32. Sayers, Whose Body? 165, 177, 186–87. For a perspective on Lord Peter as a “dissenter from the values of Duke’s Denver,” see Erik Routley, The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story: A Personal Monograph (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), 139–41.
33. Sayers, Whose Body? 176–77, 186. An excellent discussion of the influence of sport on British society is John Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). Perhaps the truest personification of this ethic during the 1920s was the American golfer Bobby Jones. See Peter Dobereiner, “My, But You’re a Wonder, Sir,” Bobby Jones: The Greatest of Them All, ed. Martin Davis (Greenwich, Conn.: The American Golfer, 1996), 38–47. Harriet Vane’s thoughts on the subject may be found in Sayers, Gaudy Night, 142.
34. Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell, 7–70.
35. Ibid., 161–205; Winter, Death’s Men, 223–34. Siegfried Sassoon embodied the new attitude in his later war poetry:
Base Details
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You’d see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. “Poor young chap,”
I’d say—“I used to know his father well;
Yes, we’ve lost heavily in that last scrap.”
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I’d toddle home and die—in bed.
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. Jon Silkin (London: Penguin, 1981), 131.
36. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 139–238; Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That (New York: Doubleday, 1929), 82–244.
37. Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell, 123–59; Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 170–91.
38. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” in Titles to Fame, ed. Denys K. Roberts (London: Nelson, 1937). The essay was republished in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992), 208–21. Subsequent citations will refer to the latter source.
39. Sayers to David Higham, Nov. 27, 1936, Letters, 405–6.
40. James Brabazon maintains that Dorothy L. Sayers was consciously anti-Semitic, in Sayers: A Biography, 216–19, a charge refuted by Carolyn G. Heilbrun in “Dorothy L. Sayers: Biography Between the Lines,” in Dale, Sayers Centenary, 1–14. Nancy-Lou Patterson agrees that Sayers’s treatment of ethnic stereotypes was ill considered. See “Images of Judaism and Anti-Semitism in the Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers,” Sayers Review 2, no. 2 (June 1978): 17–24. A most perceptive critique of British anti-Semitism is George Orwell, “Antisemitism in Britain,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols., ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 3: 332–41.
41. Dorothy L. Sayers, ed., “Introduction” to Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (London: Victor Gollancz, 1928). Republished in Haycraft, Art of the Mystery Story, as “The Omnibus of Crime,” 71–109. Subsequent citations will reference the latter publication.
42. Two excellent books consider the impact of the war on modern literature: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); and Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990).
43. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound [1935], ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 4.
44. For examples, see Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925) and To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927); William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Random House, 1929) and As I Lay Dying (New York: Random House, 1930); James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1922). For a discussion of the development of modern narrative form, see James Mellard, The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980); or Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992).
45. Sayers’s most unusual experiment came with the publication, with Robert Eustace, of The Documents in the Case, an epistolary mystery novel published in 1930 (reprint; New York: HarperPerennial Library, 1987).
46. Sayers to her mother, Nov. 8, 1921, Letters, 180.
47. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 225.
2. LORD PETER DISCOVERS THE POSSIBILITIES
1. Mary B. Rose, “Britain and the International Economy,” in Constantine, Kirby, and Rose, First World War in British History, 231–51; A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 134–35, 189, 203–4.
2. Taylor, English History, 227–60.
3. Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End, 139–59; Taylor, English History, 242–50.
4. Taylor, English History, 242–50. For a historical overview of the general strike, see Patrick Renshaw, Nine Days That Shook Britain: The 1926 General Strike (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1976).
5. Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death (1927; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 62.
6. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 107–16.
7. Ibid.; Sayers to John Cournos, Aug. 13, 1925, Letters, 237.
8. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 117–70.
9. Sayers to John Cournos, Oct. 27, Dec. 4, 1924, Letters, 218, 221.
10. The extant letters from Sayers to Cournos are printed in Sayers, Letters, 215–33, 236–41.
11. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 141–70.
12. Sayers to her mother, June 13, 1924, Letters, 215.
13. Sayers to her parents, Mar. 3, 1922, Letters, 189.
14. Sayers to John Cournos, Jan. 25, 1925, Letters, 224.
15. Sayers to John Cournos, Feb. 22, 1925, Letters, 230.
16. Sayers to John Cournos, Mar. 28, 1925, Letters, 231; Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 202–3.
17. Sayers, Clouds of Witness, 27–28.
18. Sayers, Unnatural Death, 112.
19. Ibid., 217.
20. Ibid.; Sayers to John Cournos, Oct. 18, 1925, Letters, 239–41.
21. Sayers, Unnatural Death, 21.
22. For further discussion of Sayers’s portrayal of women as villains, see Virginia B. Morris, “Arsenic and Blue Lace: Sayers’ Criminal Women,” Modern Fiction Studies 29 (autumn 1983):485–95.
23. Sayers, Unnatural Death, 216. For a discussion of Sayers’s use of humor, see Catherine Kenney, “The Comedy of Dorothy L. Sayers,” in Dale, Sayers Centenary, 139–50.
24. Sayers, Unnatural Death, 229–30.
25. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age, 3d ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984).
26. Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Genevieve Fraisse and Michelle Perrot, eds., A History of Women; Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap of Harvard, 1993).
27. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education: or A Fair Chance for the Girls (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1873) provides one of the clearest statements connecting education to physical harm of female reproductive organs.
28. See for instance Nancy Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850,” Signs 4 (1978): 219–36; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).
29. See Cott, “Passionlessness.”
30. Deborah Kuhn McGregor, From Midwives to Medicine: the Birth of American Gynecology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rut
gers University Press, 1998), 153–55; John Cournos, The Devil is an English Gentleman (New York: Liveright, 1932); Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 114–16.
31. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Carl Degler, “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 79 (1974): 1467–90.
32. Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990), 9–45.
33. Jann, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 3–6, 103–26.
34. Adams, The Great Adventure, 47–112; Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 76–135. For a vivid rendering of what it was for a young woman to grow up amidst the assumptions of the old culture, the reader can do no better than Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933).
35. Sayers, Unnatural Death, 148.
36. Ibid., 155.
37. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 14–16.
38. Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison, 100–102, 112–14.
39. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 199–211.
40. Sayers, Unnatural Death, 37.
41. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 200–201. Reynolds quotes a letter from Sayers to Maurice Reckitt, Nov. 19, 1941.
42. Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End; Sayers, Clouds of Witness, 212.
43. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 225–27.
44. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 275–99; Hynes, A War Imagined, 425–26.
45. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 35–36; Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers, 10.
46. Sayers, Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 298.
3. LORD PETER ACQUIRES A SOUL
1. Taylor, English History, 321–49; Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End, 235–53; Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
2. Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End, 211–12.
3. Ibid., 212; “Clarence Hatry,” The Banker 13 (May 1985): 78–79; Thomas Jaffe (ed.), “Clarence Who?” Forbes 146 (July 9, 1990): 120.
4. Taylor, English History, 321–49.
5. Sayers, Strong Poison, 124, 131.
6. Ibid., 136.
7. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 225–26.
8. Sayers to Victor Gollancz, Nov. 25, 1927, Letters, 266–67.
9. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 225–26.
10. Sayers to Victor Gollancz, Nov. 28, 1927, Letters, 267–68.
11. Sayers to her parents, Aug. 15, 1928, Letters, 282.
12. Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers” and “The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question,” in Lord Peter Views the Body, (1928; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 5–40.
13. Sayers, “The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps That Ran,” in Lord Peter Views the Body, 174.
14. Sayers, “The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention” and “The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head,” in Lord Peter Views the Body, 93–160, 197–222.
15. For a discussion of the Wimsey short stories, see Durkin, Sayers, 84–100.
16. Sayers to Harold Bell, Mar. 12, 1933, Letters, 330.
17. Sayers to Harold Bell, Feb. 4, Mar. 12, 1933, Letters, 325–34.
18. An anonymous reviewer noted in 1935 that Sayers took meticulous care to maintain an internal consistency in the Wimsey chronology. See “The Exploits of Lord Peter Wimsey,” Times (London), July 12, 1935, 9.
19. Sayers, “The Cave of Ali Baba,” in Lord Peter Views the Body, 283–317.
20. Sayers, Strong Poison, 126.
21. Three authors have considered aspects of this subject. See Jonathon Hodge, “Chronology,” Sayers Review 1, no. 4 (July 1977): 10; Geoffrey A. Lee, “The Wimsey Saga,” Proceedings of the Seminar, 1977 (Witham, Essex: Dorothy L. Sayers Historical and Literary Society, Archives), 2–12; Alzina Stone Dale, “Fossils in Cloud-Cuckoo Land,” Sayers Review 3, no. 2 (Dec. 1978): 1–13.
22. Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” in Titles to Fame, ed. Dennis K. Roberts (London: Nelson, 1937). Reprinted in Haycraft, Art of the Mystery Story, 210.
23. Sayers to Eustace Barton, May 7, 1928, Letters, 274.
24. Sayers and Eustace, Documents in the Case; Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 213–24; Trevor H. Hall, Dorothy L. Sayers: Ten Literary Studies (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980), 62–103. Sayers’s extensive correspondence with Barton is contained in Letters, 272–89, 298–99, 302–5, 308, 310–11, 323. Dawson Gaillard maintains that The Documents in the Case is Sayers’s best crime novel. See Gaillard, Sayers, 45–54. H. R. F. Keating also defends Documents in “Dorothy L.’s Mickey Finn,” in Dale, Sayers Centenary, 129–38.
25. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 206–9.
26. Sayers to Ivy Shrimpton, Oct. 18, 1928, Letters, 287.
27. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 208–10.
28. Sayers to Ivy Shrimpton, Dec. 10, 1928, Letters, 289–90.
29. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 210–11.
30. Sayers to her mother, Apr. 8, July 12, 1926, Letters, 245–47, 249–50; Hall, Ten Literary Studies, 40–51.
31. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 234–35.
32. Ibid., 231–33.
33. Ibid., 210–11, 225–35; Sayers to Ivy Shrimpton, Nov. 11, 1933, Letters, 239.
34. Dorothy L. Sayers, Tristan in Brittany (London: Ernest Benn, 1929).
35. Sayers to Donald Tovey, Jan. 18, 1934, Letters, 340.
36. Sayers, Strong Poison, 45–46.
37. Ibid., 69.
38. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors: Changes Rung on an Old Theme in Two Short Touches and Two Long Peals (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1934), 10.
39. For a brief discussion of Sayers’s development of Wimsey as a character, see Julian Symons, The Detective Story in Britain (Harlow, Essex: Longman, Greens and Company, 1969), 26–28.
40. Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” 210.
41. Kevin I. Jones, Conan Doyle and the Spirits: The Spiritualist Career of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Wellingsborough, England: Aquarium Press, 1989).
42. Ibid., 109–31; Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 58–77.
43. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 112–14.
44. Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). Virginia Woolf was among a small coterie of Britons who did believe that the nature of art and humanity had really changed: Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in Collected Essays, vol. 1 (1923; reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1966).
45. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 55–135; Malcolm Smith, “The War and British Culture,” in Constantine, Kirby, and Rose, First World War in British History, 168–83.
46. Wilfred Owen, “Insensibility,” in Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, 189. John Silkin’s introduction provides a thoughtful analysis on the place of the war poets in British literary history.
47. Hynes, A War Imagined, 269–463.
48. Smith, “The War and British Culture,” 168–83.
49. Sayers, Strong Poison, 88.
50. Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” 211.
51. For a discussion of Harriet Vane’s influence on the direction of the Wimsey stories, see Margaret P. Hanay, “Harriet’s Influence on the Characterization of Lord Peter Wimsey,” in As Her Whimsey Took Her, ed. Margaret P. Hanay (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979), 36–50.
52. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Five Red Herrings (previously published as Suspicious Characters, 1931; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 176.
53. For a discussion of the novel, see Lionel Basney, “The Nine Tailors and the Complexity of Innocence,” in Hanay, As Her Whimsey Took Her, 23–35.
54. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Notebook: The Nine T
ailors,” Original Notebook (MS 151), Sayers Collection, Wade Center.
55. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 237–46; Sayers to Victor Gollancz, Sept. 14, 1932, Letters, 322–23.
56. Several of Sayers’s biographers cite the influence of her religious outlook on the Wimsey stories, though most tend to overdo it, reading backward from her later career as a Christian apologist. This seems especially true of David Coomes, Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life; Dale, Maker and Craftsman; and to a lesser extent, Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers; and Kenney, Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers. See also Stephen Hahn, “Theodocy in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise,” Renascence 41 (spring 1989): 169–76.
57. Sayers, Strong Poison, 167.
58. For a discussion of Lord Peter’s religious development, see Lionel Basney, “God and Peter Wimsey,” Christianity Today 17 (Sept. 14, 1973): 27–28.
4. LORD PETER DISPLAYS HIS RANGE
1. Among those singing the praises of Sayers’s detective stories are “Little ‘Tecs’ Have Little Crooks,” New Statesman and Nation 3 (May 7, 1932): 594; and H. R. F. Keating, Murder Must Appetize (London: Lemon Tree Press, 1975). For a discussion of Sayers as the Queen of Crime, see “D. L. S.: An Unsteady Throne?” in Dale, Sayers Centenary, 23–30.
2. Sayers, introduction to “The Omnibus of Crime,” in Haycraft, The Art of the Mystery Story, 71.
3. Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime,” 71–83. Quotations, 72.
4. Ibid., 83.
5. Ibid., 89–93; quotation, 89; Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 196–97. See also E. R. Gregory, “Wilkie Collins and Dorothy L. Sayers,” in Hanay, As Her Whimsey Took Her, 51–64.
6. Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime,” 92–97. Sayers later wrote a series of essays on Sherlock Holmes minutiae in which she addressed the mystery of Doctor Watson’s given name. See Dorothy L. Sayers, “Studies in Sherlock Holmes,” in Unpopular Opinions (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946).
Conundrums for the Long Week-End Page 30
