertise, but the novel, and Peter’s actions especially, convey a decidedly sensational air. By day Peter Wimsey lives as Death Bredon (a name he derives by taking his own two middle names), a clever, impish, and gifted writer of advertising copy (still another talent). By night he transforms into the masked and mysterious harlequin, a drug addict’s nightmare. Peter is not mentioned by his real name until the fifth chapter, when he emerges momentarily in his true persona to comment on the action. In both disguises, he is required to perform feats of physical daring beyond the reach of the average human being. Wimsey has become a kind of Sexton Blake or maybe a Robert Templeton.

  As Death Bredon, Wimsey seizes the opportunity to play an under-cover role, posing as a copywriter while investigating some unspecified irregularity at Pym’s Publicity, a staid old advertising firm. The mystery is in some obscure way connected to the death of Bredon’s predecessor at the office, one Victor Dean. While Bredon idles, frivols, and somehow produces some priceless copy, Wimsey determines that Dean’s “accidental” death was actually murder. Grasping at straws, he can only suspect that the death was somehow connected to blackmail and that the blackmail was somehow connected to drug trafficking. His one tenuous connection is that Victor Dean had spent considerable time partying with the sad remnants of the Bright Young Things, a fast crowd now doomed by drug abuse.

  In the role of Bredon, Peter returns to the blithering lightness that characterized his makeup through the twenties. As Wimsey, the trait peeked out only at rare moments in the later books. As Bredon, it runs wild. He plays a Jew’s harp while leaning on his door jamb, does hand-springs down the hallway, recites juicy limericks, and spends too much time with the typists. In a truly inspired moment, he prises confidences from a colleague by assuring him that “In all social difficulties . . . ask Uncle Ugly.” The assurances continue: “Say on, Tompkin. We will be as silent as a pre-talkie movie. Any sum from £5 to £5,000 advanced on your note of hand alone. No embarrassing investigations. No security required—or offered. What’s your trouble?” (214)

  At Pym’s, this kind of breezy dialogue passes as normal. None of the copywriters, particularly those graduated from university, take anything any more seriously than they can help. Peter admits that a colleague “has put his finger on the real offensiveness of the educated Englishman—that he will not even trouble to be angry” (279). Whatever happens, these men and women will maintain their equaninimous facade.

  The facade is in some ways a product of their culture and their education, but at Pym’s it serves the additional purpose of lending a measure of defense against the essential immorality of their occupation. Though the general public does not genuinely recognize the hand or even the existence of the advertising agency, its influence is everywhere and personal. It aims its appeal not at the rich but at the working poor, the class with so little to spend. The struggle to steal those pennies from rivals creates the need for delusion and deceit. The poor must be convinced that their life is no good, their health threatened, their simple pleasures empty, their attractions insufficient, and their food and shelter not up to snuff. Left in an agony of doubt, the advertiser then convinces the poor consumer to part with his (or, more likely, her) pennies for some cosmetic illusion that will not deliver of its promise. It is conscience-sapping work, as Wimsey soon comes to realize:

  “I think that this is an awfully immoral job of ours. I do, really. Think how we spoil the digestions of the public.”

  “Ah, yes—but think how earnestly we strive to put them right again. We undermine ’em with one hand and build ’em up with the other. The vitamins we destroy in the canning, we restore in Revito, the roughage we remove from Peabody’s Piper Parritch we make up into a package and market as Bunbury’s Breakfast Bran; the stomachs we ruin with Pompayne, we re-line with Peplets to aid digestion. And by forcing the damn-fool public to pay twice-over—once to have its food emasculated and once to have the vitality put back again, we keep the wheels of commerce turning and give employment to thousands—including you and me.”

  “This wonderful world!” Bredon sighed ecstatically. (52–53)

  It is a world of facades, not unlike Death Bredon himself.

  This was an immorality so deeply bred into the culture by the 1930s that no one even thought to question the validity of its practices. Parliament passed laws to prevent flagrant misleading and lying, but the essentials of the system went unchallenged. Sayers knew this well; she had written advertising copy for Benson’s for more than seven years. Peter’s brief career is in fact modeled on that of his creator. Pym’s was Benson’s, right down to the circular iron staircase that did in Victor Dean; Peter’s blanket advertising campaign to promote Whifflets mirrored Sayers’s own great success.35 As Sayers advised in concluding the book, “Advertise, or go under” (344).

  Wimsey’s classical education and his long-exercised penchant for irresponsible lightness made him a natural copywriter. Though it is painful to watch Peter employ his impressive familiarity with Dickens to produce lines such as “It’s a far, far butter thing” (27), this is small stuff when considered next to his real purpose at Pym’s: to expose some bona fide criminal activity. He knows only that Victor Dean had uncovered some such activity among the staff, had begun a letter to Mr. Pym, and had met a fatal “accident” before he could finish or send it. Peter, assisted by his junior colleague, Ginger Joe, undertakes the long and trying task of investigating Pym’s employees. Soon armed with suggestive clues to Dean’s murder, Peter relentlessly seizes every opportunity to surprise employees with this knowledge and observe their reactions. Recognizing that Dean was killed with a catapult, Peter carries one around with him, spurring conversations about the weapon’s use. Sooner or later, someone is bound to crack.

  The only other handle to the mystery is Dean’s brief association with the “Bright Young Things,” notably the black-sheep daughter of the gentry, Dian de Momerie. Peter gains access to the doings of this crowd through Dean’s sister, Pamela. She is an innocent as far as the Bright Young Things are concerned, but she has contacts among them, thanks to her late brother. Together, she and Peter attend one orgy of a costume party, where Peter latches on to the notorious Dian.

  Historically speaking, the heyday of the Bright Young Things was largely past by the time Sayers wrote Murder Must Advertise. Never a large coterie, these were young people who snatched at the extremes of possibility inherent in the freedoms of the twenties. The men were largely too young to have fought in the war, the women too youthful to comprehend the extremes of sexual discrimination that their mothers and sisters had suffered. Of the upper and upper-middle classes, they had too much time and money on their hands and lived for naughty thrills. They frequented the jazzy nightclubs, drank cocktails, sniffed cocaine, indulged in frequent and meaningless love affairs, and sought above all to mortify staid traditional society. By 1930 those not dead or ruined in health, destroyed by the financial crash, or utterly burned out had largely sobered up and wised up. In Strong Poison, Sayers mentions that a couple of Bright Young Things had joined Miss Climpson’s typing bureau, seeking a more substantive kind of thrill.36

  The few remaining thrill seekers sought out the wild parties such as the one attended by Peter Wimsey and Pamela Dean, where they were greeted by “the strains of a saxophone” (68). Different doors opened to reveal gambling, drinking, nude dancing, and orgies. At the bottom of it all, the attraction was cocaine—this was a gathering of the addicted. Faced with this hedonistic tumult, Peter takes steps to assure Pamela Dean’s safety and then metamorphoses into the harlequin, denizen of the night.

  Peter’s masquerade as the harlequin plunges him into the world of the sensational novel. There are no clues here, only the dimmest notion of what exactly is being detected. Peter understands instinctively that he must get hold of Dian de Momerie and pry what he can from her drug-addled brain to shed light on the mystery at Pym�
��s. In the process, he becomes superhuman.

  The charade begins at the party, when Peter, dressed in harlequin costume and mask, climbs atop the statues in the center of a pool:

  Up and up went the slim chequered figure, dripping and glittering like a fantastic water creature. . . . It was the easy, unfretted motion of the athlete, a display of muscular strength without jerk or effort. Then his knee was on the basin. He was up and climbing upon the bronze cupid. Yet another moment and he was kneeling upon the figure’s stooped shoulders—standing upright upon them, the spray of the fountain blowing about them. . . . The black and white figure raised its arms above its fantastic head and stood poised. . . . The slim body shot down through the spray, struck the surface with scarcely a splash, and slid through the water like a fish. . . . It was perfectly done. It was magnificent. (70)

  Dian de Momerie was among those yelling for the harlequin to dive. He now ran off with her, defying all within earshot to catch them. Fortunately, the infamous Dian was stone drunk, or Peter would have had to add debauchery to his list of accomplishments.

  As it was, Wimsey had crossed the line into the fantastic. In the next few weeks, he became a near demon, capable of astonishing physical feats, taunting and tantalizing psychological cruelty, and reckless abandon. Dian is drawn to him because, as the harlequin, he is a thrill, a deadly nightmare embodied. She does not love him nor want to be loved by him; she in fact dreads the tinny sound of the pennywhistle that signals his approach. But she is drawn to him. Wimsey preys upon her amoral and drug-debilitated character for all she is worth. In the end, she provides him, serendipitously, with the key to the Pym’s mystery.

  Lord Peter stretches himself to the limits of the humanly possible in this novel. Perhaps he exceeds the limits. Copywriter by day, harlequin by night, Peter has become the Sexton Blake of Ginger Joe’s imagination:

  Death Bredon, driving his pen across reams of office foolscap, was a phantasm too, emerging from [his] nightmare toil to a still more fantastical existence amid people whose aspirations, rivalries, and modes of thought were alien, and earnest beyond anything in his waking experience. Nor, when the Greenwich-driven clocks had jerked on to half-past five, had he any world of reality to which to return; for then the illusionary Mr. Bredon dislimned and became the still more illusionary Harlequin of a dope-addict’s dream; an advertising figure more crude and fanciful than any that postured in the columns of the Morning Star, a thing bodiless and absurd, a mouthpiece of stale cliches shouting in dull ears without a brain. From this abominable impersonation he could not free himself. (180–81)

  Certainly the life of a detective is a hard one.

  At the end, the superhuman aspects of Peter’s character permeate even the persona of Death Bredon, supercilious copyeditor. Demonstrating his ingratiating approach to women, he soothes the ruffled feathers of a gold digger (“a tough Jane” [215]) who has come to confront one of the group managers, Mr. Tallboy. Wimsey warns Tallboy not to thank him; in fact, Peter has pretty much identified the man as Victor Dean’s murderer. All that remains is to figure out how Tallboy fits into the operations of the dope gang.

  Peter demonstrates his physical prowess even as a Pym’s employee. At the annual cricket match between Pym’s and one of the firm’s clients, he forgets himself. Striving for a steady mediocrity, he is stung by a ball running up his arm and sees red. The Wimsey of Balliol days at Oxford emerges; he punishes the opposition to the incredible tune of eighty-three runs. Naturally, Peter is not just a good cricket player; he is a batsman whose university performances are eagerly recalled more than twenty years later. Is there anything this man cannot do?

  Both Death Bredon and the harlequin must dissolve before novel’s end. Peter succeeds in piercing the mystery surrounding Pym’s; drug smugglers are relying on Tallboy to give them advance notice of the first letter of a weekly advertisement, which is used to signal the gang where the drugs will be distributed that week. In making the discovery, Peter foolishly exposes himself to danger. The gang frames him for the murder of Dian de Momerie; he and Parker must now stage the arrest of Death Bredon. More intrepid behavior follows. Bredon leads the police a merry chase around the cenotaph; Wimsey contrives to appear in the newspapers as himself by a display of consummate horsemanship (of course). It is all very convoluted, more than a little fantastic, and altogether too sensational.

  Sayers ends this sordid tale with a bump. No longer Bredon, no longer the harlequin, Peter reclines in his flat at 110a Piccadilly, reassuring the reader that for all his sensational behavior, he is still the same character. Tallboy comes to him there, confessing his pathetic and greedy sins in that place of shelter where so many mysteries have been unravelled. Peter cannot help him; he can only suggest the most direct way out of the intolerable situation. As he watches Tallboy leave, knowing he will be killed by the gang, he intones the words of judgment: “—and from thence to the place of execution . . . and may the Lord have mercy on your soul” (337). When Parker calls soon after to announce the arrest of the whole dope gang, Peter feels too bitter to celebrate. He is still Wimsey, still cognizant of what it means to be the agent of justice.

  The root of the difficulty Sayers sensed in this book seems to lie in the nature of the crime that Lord Peter is asked to solve. His task is at once very simple—find out what is wrong at Pym’s—and fearfully complex: bring a huge dope gang to heel. The first is within the scope of Peter Wimsey, a specific crime demanding a specific resolution. But the second is really beyond his reach. He may be able to turn up the key that exposes the gang, but actually breaking the ring necessitates the full involvement of the official police. For Peter to achieve as much as he does, he is called upon to display physical, mental, and emotional powers beyond the scope of any human individual. In writing a sensational tale, Sayers allowed Peter to become sensational. It was a mistake she would not repeat.

  This was the first book Sayers set in London since Strong Poison, and it was also the last. In removing Wimsey from town, she sought to establish his presence on a different footing, free from the steadily growing community of stock characters she had established. Returning him to London for Murder Must Advertise, she firmly held the line against the intrusion of this community. The only familiar characters to fully participate in this drama are Peter’s sister Mary, now married to Charles Parker, and Chief Inspector Parker himself. Helen, Duchess of Denver, appears briefly, but Peter absents himself readily enough.

  The novel provides the reader’s first real look at Lady Mary since Clouds of Witness. She made brief appearances in Strong Poison, but only in Murder Must Advertise is she fleshed out as a character. Mary has now become a modern married woman, straightforward, practical, and capable of real affection for her husband and children. She chooses for the moment to be domestic, taking pleasure in managing the household and doing without servants. To emphasize her equality with Parker, Sayers has invented a unique manner of trust fund for her. Being a Wimsey, she is actually quite wealthy, but she has access only to an amount of money equal to her husband’s income. On this she must, and does, manage comfortably. She does retain some attributes of the wealthy: she never reads advertisements. Her copywriting brother can only reply that she “should have been smothered at birth” (292).

  Mary becomes a welcome addition to the detecting team of Wimsey and Parker, offering careful analysis of information and sound advice. Often she anticipates Peter and Charles, urging them to “step on the gas” (83) when they mull the possibility that Victor Dean was blackmailing somebody. At each succeeding stage of the investigation, Mary proves an adept and critical sounding board. Here is suggested the possibility that a woman can marry, maintain her equality in the face of her man and society, and sustain her modern outlook.

  The Charles Parker of this case is remarkably consistent with the Parker of every Wimsey story to date. Happily married to Mary, he is relieved of the necessity of making the foolish displays characteristic of the Riddlesdale investigation�
�his one lapse from steady dependability. Given something substantive to do for the first time since The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, he is his usual disciplined, cautious, determined self. Responsible for the official investigation into the drug smuggling, he falls back once again on his interest in theological debate to help him through. “Fear not him that killeth, but him that hath power to cast into hell” (243), he intones, comparing the common murderer to the drug peddler. Even Peter is impressed by the enlightened sentiment in that observation.

  Though in no way intrepid himself, Parker comes in for more than his share of sensational adventure, thanks to his association with Wimsey. This time Charles breaks his collarbone, in an attack meant to kill Peter. His reaction is far more realistic than Peter’s had been ten years before. Suffering from debilitating pain and nagging headache, he is in a foul temper for days afterward. Charles apparently is not cut out for the adventurous life.

  One stock character conspicuously missing from Murder Must Advertise is Peter’s manservant, Mervyn Bunter. Sayers does not mention Bunter at all until the next-to-last chapter, when he opens the door to Mr. Tallboy and later sees him out. Bunter has no role to play in the resolution of this case.

  Until the writing of this novel, Bunter had been the fixed point in Peter Wimsey’s universe. He has a critical function in Strong Poison and equally strong investigative parts in each of the two novels directly following. In the Philip Boyes murder investigation, his station and his talents dictate that he cultivate a relationship with the maid Hannah Westlock “almost to breech of promise point.” 37 The evidence he gathers is critical in bringing the murder home to Norman Urquhart. In The Five Red Herrings, Bunter performs a similar service, taking it upon himself to escort young Betty, one of the Gowan household domestic staff, to the cinema. Here the information Bunter derives does not point to the murderer, though it does clear up several important points. And, in Have His Carcase, Bunter steps beyond the stereotypical task of dating housemaids to undertake truly yeoman detective work. After investigating the deplorable conditions at the Weldon farm and determining that its owner was up against the wall, he undertakes to trail the elusive William Bright, itinerant hairdresser, following the Alexis inquest. Doggedly trailing Bright’s wandering path through London over four days, Bunter discovers that the quarry is actually Alfred Morecambe. This furnishes the final link in the conspiracy to kill Paul Alexis. It is also Bunter’s greatest moment as a criminal investigator. Having exercised the butler’s talents to the fullest, Sayers chose to let him rest through Murder Must Advertise.