The authors worked on Busman’s Honeymoon throughout the summer of 1935, completing the play in September, just as Gollancz published Gaudy Night. Sayers and St. Clare Byrne immediately began the arduous business of securing a producer. After an initial failure, they found success with Anmer Hall, who located the necessary money. Such things take time; rehearsals did not begin until November 1936, and the first London performance came just before Christmas. The play enjoyed a nine months’ run in London.
This rather held matters up, as far as continuation of the Wimsey novels was concerned. After completing the play, Sayers had proceeded directly to work on the novel Busman’s Honeymoon, which was to embody the play in narrative form while incorporating additional materials. Not wishing to spoil the impact of the play by giving away the solution, Sayers stipulated that the play appear on stage in advance of the novel’s release. The theater being what it was, such a course dictated a good deal of waiting. Sayers completed the book in October 1936, but Gollancz did not publish it until the following February.28
In some ways, Busman’s Honeymoon is the oddest of all the Wimsey novels, a beast both satisfying and unfulfilling, neither fish nor fowl. The story’s genesis as a play trapped Sayers; it is of necessity a very talky novel, an endless succession of conversations punctuated very seldom by either thought or action. Until the conclusion, the most active moment in the story comes when Peter and Harriet take a ride in the car. It is also the only Wimsey novel to fully hinge on its predecessor—the book is a sequel to Gaudy Night. The satisfaction the novel provides derives from seeing Peter and Harriet safely married at last.29 Certainly it is a Wimsey novel most oriented to the private side of life. Beyond a bare mention early in the book of King George V’s Silver Jubilee, there is no reference to current events. Peter has given himself over almost completely to the traditional half of his existence, eschewing the modern as he commences life as a married man. Harriet now understands that the air of security she had perceived in Peter almost from the beginning emanates from allegiance to his traditional British heritage. For all his adaptation to the modern world, Peter “belonged to an ordered society.” To her delight, she discovers that she has “married England.” In fact, of the two, Harriet now comes closer to embodying a sense of the modern. A woman without family and possessing a means of income entirely her own, it is her sort who “go all sanitary and civilised, and get married in hotels and do their births and deaths in nursing-homes where they give offence to nobody.”30
The novel begins with a series of vignettes—material purportedly written by persons attending the Wimsey-Vane wedding, including Bunter, Peter’s mother and sister-in-law, and the dean of Shrewsbury College. Obviously inspired by the “Wimsey industry,” these letters and diary entries provide several perspectives on the marriage. As might be expected, the ceremony has its share of maladroit moments, both in planning and performance. Harriet has fallen head-over-heels in love with Peter, worrying only about negative publicity from her notorious past and her ability to perform the duties incumbent on Lady Peter Wimsey without embarrassing all concerned. Peter is naturally solicitous that the thing be done in loving good taste beyond the glare of reporters’ cameras and that Harriet’s entrance into noble society be as smooth as possible. The witnesses report a simple, elegant, but private wedding, followed by a successful escape from the newshounds for the honeymoon. Each account has its share of pithy comments, such as this observation, contained in a letter from the dean to Miss de Vine: “I know heaps of couples who are both as stupid as owls and not happy at all—so it doesn’t really follow, one way or the other, does it?” (12)
Obviously much smarter than owls, Peter and Harriet have determined on a very private honeymoon in Harriet’s childhood hometown of Great Pagford, Hertsfordshire. Both the play and the narrative portion of the novel essentially begin with their arrival at Talboys, a great old Tudor house newly purchased in secret by the Wimseys. Unfortunately, Noakes, the former owner, is not there to meet them, nor is the house prepared for their appearance. All the doors are locked; no key is in evidence. Noakes is in fact dead, lying in the basement with a fractured skull. Thankfully, no one discovers the grisly fact until the following day.
The unscheduled appearance of a murder victim on a honeymoon gives the story two horses to ride, though neither is a terrifically strong one. There is some tension in the romance, as Peter and Harriet must work out their roles as husband and wife and learn how to maintain complementary but separate identities. This is nothing in comparison to the kinds of romantic tensions flowing like kerosene on fire through Gaudy Night. There is a murder mystery, of the locked-room variety, but the victim is a close old man no one much liked. There can be just four suspects; no one of them encourages much sympathy either. The limits of the stage have left Sayers with rather a tepid puzzle in comparison with her ten preceding novels.
Sayers seems more interested in exploring the problems of love in marriage than in posing a detective puzzle. Having at long last brought Peter and Harriet to the altar, she is now free to explore her ideal state of wedded bliss—a stark contrast to the reality of her own marriage to Mac Fleming. The reader is made to understand that this couple will succeed, not only because they love each other deeply, but because they respect one another equally as human beings. They have already overcome their most dangerous obstacle: the problem of gratitude. Harriet freely allows Peter to purchase their new home because she knows “he liked giving people things” (18); she in turn expends the proceeds from three short stories to purchase for him a letter of John Donne concerning “Divine and human love.” Peter could easily have purchased the letter himself—he had wanted to do so, as a gift for Harriet. The value is not in the letter but in the fact that Harriet has bestowed it. They are free of the mutual burden of necessary gratitude; each can now give to the other freely.31
As might be expected, there are awkward moments as they inadvertently test one another. When Harriet discovers information that might incriminate Aggie Twitterton, Noakes’s niece (and a hapless human being if ever there was one), Peter automatically assumes that they will share this with the police. Harriet is appalled; the information has come to her in confidence. But Peter’s hands are the hangman’s hands: catching murderers is his job. Either Harriet must allow him to pursue that job in his usual thorough way, or he must quit. She has the power to make him quit; most women would use it immediately. Harriet will not:
“If we disagree, we’ll fight it out like gentlemen. We won’t stand for matrimonial blackmail. . . . You must do what you think is right. Promise me that. What I think doesn’t matter. I swear it shall never make any difference.”
He took her hand and kissed it gravely.
“Thank you, Harriet. That is love with honour.” (292)
The difficulty for Peter will be to allow someone to share his most private, self-protected moments. In the face of Barbara and the war, Peter had spent long years constructing mask after mask to protect his emotional fragility; he has been the comedian, the pedant, the clotheshorse, the man about town, the hardworking private detective, and even the harlequin. Harriet’s relentless demand for honesty has mostly torn those masks away, but there are still places he keeps hidden, even from her. When Peter comes to understand how the murder was done, he turns more to Bunter than to Harriet. The old habits die hard.
Yet, for the far larger part, this is a story of joy in marriage. Harriet is perfectly thrilled, in every sense, now that all the difficulties and discomfort are behind her. Peter suspects that “If I’d had nothing but a haystack to offer you, you’d have married me years ago.” Harriet agrees:
“I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“Damnation! think what I’ve missed.”
“Me too. At this moment I could have been tramping at your heels with five babies and a black eye, and saying to a sympathetic bobby, ‘You leave ’im be—’e’s my man, ain’t ’e?—E’ve a right to knock me abaht.’”
“You
seem,” said her husband, reprovingly, “to regret the black eye more than the five babies.”
“Naturally. You’ll never give me the black eye.” (37)
Peter too gives himself over to a euphoria verging on giddiness. Holding Harriet in his arms and hearing her sigh “seemed to lift the sealing stone and release some well-spring of laughter deep down within him. It came bubbling and leaping up in the most tremendous hurry to reach the sunlight, so that all his blood danced with it and his lungs were stifled with the rush and surge of this extraordinary fountain of delight. He felt himself at once ridiculous and omnipotent. He was exultant. He wanted to shout” (250). They can only agree that this was “almost like being in love,” a faintly ludicrous thought. Peter concludes, mischievously, that “One can’t be married and in love. Not with the same person, I mean. It isn’t done” (272–73). The alert reader can almost hear the lamenting sigh of Dorothy L. Sayers.
Sayers once again demonstrated her choice to be cognizant of the modern without being of the modern in her treatment of sex, that most delicate and delectable of subject matters. True to form, she frankly examined “the interesting revelations of the marriage-bed” (there was little left to reveal for any reader familiar with the works of D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller), without ever mentioning sexuality in any overt fashion. Only the discerning and lascivious old Paul Delagardie can discern the reason for the “unusual constraint between P. and H.” at a dinner party not long before the wedding. Harriet possesses a tiger, not a shabby tiger as Peter feared, but “an entirely new tiger,” ready and waiting to pounce. But when, after several misadventures, Harriet and Peter do land in the marriage bed, it is “the end of the journey and the beginning of all delight.” This bedroom stuff is supposed to be fun, Sayers reminds the reader. Beyond the fact that Peter and Harriet found it so, there was nothing worthy of report (62, 31).
There is a mystery to be solved in the midst of all this, of course, but it is an infernal nuisance. The news of the body brings an avalanche of reporters to Talboys, along with the official police who carry on their initial inquiries in the Wimsey living room. Meanwhile, creditors have come to demand the furniture—old Noakes was in debt up to his ears. The murder scene is slowly dismantled, first by the happy couple (assisted by Bunter) and subsequently by the movers. As any faithful reader of the Sayers mystery series knows, what is being destroyed is evidence of how the murder was done, which is the key to understanding the entire business.
Peter and Harriet talk about the “how” at some length. Comparing memories of the condition of the house upon their arrival, they dwell on possible means of entry, possible times when the murder could have occurred, and possible weapons. Peter is really glad to discuss the case with someone knowing enough to focus on method. All too often, he complains, the official police concentrate largely on motive, a weak indicator at best. Several people may possess a reason for wanting to do someone in (love or money, generally speaking), but that proves nothing. Juries want to look at motive as well, for the same wrong reasons. But if you can trace the method the killer employed, that will point unfailingly to the perpetrator—“When you’ve got How, you’ve got Who.”
Harriet replies in kind: “I seem to have married my only intelligent reader. That’s the way you construct it from the other end, of course. Artistically, it’s absolutely correct” (219).
Once again, Dorothy L. Sayers is speaking through Harriet and Peter, coaching her audience on the proper approach to resolving her locked-room mystery. This time the audience includes, not merely armchair readers, but people seated in a theater, eyes on a stage. Somewhere before their eyes there exists the remains of a murder device capable of fracturing a tall man’s skull. And that potted cactus hanging by the fireplace near the wireless looks so innocent.
Sayers strews a fair number of red herrings across the investigators’ path, but in the end all that matters is the lead-weighted cactus and the memory of a few yards of fishing line. The device is easy enough to reconstruct; once in place it points directly to the murderer: the man who unnecessarily watered the cactus twice in a week’s time.
Frank Crutchley is by far the most repulsive of Sayers’s murderers, a “pushing” young no-account from London who sticks at nothing. He is a hard worker, serving as a garage mechanic and working part-time as Noakes’s gardener. But he works only for the sake of the money and his own ambitions, not for the pride of the job. He is willing to demonstrate the proper respect for Lord and Lady Peter only as long as he thinks there is something to be got out of them—within, he hates the thought of “trucking to a blasted title” (268). He has paid court to poor old Aggie Twitterton solely to get her money (and perhaps her uncle’s) for his own garage. In the meantime he has been seeing another woman on the sly, saucy Polly Mason, too modern for Pagford with her silk stockings and motion-picture ways. She is a bit too modern for her own good, ending up carrying the child of a condemned murderer. Crutchley does not care.
Crutchley, in fact, does not care about anything. When Peter reconstructs his death machine and springs the trap, Crutchley knows the game is up. He has but one regret: that he got caught. He would like to escape the strong arms of the police, kill Peter for catching him: “Let me go, blast you! Let me get at him! So you set a trap for me, did you? Well, I killed him. The old brute cheated me. So did you, Aggie Twitterton, blast you! I been done out o’ my rights. I killed him, I tell you, and all for nothing” (341).
The play ends at this point, with much the same speech from the murderer. As Crutchley is dragged off stage, Peter seeks Harriet’s hand. “This part of the business always gets me down,”32 he warns. They exchange promises, embracing as the curtain falls. Sayers has paid the necessary debt to her craft, acknowledging that, however repulsive the crime, sending a man to the gallows is a sobering thing.
The book winds through an additional three chapters, providing the reader a full look at Peter’s reaction to investigative triumph. Sayers had generally suggested that Peter took it hard when a case came to an end. In Whose Body? he suffered a relapse of shell shock after discovering Levy’s murderer. Unnatural Death left him ready to believe the end of the world had come; exposing The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club as murder led to depression and quarrels with Charles Parker. So it went. In the early chapters of Gaudy Night, Sayers hinted that such adverse reactions were typical:
There had been an evening when he had turned up to keep a previously-made dinner appointment, but had obviously been unfit either to eat or talk. Eventually he had confessed to a splitting headache and a temperature and suffered himself to be personally conducted home. [Harriet] had been sufficiently alarmed not to leave him till he was safely in his own flat and in the capable hands of Bunter. The latter had been reassuring: the trouble was nothing but reaction—of frequent occurrence at the end of a trying case, but soon over. (64)
In this way, Sayers addressed what was to her a most crucial element in the detective story as human drama: the detective must acknowledge the gravity of his deeds and in some way suffer in consequence.
The last three chapters of Busman’s Honeymoon—the “Epithalamion”—explore this theme in crucial detail. In the play, it is enough for Harriet to “feel as if the evil spirit has been cast out of this house, and left it clean for you and me.”33 Despite its sudden shock of a climax, the play was intended to be a light comedy. The book, being the eleventh Wimsey novel, demanded much more. Looking at the situation realistically, the Wimseys have spent the first three days of their honeymoon at a crime scene, with policemen, reporters, and total strangers traipsing through at all hours. Even after they expose the murderer, they are left with the haunting echo of his curses. Moreover, they are standing holding hands in a house with no furniture. This is all going to be a little bit depressing, even if all else is equal.
Sayers was now faced with the consequences of entangling murder and romance. Her newly wedded couple must get marriage off on the right foot, but Peter must ack
nowledge his responsibility for uncovering Frank Crutchley’s crime. Love and depression can be a volatile mix; the shadows hang heavy over these last three chapters.
Peter does his best to disguise and dispel the usual reaction. He assumes direct responsibility for Crutchley’s predicament and arranges the best legal counsel possible for his defense. For the briefest of moments, the honeymooning Wimseys re-enter the modern world, driving up to London, turning into a movie house to view a “Mickey Mouse and an educational film about the iron and steel industry,”34 before speaking to Sir Impey Biggs at midnight. That done, Peter and Harriet return to the England of long-standing tradition, driving to Denver, where she is truly initiated into the ancient Wimsey family—ghosts and all. Sayers draws again on the “Wimsey industry” in creating these scenes, filling in considerable detail on the Wimsey family history as well as Peter’s personal past. The story of how Bunter came to serve him is for the first time told in full.
Then the return to refurbished Talboys and the trial, the inevitable condemnation. Peter is an emotional wreck. He would like to have Crutchley’s forgiveness; he does all he can to ease the prisoner’s last hours, even arranging care for Polly Mason and her baby, all to no avail. A bitter and unrepentant Crutchley remains sullen to the end; his only wish is to get the drop over with and see them all in hell.
Peter’s anguish is the great final test of his marriage to Harriet. This is a struggle he wants desperately to carry on alone, the last defended place in his own psyche, the part of himself he can share with no one. Harriet can only wait it out. To demand that Peter share this last bit of himself is unthinkable; she can only let him know in subtle but unmistakable ways that she is there if he wants her. He comes at last at four in the morning, shivering, teeth chattering—the exact symptoms exhibited in Whose Body? more than thirteen years before. “It’s my rotten nerves,” he confesses. “I can’t help it. I suppose I’ve never really been right since the War. I hate behaving like this. I tried to stick it out by myself” (378).
Conundrums for the Long Week-End Page 25
