I have been asked many times over the years why he did not write another novel after The Thin Man. I do not know. I think, but I only think, I know a few of the reasons: he wanted to do a new kind of work; he was sick for many of those years and getting sicker. But he kept his work, and his plans for work, in angry privacy and even I would not have been answered if I had ever asked, and maybe because I never asked is why I was with him until the last day of his life . . .
—Lillian Hellman
In angry privacy, Dashiell hated the world. In angry privacy, Dashiell loved the world. And so Dashiell drank. In angry privacy. To destroy the world. And he drank. In angry privacy. To save the world. And he drank. In angry privacy. And he drank. Until there was no more world, no more world to hate or to love, to destroy or to save. In angry privacy. Until there was no more Dashiell. Only his books. But what books. And the best of those books, the very best of any books, the book every person should read at least once, and every writer at least once a month, is The Glass Key.
David Peace was declared one of the Best Young British Novelists by Granta in 2003. The four novels of his Red Riding Quartet were condensed into a three-part TV series broadcast by Channel 4 in 2009. He followed the quartet with GB84 (2004), a fictional account of the miners’ strikes of 1984–85, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2005. Peace subsequently published The Damned Utd (2006), about Brian Clough’s ill-fated tenure at Leeds United. Tokyo: Year Zero (2007) and Occupied City (2009) are the first two books of a proposed Tokyo Trilogy. David Peace currently lives in Japan.
Have His Carcase
by Dorothy L. Sayers (1932)
REBECCA CHANCE
* * *
Dorothy Leigh Sayers (1893–1957) was born in Oxford, England, where her father was headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School. She took modern languages and medieval literature at Somerville College, Oxford, and in 1923 published her first novel, Whose Body?, which introduced her most enduring creation, the anxious, flawed amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. Sayers is one of the most important writers of the Golden Age of mystery writing. She tested and stretched the boundaries of the genre, touching on issues of morality and justice (both human and divine) and the nature of the academic and literary lives, and experimenting with parody and social commentary, most often through the character of Harriet Vane, Lord Peter’s love interest, who is, like her creator, an Oxford scholar and a wealthy author. Her ambitions for the genre drew harsh criticism, most memorably from the American critic Edmund Wilson, who castigated her in the course of a 1945 New Yorker essay titled “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” Wilson commented of Sayers that “she does not write very well: it is simply that she is more consciously literary than most of the other detective-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub-literary level,” a stance that probably made Wilson few friends in the genre. Later in life, Sayers, a devout Anglican, turned her attention to a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, a project on which she was still working when she died.
* * *
Intrepidly hiking the British coast on a “solitary walking tour . . . dressed sensibly in a short skirt and thin sweater” and carrying “a pocket edition of Tristram Shandy, a vest-pocket camera, a small first-aid outfit and a sandwich lunch,” Harriet Vane stumbles (as one does) across the corpse of a young man whose throat has very recently been slit, blood still dripping from the gaping wound. On hearing this news from his old contact, Salcombe Hardy of the Morning Star (as befits a journalist, Hardy is an old soak with “drowned-violet eyes”), Lord Peter Wimsey jumps in his Daimler, Mrs. Merdle, and speeds off to investigate. The younger son of a duke, extremely rich in his own right, Lord Peter is a very talented amateur detective, and has already saved Harriet from being found guilty of murder once in the novel Strong Poison, falling in love with her in the process; now he’s riding to her rescue again, realizing that she’s bound to be suspected of this crime as well.
In Strong Poison, Harriet was behind bars for the entire novel. Now she’s free to help in the investigation, and one of the great pleasures of the book is the fast-witted, Nick-and-Nora-style flirtation between her and Lord Peter. Watch them go as Harriet is tasked with becoming acquainted, for detective purposes, with the “professional dancers” at the Hotel Resplendent in Wilvercombe, the seaside town where she is staying:
“I’ll have to get a decent frock, if there is such a thing in Wilvercombe.”
“Well, get a wine-coloured one then. I’ve always wanted to see you in wine colour. It suits people with honey-coloured skin. (What an ugly word ‘skin’ is.) ‘Blossoms of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured menuphar’—I always have a quotation for everything—it saves original thinking.”
“Blast the man!” said Harriet, left abruptly alone in the blue-plush lounge. Then she suddenly ran out down the steps and leapt upon the Daimler’s running board.
“Port or sherry?” she demanded.
“What?” said Wimsey, taken aback.
“The frock—port or sherry?”
“Claret,” said Wimsey. “Château Margaux 1893 or thereabouts. I’m not particular to a year or two.”
He raised his hat and slipped in the clutch.
I always wonder, on reading this passage, what kind of sherry could conceivably be considered “wine-coloured”: but, that question apart, this kind of high-flown banter is much harder to pull off than it seems. Many writers in the 1930s and 1940s were attempting arch, apparently effortless repartee, larded with quotations and metaphors, but only Sayers’s novels met the challenge successfully. She can move effortlessly between high comedy—the locals Harriet meets while trying desperately to report the murder, or the nervous hiker keen to hide behind her skirts—delicious social observation, and moments of great poignancy. Mrs. Weldon, the widow whose considerable fortune is at the center of the plot, is first considered by Harriet a “predatory hag,” but this harsh, misogynistic judgment softens into a sympathetic portrait of the lonely rich women and impoverished gigolos who meet on the dance floor of the grand ballroom at the Hotel Resplendent. The professional dancer Antoine—“rather surprisingly, neither Jew nor South American dago, nor Central European mongrel, but French”—is the character with whom Harriet feels most at ease, and poor Mrs. Weldon, vulnerable and fragile, easily exploited, turns out to be prey rather than predator.
As well as the considerable pleasures of its writing and characters, Have His Carcase is also an excellent example of the enjoyment readers derive from the sight of an author working her way through meticulous research, and presenting the results to us so entertainingly that we become utterly absorbed in the most minute of details. In The Nine Tailors, for instance, Sayers presents us with campanology; in Five Red Herrings, with train timetables and ticketing; while Have His Carcase requires her detectives to decipher both tide tables and a fiendishly complicated secret code.
And it is a more well-rounded novel, in my opinion, than either The Nine Tailors or Five Red Herrings. There’s a reason that the detective novels in which Harriet Vane appears are generally the readers’ favorites in Sayers’s canon: her presence humanizes Lord Peter, makes him vulnerable, and, mercifully, balances out Sayers’s compulsion to continually demonstrate how very much better-educated and sportingly superior he is to absolutely everyone else around him. There is a heroic act of derring-do in this novel, as he canters, bareback, across the sands of the beach on which the body was discovered, only for the mare he’s riding to come close to throwing him quite unexpectedly. Of course, Lord Peter, who can steer his Daimler around curves like a racing driver, dive off the top of fountains without breaking his neck, and disable opponents with cunning jujitsu holds, is more than a match for a startled, bucking mare: but not even this dashing feat can persuade Harriet to accept his proposal.
“REFUSE RESEMBLE THRILLER HERO WHO HANGS ROUND HEROINE TO NEGLECT OF DUTY BUT WILL YOU MARRY ME,” he telegrams to Harriet, who answers:
&
nbsp; “GOOD HUNTING CERTAINLY NOT SOME DEVELOPMENTS HERE.”
It’s a salutary reminder that there is something that the powerful combination of Lord Peter’s money, education, charm, aristocratic manners, and oenophilic skills can’t buy. His quest to win Harriet is reminiscent of that of his friend Freddy Arbuthnot, in love with Rachel Levy, whose mother disapproves of the match between Christian and Jew; Freddy finally wins round Lady Levy by quoting from Genesis, saying that, like Jacob, he’d “served seven years for Rachel.” We don’t know with certainty how long Lord Peter has to wait for Harriet, but by the time she finally agrees to marry him, he has proved to her that she’ll be entering into an equal partnership, and one of the delights of Have His Carcase is watching that partnership begin to take shape.
However, the detection, in this novel, is still paramount. The Lord Peter/Harriet books that follow this one, including Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon, focus increasingly on their relationship and, in due course, their marriage; I, for one, would have liked a few more Sayers novels set in this halcyon period—halcyon for the reader, if not for Lord Peter—where the solving of a crime has more weight than the sexual tension between the two main characters. They are, after all, detective novels first and foremost, and Sayers was at her sharpest when she constructed the plot of Have His Carcase: it turns on a superbly simple medical twist that, as in all the best crime fiction, is signaled all the way through but that the reader fails to see.
The solution is revealed on page 440 (in my edition), and a mere four more pages afterward, the book has ended. As Lord Peter would say, once you know “how,” you know “who.” As is customary with Sayers, the murderer and the motive have been clear for at least half the book; her novels aren’t whodunits, but howdunits. And, as is also customary with Sayers, the novel ends with Lord Peter promptly and bitterly regretting his crucial part in bringing a murderer to justice. The words on which he closes the book are:
“Well, isn’t that a damned awful, bitter, bloody farce? . . . God, what a jape! King Death has asses’ ears with a vengeance . . . Let’s clear out of this. Get your things packed and leave your address with the police and come on up to town. I’m fed to the back teeth . . . We’ll go home. We’ll dine in Piccadilly. Damn it! . . . I always did hate watering places!”
Readers may well roll their eyes at this display of Lord Peter’s highly refined sensitivities, especially when combined with a side comment on his plans for dinner; but Harriet—less patrician, more practical—has already pointed out that the murderer, if not convicted, will kill again, and she’s perfectly right. Though one applauds Sayers’s wish to demonstrate that catching killers is not simply an intellectual flexing of wits, but has real, brutal consequences when the death penalty awaits convicted murderers, the hypersensitivity with which she endowed Lord Peter can be wearying. His heightened nerves are partially attributed to shell shock, but his valet Bunter, who, after all, was Lord Peter’s batman, enduring the same war as his master, has no similar symptoms—aristocratic nerves being presumably more delicate than working-class ones.
Lord Peter is such a powerful creation that the later variations on this sensitive, cerebral, privileged archetype—Roderick “Handsome” Alleyn, baronet’s son and art appreciator; Adam Dalgleish, dark, brooding poet; Thomas Lynley, the eighth Earl of Asherton—all owe a great debt to Sayers, as do the stolid, loyal, working-class sidekicks who usually accompany the heroes. Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but it rarely outdoes the original, and certainly not in Sayers’s case; she was the mistress of her genre, and her writing is unparalleled, clever, sharp, strewn with literary allusions, and endlessly rereadable.
“There is something about virgin sand which arouses all the worst instincts of the detective-story writer,” she observes at the start of Have His Carcase. “One feels an irresistible impulse to go and make footprints all over it.”
But even when her books are no longer virgin sand, when we know exactly where the footprints are leading, the pleasure we derive from reading them is almost as acute as on first reading; more so, perhaps. As with all the great crime novels, you come for the plot but you stay for the writing and the characters, and Sayers provides both in rich abundance.
Rebecca Chance is a pen name of Lauren Henderson, who, under her own name, writes elsewhere in this volume on Agatha Christie’s Endless Night. As Rebecca Chance, Lauren has written the racy, crime-themed bonkbusters Divas, Bad Girls, Bad Sisters, and Killer Heels, to be followed by Bad Angels before the end of 2012. They are published by Simon & Schuster. Visit her online at www.rebeccachance.co.uk.
The Holy Terror (aka The Saint v. Scotland Yard)
by Leslie Charteris (1932)
DAVID DOWNING
* * *
Before becoming a full-time writer, the Singapore-born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin (1907–93) held a variety of jobs: tin miner, pearl diver, gold prospector, and carny. His first novel, X Esquire, was published in 1927, while Charteris was still at Kings College in Cambridge; his third, and the first Saint novel, Meet the Tiger, appeared in 1928. Charteris wrote short stories, novellas, and novels featuring the Saint for the next thirty-five years, with ghostwriters subsequently penning Saint stories under his editorial supervision. During the 1940s, Charteris also wrote for the Sherlock Holmes radio series starring Basil Rathbone. The TV series The Saint, starring Roger Moore, ran from 1962 to 1969; the series was revived, with Ian Ogilvy in the lead role, in the late 1970s.
* * *
Those readers encountering the early Saint books after watching the 1960s TV series must have had rather a shock. They were probably few in number, because Roger Moore’s portrayal of Simon Templar, and the story lines the studio gave him, effectively gutted the character of everything that made him special. The written Saint was lithe and volcanic, with an absurdist sense of humor, not beefy, impassive, and given to dry quips. The written Saint was first and foremost a rebel, yet the TV series served up in the rebellious 1960s was somehow drained of all subversive content.
The Holy Terror (1932) was the eighth of thirty-four Saint books that Charteris wrote between 1928 and 1963 (there were another sixteen “collaborative efforts” over the next twenty years, of uneven but inferior quality). Eleven were full-length novels, twelve contained two or three novellas, and the remaining eleven—including the last nine—were collections of short stories. The Holy Terror comprises three novellas: The Inland Revenue, The Million Pound Day, and The Melancholy Journey of Mr. Teal.
The Inland Revenue entwines two story lines. The Saint has received a tax bill after writing a successful adventure novel, and as the story begins he discovers that his reason for refusing payment—that he’s beneficial to the community, and should therefore qualify for tax-free status as a charitable institution—has been rejected. Someone will have to pay, he concedes, impaling the demand on his mantelpiece. The chosen donor is a blackmailer called The Scorpion, whom he’s recently encountered while shaking down a dope-dealing club owner.
The story contains several of Charteris’s imaginative set pieces: the unexpected arrival of a real scorpion in the post, an attempted live burial, an armchair that gases anyone who sits in it. The Scorpion, one Wilfred Garniman from suburban Harrow, is a classic Charteris villain—methodical, dispassionate, utterly cold. Even without the penchant for gas, he reads like a stark premonition of Himmler and Co., and, almost needless to say, turns out to be the Inland Revenue inspector responsible for the original tax demand. After throwing Garniman’s office desk at him, the Saint turns him over to Chief Inspector Teal, the rotund and usually hapless policeman who features in most of the U.K.-set books.
Teal has a harder time in the other two stories. There’s no doubting which side of the law the Saint inhabits in either of these, and the detective suffers accordingly. Nor is there any mistaking what makes the Saint tick: a personal sense of justice that only sporadically chimes with legality, and an endless yearning for excitement. If he also gets richer i
n the process, so much the nicer, but the money’s more a measure of success than an end in itself.
The Million Pound Day opens with another wonderful set piece. Having spent most of the night driving up from Cornwall, the Saint is dozing in a lay-by outside Basingstoke when a terrible scream pierces the dawn. A few seconds later a running man bursts out of the early-morning mist and collapses in our hero’s arms. He is swiftly followed by a gigantic negro in bare feet, wearing only a loincloth, “the gleaming surfaces of his tremendous chest” shifting “rhythmically to the mighty movements of his breathing.” A dreadful stereotype, of course, but by the standards of the time, not a vicious one. Charteris had seen a lot of the (white-ruled) world before taking up his pen, and always seemed less inclined to prejudice than most of his literary contemporaries. In The Inland Revenue he gives the Saint’s own novel a South American hero named Mario, and then sends him a letter from a spluttering bigot, accusing him of “Dago” ancestry.
The Million Pound Day has the usual extravagant plot—in postwar years they grew cleverer but less memorable—and the usual quota of splendid one-liners. The villain Kuzela meets his end in typical Charteris fashion. Early in the story, he tries to kill the Saint by sending him a glove containing a sliver of wood coated in nerve poison, and the Saint eventually returns the compliment, enticing the villain into opening a spring-loaded matchbox containing the sliver. There is no question of self-defense. This is an execution, one of many that the Saint happily carries out in his prewar career. In The Last Hero (aka The Saint Closes the Case) he shoots a scientist who refuses to suppress a weapon he has invented; in “The Death Penalty” he frames one drug dealer for the murder of another, and sends him to the gallows. In The Saint in New York, he stands in front of gangster Morrie Ualino, calmly tells him he’s there to kill him, and rips him open from stomach to breastbone—hardly the behavior of the usual Hollywood hero.
Books to Die For Page 8
