After completing her sensational tale of dope and advertising, Sayers returned to her labor of love, The Nine Tailors, where once again Peter and Bunter must work on their own. Bunter’s return to action in this novel marks the culmination of a development of character paralleling that of Lord Peter. If Peter acquired a soul in the 1930s, Bunter became, for the first time, a truly fallible human being. In grasping the nature of this small but arresting accomplishment, the reader comes to appreciate more fully the depth of Dorothy L. Sayers’s wonderful triumph.
In The Nine Tailors, Sayers achieved the perfect balance between the puzzle—who is the body in the grave? why did he die?—and the sensational—why cut off his hands? smash his face? More important, she created a novel in its truest form, set in a sympathetic and persuasive community peopled by characters possessing the range of absorbing human qualities. The detective and his assistant descend on this community, not as experts or officials but as outsiders of unfamiliar habit and uncomfortable ideas. As the community suffers the anguish of this most hideous and disquieting case, the detective and his man suffer alongside. The Nine Tailors is about a bizarre series of contingent crimes witnessed by God and humanity. No one escapes unscathed.
Bunter’s ordeal in Fenchurch St. Paul illustrates the gravity of the episode as much as does Lord Peter’s experience. Sayers sees fit to expand Bunter’s character somewhat, providing him a talent for music-hall impressions to go with his usual qualities: a fierce correctness in all matters of service, an untouchable knowledge of fashion and dress, an adept’s skill in the science of criminology, and a decided way with women. In the past, such a formidable array of attributes has made Bunter unerring on his own ground. At Fenchurch St. Paul, he comes to grief. Entrusted with a beer bottle found in the church belfry, Bunter places this clue safely in a cabinet until fingerprinting can be carried out. Before Bunter can see to this process in his usual capable fashion, the Venables’s maid, Emily, dusts the bottle. Helpless and enraged, Bunter forgets himself and his place, turning against Emily. Mrs. Venables is forced to step in; Bunter is mortified, both for his failure and his lapse. The episode is a small one but important. In the life made real by the craft of Dorothy L. Sayers, no one is faultless.
Like Lord Peter, Bunter achieves a measure of redemption in the flooding of Fenchurch St. Paul. Faced with a life-threatening crisis, Bunter applies his talents to their fullest extent, not simply for the comfort of his master but for the good of all. It is Bunter who organizes the kitchen and oversees the preparation of meals. And again it is Bunter who lends much-needed assistance to the thrice-weekly series of concerts and lectures that sustain community morale. His unsuspected gift for musical comedy assumes the quality of a blessing in this desperate surrounding.
Sayers wrote Murder Must Advertise and The Nine Tailors more or less in tandem, publishing the former in February 1933, the latter in January 1934. This made a total of four books in four years following her decision not to marry off Peter at the conclusion of Strong Poison. These four books may be regarded as the fruits of her status as an independent author, fully freed from the worry and necessity of having to work outside to support her writing. Sayers now identified herself wholly as a mystery writer, a devoted and fully-informed expert in her craft. The definition encompassed not only her own tales but also her reflections in critical essays and the editing of anthologies. She is fully aware of the history and the potential of the detective story, and she is quite prepared to employ that knowledge in an array of ingenious (and sometimes devastating) manners. If life determines that she is best cut out to write detective fiction, she will attack the demands of this calling with her full faculties. The mysteries written between 1931 and 1934 reflect the range of the possibilities as she understood them. She explored that range fully and consciously, producing a traditional puzzle, a combined puzzle-thriller coupled with the exploration of a love interest, a sensational thriller, and finally her ultimate achievement: a rich and varied mystery novel, incorporating all the elements she had defined. Another daunting task now stood on the horizon: the tantalizing possibility of marrying the mystery story to the novel of manners.
5
Lord Peter Achieves a Balance
THE WESTERN WORLD HAD BECOME A DESPERATE AND FRENETIC place in which to live by the middle of the 1930s. If Dorothy L. Sayers lacked true happiness, she had at least achieved a measure of personal security; European society as a whole could boast neither. The new dawn that had beckoned peace and promise after November 1918 proved illusory, even self-delusional. The world had seemed malleable then, a vast potential awaiting the devoted commitment of the newly wise and the newly free. Fifteen years later, society was wobbling, careening toward a spectacular and appalling wreck. Potential had turned to poverty, freedom exchanged for fascism. Everywhere, the long weekend showed signs of ending in a very great sorrow. Expending her creative energies in Cloud-Cuckoo Land, Sayers could still see and feel the hopes of her own youth rapidly slipping away. She chose to write about it, spilling England’s hopes and afflictions onto the printed page just as she achieved the zenith of her powers as a novelist. Could anyone find something resembling love in a universe slowly driving itself mad?
All during the early 1930s, Sayers had tracked the slow unwinding of modern European society in the interstices of her novels. Have His Carcase is especially peppered with references to England’s decline, both economic and political. Agricultural conditions were terrible, as no less an expert than Henry Weldon could testify:
“Nothing in farming these days,” grumbled Mr. Weldon. “Look at all this Russian wheat they’re dumpin’ in. As if things weren’t bad already, with wages what they are, and taxes, and rates and tithe and insurance. I’ve got fifty acres of wheat. By the time it’s harvested I daresay it’ll have cost me £9 an acre. And what shall I get for it? Lucky if I get five. How this damned Government expects the farmer to carry on, I don’t know.” (154)
Henry Weldon may have been a repulsive and brutal killer, but he was not lying about agricultural conditions. Three years later, Sayers would put much the same words into the mouth of Catherine Freemantle Bendick, farmer’s wife and benighted former classmate of Harriet Vane. It was a sad story and altogether too common. In The Nine Tailors, William Thoday, anguished victim of the Fenchurch St. Paul tragedy, was already a victim of the agricultural depression when the story began. Once an independent farmer, Thoday had lost his land when the “bad times” came; he was forced to accept work as a tenant for Hilary Thorpe’s father. Thoday’s brother James was in much the same shape. An officer on a freighter, he was experiencing “an anxious time for men in his line of business, freights being very scarce and hard to come by.” It was “all this depression,” sure enough (121).
Indeed, the remainder of English society was faring little better. At the inquest into the death of Paul Alexis, Sayers has one of the jurors speak out against the numbers of foreigners who have entered the country since the war. Echoing the real sentiments of many, he demanded that the government do more to keep the riffraff out. An “Empire Free-Trader and member of the Public Health Committee,” the juror vehemently argued that with “two million British-born workers unemployed,” it was a scandal to allow Russians or any other outsiders to compete for jobs, naturalization papers or no.1
Two million represented roughly 16 to 20 percent unemployment, a figure that persisted throughout much of the 1930s. Unemployment peaked at about three million (22.5 percent) in 1932, then fell off all too slowly despite steady growth in industrial production. Leaders in Parliament despairingly came to see persistent 15 percent unemployment as a fact of life.2
The sad story of William Bright and the razor in Have His Carcase was believable to Lord Peter and the police for precisely this reason. The tale was a familiar one. Bright supposedly had owned a prosperous haircutting establishment in Manchester before the slump; now he wandered from town to town, desperate for any sort of job and drinking to ease the shame. Po
sing as Bright, Alfred Morecambe laid it on thick:
“I don’t like making this confession. It’s very humiliating for a man who once had a flourishing business of his own. I hope you won’t think, gentlemen, that I have been accustomed to this kind of thing.”
“Of course not,” said Wimsey. “Bad things may happen to anybody. Nobody thinks anything of that nowadays.” (180)
What finally makes Wimsey and the official police suspicious of Mr. Bright is the fact that he was not on the dole.
In Murder Must Advertise, assumptions born of the same prolonged economic crisis actually assist Lord Peter. Passing himself off as an educated man willing to work for four pounds a week, he forgets to dress accordingly, showing up in silk socks and a Saville Row suit. The typists attribute this suspicious circumstance to the cruel effects of the slump; obviously Mr. Death Bredon was a wealthy man who had lost all his money. He would be one more among thousands.
The international depression did not kill the movement for women’s rights, though it may have blunted its hopes somewhat. It is difficult to make demands for equal treatment and equal employment, however just, in the face of two million able-bodied unemployed. The villain Henry Weldon spoke for a great many Britishers when he disparaged women’s rights as a form of mania. To him and to thousands more, the idea of equality was nonsense. But then, his exposure to women was rather limited. His mother was a sad case, possessing neither brains nor interests. She wandered from one watering hole to the next, vaguely searching for some kind of thrill to occupy her stay on this earth. “I’ve so often thought that if I could have painted pictures or ridden a motorcycle or something, I should have got more out of life” (67), she lamented. The only other women Henry would know were laboring women, such as his housekeeper, with whom he had little contact, or those he targeted for conquest. Certainly he was not interested in their brains.
Fashion designers fell to believing that the work place was not a woman’s place in the early thirties. Whether this was by choice or because societal conditions left them no choice did not matter. Harriet Vane encountered the “return to womanliness” on the dance floor in Wilvercombe, where “long skirts and costumes of the seventies were in evidence—and even ostrich feathers and fans. Even the coyness had its imitators.” Harriet was not fooled, nor were very many of the women present:
If this was the “return to womanliness” hailed by the fashion correspondents, it was to quite a different kind of womanliness—set on a basis of economic independence. Were men really stupid enough to believe that the good old days of submissive womanhood could be brought back by milliners’ fashions? “Hardly,” thought Harriet, “when they know perfectly well that one has only to remove the train and the bustle, get into a short skirt and walk off, with a job to do and money in one’s pocket.” (143–44)
Harriet was perhaps unable to grasp that the situation she described did not match the lot of a great many women in the Britain of the thirties.
For all that hardships obstinately refused to lessen as time crawled slowly from 1929 to 1935, matters could have been worse. They were in fact far worse in nations not far away. Dorothy L. Sayers kept a weather eye on developments in Russia, Italy, and especially Germany. She did not like what she saw.
Russia’s experiment in totalitarianism had of course begun during the Great War. The revolution of February 1917 toppled the czar; the Bolshevik Revolution of the following October ruthlessly established the single-party authority of the communists. Widespread civil war, massive confusion, and abject starvation ensued, lasting at least until 1921. The death of Lenin wrought still more disarray at the top; the infighting continued until Josef Stalin emerged as dictator two years later. The Russian economy slowly recovered and modernized under the Stalinist five-year plans, while nominal rights for working men and women improved. The benefits were illusory in the midst of terror; the collectivization of farms was a calculated cruelty, while the highly publicized political purges left little doubt as to the character of the dictator. In the west, darker rumors circulated, though Russian secrecy masked the depth of Stalin’s brutality.3
Italy had been under the one-party rule of Benito Mussolini and the fascists since 1922. On the surface, dictatorship seemed to have something to recommend it, if the example of Italy meant anything. In the midst of worldwide economic chaos, the country seemed to run more or less efficiently. The boggling thought that Mussolini had made the trains run on time became a watchword throughout Europe. That he exercised management and efficiency using the bayonet as persuasion seemed not to matter. And if Italian women were second class citizens, regarded as little more than baby machines, the fascists were not to blame for that. Italian women had been regarded as such for a very long time.4
Germany’s convulsive leap into totalitarianism in 1933 came as more of a shock. The Lausanne Conference of the previous year had brought an end to Germany’s payment of war reparations, but the economic damage was done. Prostrated by the Great Depression, German unemployment reached at least 6.2 million in August 1933. This was merely the official figure and did not include the many who had given up searching for work or those occupying wholly inadequate part-time jobs. The economic disaster naturally produced a political crisis; a majority in the Reichstag advocated one-party rule. Unfortunately, this majority comprised extreme leftists—the communist party—and extreme rightists—the Nazis. Seeking desperately to break the deadlock, Paul von Hindenberg, war hero and president of the Reich since 1925, handed the powers of chancellorship to the leader of the Nazi party, Adolph Hitler.
Hitler’s rise to power was entirely constitutional, but it brought an end to the Weimar Republic in all but name. The German people went to the polls in February 1933 for the third time in nine months. This time the Nazis won 45 percent of the seats in the Reichstag. Minor alliances made them the majority party, the first step toward one-party rule. In March, the Nazis adopted a law turning practical legislative power over to the cabinet—fully manned by members of the Nazi party. The Communists, the Nationalists, and the Social Democrats were quickly outlawed. The civil service was purged of all but Nazi loyalists. Dictatorship had come to Germany.5
The government moved quickly to consolidate its position. Careful not to trespass on the mostly ceremonial powers of the aged Hindenburg, who still commanded the loyalty and respect of the military, Hitler nonetheless began a radical transformation of German society. To address the economic problems that brought him to power, Hitler quickly outlawed the trade unions and enforced strict managerial control over industry and labor. Fearing the communist alternative, the major industries supported him, as did the average working man. Germany’s labor force became a regimented machine, marching to orders issued from the hierarchy. Youth was organized in much the same way. At least there seemed some promise of working again.
Working women, and women generally, were not so fortunate. Nazi ideology dictated that women belonged in the home raising children. To achieve this end, women were forced out of the work place. Political and legal rights were stripped away, leaving women little defense in a country where traditionally many more had worked outside the home than in any other nation in Europe. The Nazis widely publicized the rejoicing women expressed over this turn of fortune. What choice did the women have?6
Hitler envisioned a fundamental reshaping of Germany, not simply in its economic and social institutions, but in the essence of its culture. Nazi philosophy was rooted in fantasy, built on a credo of Aryan racial superiority and Teutonic mythology, neither of which had ever existed save in Hitler’s own mind. He fed this fantasy to a people flattened by defeat and disaster; too many willingly bought in. He forced the Christian churches into line, planning eventually to displace their function with a Germanic religion emphasizing obedience and racial purity and paying homage to Germanic gods. The persecution of Jews and other “non-Germanic” peoples began immediately. By 1935 the Nuremburg laws excluded all Jews from rights of citizenship.7
Hindenburg died in August 1934, removing the last impediment to a complete Nazi takeover. The military, initially cool to Hitler, now pledged their unqualified allegiance. Despite pressures to the contrary, Hitler had done little to alter the composition of the armed forces to this point. Military leaders could not foresee the rise of the SS (Schutzstaffel), with its unparalleled array of heinous police powers. Hitler now had all the necessary tools to mold a fully totalitarian state.
England was not entirely immune to the seductive promises of dictatorship. Faced with endemic high unemployment, politicians on the left and the right agitated for stronger one-party rule. Given the strength of Britain’s Labour party, the communists appeared to have some advantage, but this proved illusory. Labour stood firm against communist ideology; any member pushing a communist line was unceremoniously booted out. The radical left boasted a membership of sixteen thousand by 1938, but this group exerted little direct political influence. Mainly they confined themselves to antifascist activities, pointing out the dangers to a largely misapprehending public. Radical publishers, including Victor Gollancz, formed the Left Book Club in 1936 to better inform the nation on leftist issues. Membership reached sixty thousand readers.8
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