Sayers left no clues to suggest when she stopped writing, or why. Apparently she worked on the manuscript as opportunities arose throughout the latter half of 1936. By early 1937 she had definitely moved on to other projects, meaning that she may have stopped at year’s end in 1936. It is not difficult to guess the reason: the abdication took place on December 10. Sayers was in Leeds, working out the bugs in the play, Busman’s Honeymoon, in advance of the London opening when the constitutional crisis struck.
Dorothy L. Sayers took an avid interest in the abdication and was fully prepared to believe the worst of Edward and Mrs. Simpson.19 This historic event shed an entirely new, and not altogether complimentary, light on the institution of marriage. Inevitably, this would impact Sayers’s own interpretation of the emotions and events she was attempting to portray in “Thrones, Dominations.” By unfortunately choosing the highly visible death of George V as a springboard for her fiction, she guaranteed that readers would interpret her ideas with the abdication sequel in mind. Sayers had allowed herself to be trapped by historical events. She quietly put the manuscript away, perhaps hoping to iron out the problem later. In a letter written in November 1938, Sayers confessed, “I have taken a dislike to the story, and have great difficulty doing anything about it.”20
Crisis followed on crisis after the abdication. International complications rolled menacingly and inexorably on, drowning whatever illusion of peace the Britons may have possessed. Sayers had almost no choice but to leave Peter Wimsey’s latest novel in the attic; his world was receding with frightening velocity into a dimly remembered past when hope in some way existed.
Sayers tried to keep Lord Peter alive. In her essay “Gaudy Night,” published in 1937, she foresaw “no end to the Wimseys this side the grave” (220). Apparently she had ideas in mind for several more novels, as she suggested in a letter to Sir Donald Tovey, musicologist and devoted Wimsey follower, in April 1936: “What I have got in mind, is the complete history of all Peter’s earlier women, leading up to their appearance from time to time in his detective presence. We shall then know what happened to Barbara, to the Viennese singer and also to that unknown lady who was his partner during the Ali Baba period; and may also have some information about those ‘trustworthy hands’ in which Uncle Paul established him in Paris.”21 Poor Harriet—one can only hope the shock was to be spread over several years’ worth of books.
The Wimsey material that Sayers actually produced was far less informative, and paltry besides. In 1936 she published a new anthology of mystery stories, Tales of Detection, for Everyman’s Library, and she included a new Wimsey story entitled “The Image in the Mirror.” A typical Sayers short story, there is much more to be said for the inspiration than for the execution. No better was “The Haunted Policeman,” published in The Strand and Harper’s Bazaar in the winter of 1938. This was the next installment in the chronicle of the Wimsey marriage, as the story opens with Harriet giving birth to a son in November 1936. The birth takes place “off”; the puzzle is not worth Peter’s time. Two more stories, both featuring Wimsey on his own, appeared in Sayers’s last collection of her own mystery fiction, In the Teeth of the Evidence. Each is amusing, though adding little to the Wimsey character.22
An unfinished short story from this period is suggestive of Dorothy L. Sayers’s dilemma. The manuscript, entitled “The Master Key,” chronicles a sadly aging and domestic Lord Peter. The story begins with a fistfight in one of Peter’s three clubs. He defends a woman’s honor against the unseemly insults of the Honorable John Hemlock, a young brute, but comes away second best, his facial features rearranged. Hurrying home, he finds solace in Harriet’s sympathy and security in a new household served by a full staff of domestics. Still, he studies his damaged face carefully in the mirror, concerned that he might discover loosened teeth. That John Hemlock comes next morning seeking Peter’s aid to clear him of a murder charge apparently did little to sweeten the situation. Sayers dropped the story at this point. Perhaps an aging Wimsey, no longer possessing even the potential to be intrepid, was too much to swallow. Even reviewers had detected the author’s problem. Considering the recent publication of In the Teeth of the Evidence, the New Republic lamented that “The hero of a hundred dangerous escapades is inarticulate in the hands of modern science and, moreover, his teeth are beginning to go.”23
The Wimseys made their last public appearance in Sayers’s lifetime as England fought for its survival in the first months of World War II. In a series of eleven installments appearing in The Spectator between November 17, 1939, and January 26, 1940, Sayers presented supposed correspondence among members of the Wimsey family and their acquaintances. Intended as an expression of patriotism and morale booster, “The Wimsey Papers” gave expression to Sayers’s views on the war experience and the necessity of looking firmly ahead to a brighter future. Sayers emphasized the need to maintain proper morale. In a supposed letter from Harriet to Helen, she argued that “It isn’t fair to expect the ordinary man & woman to struggle unaided against these violent assaults.”24
The last letter from Peter to Harriet draws on the themes that Sayers had originally examined in Gaudy Night: “I have seen the eyes of the men who ask for leadership, and they are the eyes of slaves. The new kind of leaders are not like the old. . . . It’s not enough to rouse up the Government to do this and that. You must rouse the people. You must make them understand that their salvation is in themselves and in each separate man and woman among them. . . . They must not look to the State for guidance—they must learn to guide the State.”25 Again, Sayers and Lord Peter drew on the solid traditions of British culture as a weapon to fight modernization in its totalitarian form. Fittingly, this effort was to be the last word from Peter Wimsey, at least in Dorothy L. Sayers’s lifetime. The Papers convey a sense of finality as far as the Wimseys are concerned. Supposed excerpts from Peter’s diary are especially revealing. She lifted the Duke of Denver’s announced intention to plant oaks from the “Thrones, Dominations” manuscript, perhaps an indication that she had determined to abandon that final novel. More importantly, she allowed Peter the opportunity to write his own epitaph at the diary’s close:
HERE LIES AN ANACHRONISM IN THE VAGUE EXPECTATION OF ETERNITY
Sayers understood that the forthcoming war would destroy Peter Wimsey’s world for all time.26
Sayers turned to Lord Peter one last time. After her death in 1957, a short story entitled “Talboys” was discovered among her papers. She had written the story in 1942 but apparently made no attempt to publish it. The story is a paean to wedded bliss; the reader would never guess that the action was set in the middle of World War II. Peter and Harriet have three sons, the youngest still a baby; the mystery involves a theft of prize-winning peaches. Beyond assuring her readers that the Wimseys were all right, there seems to be no good reason why Sayers should write such a tepid story. Certainly she exercised good judgment in quietly putting the work away.27
So Peter was done. As much as anything, he was the victim of the onrush of events leading to the war. Sayers decided to wed his story to England’s own just as events began to trip one over another. Choosing to anchor a novel in the death of a king, she was unable to complete the writing before the abdication forever colored perceptions of that first event. Things were moving too fast; the England of Peter Wimsey was vanishing, and Peter along with it. He was the product of an era, and the era was gone.
From an end-of the-century perspective, the fictional history of Peter Wimsey has become emblematic of its time. Unlike practically any other of the famous fictional detectives, Lord Peter Wimsey’s career was fully defined by a single epoch. He came to life as the long week-end began in the wake of the Great War; he disappeared as World War II sealed the week-end’s close. The era shaped and defined Peter Wimsey’s character; he in turn reflected its experiences and its values, at least as Dorothy L. Sayers understood them.
Sayers was first and foremost a mystery writer until 1936—a highly s
uccessful one in a period that saw the likes of G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Margerie Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Ronald Knox, and Arthur Conan Doyle. She began as an educated scholar writing for money and the fun of it and continued because of the initial success and the extra income she came to need desperately. By the end of the twenties, she had established herself, not only as a great mystery writer, but also as an expert on the mystery story. When Dorothy L. Sayers turned her mind to something, she turned all her formidable talents to the task.
She approached the mystery in a conventional way, fashioning a detective in response to Sherlock Holmes, providing a community of support players—a police detective, a forensic analyst, a solicitor, a barrister, a financial expert, a Bohemian artist, several family members, a Bunter, and a Miss Climpson—to help him along. When these grew tiresome, she developed alternative communities, including an artist’s colony and an isolated church parish, to assist his endeavors. She read fellow mystery writers intently and voraciously, eventually discerning the flaws in standard practice and defining her own ideals for the proper detective story.
As Sayers grew more conversant with the mystery form, she took to weaving into her stories subtle jabs at the failings and inconsistencies of other writers. Eventually she internalized a mechanism for both expressing her understanding of the mystery’s conventions and commenting on the structure of her own novels, by introducing Harriet Vane, the mystery writer as major character. Harriet spoke about plot and procedure with the authoritative voice of Dorothy L. Sayers. Sayers put a great deal of herself into Harriet, but it is possible to make too much of this. Harriet was not the mirror of Sayers; she was different in several respects. Moreover, Sayers placed herself in her books in the person of more than one character: both Hilary Thorpe of The Nine Tailors and Miss Meteyard of Murder Must Advertise echo memories of Sayers’s own experiences. As Sayers herself would be the first to argue, any character in a novel to some extent embodies the character of the author, even if it is no more than a reflection of her worst nightmares. The argument has its counterpart: no character on the printed page is precisely identifiable with its author, even in autobiography. The separation between the words and the self is insurmountable.
Sayers sought to maintain a consistency within the Wimsey series—Peter’s characteristics and values remain consonant from one novel to the next—but she endeavored to vary the content as well. She most feared becoming predictable or dull or, worst of all, boring to herself. She explored the range of possibilities for the detective story as she defined them, producing puzzles, thrillers, and several books that embodied elements of both. She was most comfortable with the combined puzzle-thriller. Her most patent puzzle, The Five Red Herrings, is, for all its obfuscations, one of her least satisfying novels. She moved twice to the other end of the spectrum, producing something approaching the thriller in Clouds of Witness and Murder Must Advertise. An intrepid Wimsey, though amusing, is a little difficult to swallow.
If Sayers had a formula, it was constructed around her belief that the truly entertaining mystery challenges the reader to figure not “who done it” but rather how it was done. She began Wimsey’s career with a variation on this theme—in Whose Body? Sir Julian Freke’s villainy is not difficult to spot, but the depths of his hideous scheme are far more difficult to fathom. The idea recurs, in an array of forms, in Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, and, of course, The Nine Tailors, where she gives the theme its ultimate twist. By that time, she had begun to subsume the conventional mystery within a larger dimension of creative art; Sayers was not so much devising detective stories as writing literary works in which the mystery points to a larger theme. The Nine Tailors is ultimately a redemption story and Gaudy Night a novel of manners disrupted by a psychopath. Busman’s Honeymoon began life as a comedy play.
All of Dorothy L. Sayers’s books were far more than simple mystery stories. Despite her later criticisms of the first novels, Sayers from the beginning worked to create an intensely human feel for her stories. Reading the books, one sympathizes—at times empathizes—with a full range of human experiences and human emotions. Sayers’s characters were not puppets playing parts in some puzzle intrigue; they were real people, caught up in a drama that would have consequences for all concerned. They were residents of a real world, and their thoughts and actions were shaped by the influences of that larger world.28
The most obvious of these influences was the Great War, the defining event of too many lifetimes, lived on into the twenties and thirties. The war in some way affects behaviors in every one of the Sayers novels. At times its effect is on Peter himself, as he displays the aftereffects of shell shock. Other characters display the war’s impact as well: Dennis Cathcart’s finances were ruined by the war as were George Fentiman’s nerves. Campbell and Waters get into a fistfight over whether the Scots or the English displayed the greater bravery—twelve years after the fighting has ended. Jeff Deacon returns to Fenchurch St. Paul a dozen years after accidentally getting sent to the front, one last ghost from the Third Battle of the Marne. In 1935, Peter can still speak of Sergeant Bunter and Private Padgett. And he can still break down and weep, his nerves still unhealed. The postwar years must carry the war along; the weight of the mind-numbing memories intrudes everywhere and at any time. There is no escape.
Whether or not the war spurred the elusive, ill-defined force called modernization, its effects are everywhere visible in the Wimsey stories. The embrace of technology is the most obvious sign: the fast cars and the crowded omnibus, the ubiquitous telephone and its booth, the yammering wireless, the so convenient airplane, the screaming billboard. England has become a faster, noisier place—or London has, at least, along with a few other places here and there. Wilvercombe is modern enough, with its splashy hotels, jazz music, ballroom dancing, and charming gigolos. Sayers points up the pace of modernization by contrasting the great town of London with any number of truly rural villages, from Stapley to Leahampton to Fenchurch St. Paul. The isolation, the slower pace of life, and the greater sense of community in these villages suggest what has been gained and lost with modern times.
The impact of science and especially medicine held a special fascination for Sayers early in her mystery-writing career. Villains in three of her first four novels prove to be connected to the medical profession; in each case, medical knowledge plays a crucial role in their villainy. Sayers was loathe to lay overmuch reliance on medical theories and therapies, as they seemed altogether divorced from any form of moral consideration. Science created power just as its practice denied the influence of the ethical—empiricism by its nature demanded a moral neutrality. When practitioners claim an ability to cure human deviance through chemical or mechanical means, Sayers’s advice is to watch out. The scientist may prove the most deviant of all.
The most consistently elaborated of all Sayers’s themes is her concern over the place of women in modern society. She admitted to “a foolish complex against allying myself publicly with anything labelled feminist,” arguing that the best course was to take “the feminist position for granted.”29 She was the first to concede, however, that her own career had been made possible by the advance of the feminist cause, which she championed in her own way through her novels. She attacked the problem from two angles—first by drawing strong and independent modern women characters and illustrating their continued difficulties; and second, by pursuing the histories of fierce survivors of the Victorian era.
Loving portraits of Peter’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, along with detailed sketches of Agatha Dawson, Lady Dormer, and Mrs. Wrayburn, provide a clear if repellant picture of women’s lives in the nineteenth century. These were successfully independent women, but each was regarded as a social anomaly, in some cases cast out by their own families. By contrast, figures such as Mary Wimsey, Clara Whitaker, Sheila Fentiman, Marjorie Phelps, and, ultimately, Harriet Vane are accepted as full participants in
the public sphere, though each encounters resistance from maledom. An offspring of nobility, a professional, a working wife, a Bohemian artist, and a successful author—these women exhibited the range of potential experiences in modern society. Each is better off than her Victorian counterparts, but each has to struggle upstream in everyday society simply because she is a woman. Perhaps the most suggestive of all Sayers’s women is Ann Dorland, with her curious combination of brains, acumen, and utter confusion. She must, on her own, overcome the obstacles to her own freedom and define for herself what she must be. Society, still dominated by selfishly male opinion, will offer no help.
Sayers’s novels are increasingly devoted to female characters as the series continues. Most obviously through the capable and fully active presence of Harriet Vane, Sayers emphasizes the talent and potential inherent in the female half of humanity. Miss Climpson, a Victorian relic who flourishes as a sort of private detective when given the chance, perhaps emphasizes the point even more effectively. At the opposite end of the spectrum cowers Mrs. Flora Weldon, a pathetic woman of independent means but lacking the training necessary to make something of herself. She wanders aimlessly, searching for some sort of thrill to enlighten her tooconstricted universe. Is this what men really want? If women are denied full access to the public world, this is what happens to them. Comparing Mrs. Weldon to Miss Climpson, the reader glimpses the consequences of potential denied.
While Dorothy L. Sayers revisited such more-or-less continuous themes as the war, the effects of modernization, the changing roles for women, and the impact of science through much of the Wimsey series, she also explored new events and experiences making themselves felt during the period. Historically, such hope as there was early in the postwar era was finally blighted after 1929 by the slump. Sayers reacted sympathetically to the hard times, although her personal fortunes were pretty much the reverse of Britain’s as a whole. She became financially secure just as the national economy ground into chronic recession. In her books, she acknowledges the grinding effects of endemic poverty and its influence on popular attitudes. The air of desperation wrought by the slump’s insecurities provides an atmospheric backdrop for more than one Wimsey novel. At the same time, Sayers is careful to emphasize that essential English values survive, even in the midst of widespread unemployment.
Conundrums for the Long Week-End Page 27
