Dotty and Peter

She was very particular about that L, which stood for Leigh, a family name. This is a writer about whom there is no middle way. You either love her, as I do, or you hate and despise her, as does Julian Symons, a fairly average, but very prolific, detective story writer who wrote a definitive work on the detective story, Bloody Murder, published in 1972 and reissued twice,

He can make out a good case. He says she is a snob, that her books are full of gross improbabilities (which is true), that her characters are caricatures, that she is racist, in particular anti-Semitic, which touches Symons particularly closely, since he is Jewish. Actually she is not anti-Semitic at all, though she lived in an age when nearly everyone was. The daughter of the dead man in Whose Body? marries Freddie Arbuthnot from the upper crust. They get married in a synagogue since what Freddie calls “her people” wish it so.

I should say that people in the novels do refer casually to jewboys and niggers, but Dotty cannot help that. It is the way things were then. I cannot remember any place when such comments were authorial.

Symons says that Dotty fell in love with Lord Peter. I do not think that is quite true. What is true is what she says, charmingly, here:

Lord Peter’s large income, the source of which, by the way, I have never investigated, was a different matter. I deliberately gave him that. After all, it cost me nothing, and at that time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single, unfurnished room, I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my rug got a hole in it, I ordered an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money for my bus fare, I presented him with a Daimler double-six.

Oh, and Symons said that her books are boring. Or was that someone else? Yes it was. It was Edmund Wilson, who was an aristocratic curmudgeon and an apologist for Stalin and for whose opinions I therefore care little.

And I should answer that she is not a snob. Or rather that she loves the upper class, the working class and the respectable middle class from which she came. She has no time for what used to be called counter-jumpers, nor for those who pretend to culture but have none. There is a short story where three Lord Peters turn up at a house in order to take control of a McGuffin from a French lord. In order to ascertain which is the true Lord Peter, the Frenchman organises a wine-tasting. Lord Peter is of course a great connoisseur of wine and soon sees off the other two. Now you either find this funny or colossally pretentious. Of course characters in the novels may make racist or snobbish remarks, but then they would.

One thing Symons does not mention is Dotty’s attitude to gay people. She does not seem to have been very sympathetic to male homosexuals. Vaughan, the one who hero-worships Philip Boyes, the lover Harriet is supposed to have killed in Strong Poison, is a poor whining thing. But lesbians are another matter. It is true that the murderer in Unnatural Death is a lesbian, but the two who left the money she kills for, Clara Whittaker and Agatha Dawson, are sympathetically portrayed, and the couple Wimsey knows among the bohemians with whom he mingles, Eiluned and Sylvia, are thoroughly likeable. In The Documents in the Case, an epistolary novel that does not include Peter Wimsey, Agatha Milsom is a bit of a comic turn. But we can award five out of ten, I think. As an aside I may remark that there are few homosexual relationships in classic detective novels. The only one that springs to mind is that between Bunny and A.J. Raffles in Raffles, and it remains unexpressed and unconsummated. And let us have no loose talk about Dr Watson here.

Sayers is very good on what would then have been called spinsters. Miss Climpson, who appears many times, is brave and intelligent in spite of her extraordinary speech style, which luxuriates in italics:

“Please overlook the untidiness. I always think breakfast things look so ugly when one has finished with them, almost sordid, to use a nasty word for a nasty subject. What a pity that some of these clever people can’t invent self-clearing and self-cleaning plates, is it not? Do sit down.”

And the woman Wimsey hires from what Miss Climpson calls her cattery of spinsters, Miss Murchison, is likewise bold and resourceful. There is one spinster, in The Documents in the Case, who is played for laughs, but it is not a bad average.

Dorothy is a snob all right, but she is an intellectual snob. And so am I. And so, I hope, are you. She went to Somerville in Oxford, worked hard and came out with a first-class degree in French and German. Indeed her French is so good that she composes a long suicide note for Denis Cathcart in Clouds of Witness, which is in French and which, initially, she quoted without any English translation until her publisher told her not to be so silly. But she is incorrigible. Somebody somewhere in her novels (I have not been able to verify this but it is true) quotes three consecutive lines of French poetry without translation.

She wrote her detective stories for money, first because she was poor, and second because she wished to finance her other literary projects, which she considered more worthy, but she admitted did not sell. In that she was like Arthur Conan Doyle, who thought the peak of his art was The White Company, a historical novel which I have read (it’s not bad) but am prepared to bet you have not. G.K. Chesterton was the same: Father Brown existed to provide cash for his political work, his distributism and G.K’s Weekly. Agatha Christie certainly made money from her books (a lot) but she had no need to. Her husband, Max Mallowan, an archaeologist, was well off.

Now let us look at some of the novels. In general they get better, but right from the start they exhibit her strengths, and her weaknesses too.

Whose Body? was published in 1923. The body of a middle-aged man is discovered in a bath. He is naked except for a pair of pince-nez on his nose. Who is he? How did he get there? And whodunit? Actually there is not much doubt about the third of these questions. He was done in by Sir Julian Freke, who is the standard mad scientist. He must have been, or what is Sir Julian doing in the story at all?

There are two other novels where the identity of the murderer is plain from quite early on, and the book becomes a Columbo-style exercise in seeing how Wimsey comes to prove what he already knows. I am talking about Unnatural Death where Miss Whittaker did it, and Strong Poison where Norman Urquhart ditto. Dotty always tried to make her novels different from one another. In Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors she dispenses with a murder altogether, which is probably going a bit too far, though Deacon, who is killed by the noise of the bells, is a convicted criminal. Most of the murders are committed for money, only one for love, Sir Julian Freke’s bitter, twisted love. Dotty had her head screwed on.

Where you have a great private detective you often have a boneheaded police force. This is true of Sherlock Holmes, where the police are universally stupid. Dotty fell in with this model in Whose Body?, with the heavy and obtuse Inspector Sugg who does his best to frustrate Wimsey at every turn as he unfailingly grasps the wrong end of the stick. But her next novel introduces Inspector Parker, honest and shrewd, who appears in most of the rest of the oeuvre. He can do this quite naturally, since although he is unalterably middle-class he has married Peter’s sister.

Lord Peter on his first appearance is all there. He does not really develop, just as Sherlock Holmes does not really develop. He is there playing Scarlatti on his concert grand. His silly-ass monocle is actually a powerful lens. (It must have made him more or less blind in one eye when he had it screwed in.) He is there with his first editions and his incunabula—first editions preceding 1501, if you didn’t know. His man Bunter is there too, with his photographic equipment and his strong sense of what is correct, stronger than Peter’s. Lord Peter discovers that the body is that of a Jewish man. Actually he discovers it because the man is circumcised, but Dotty’s publishers wouldn’t have that.

Dotty, who was working for an advertising agency, Benson’s, which was providing her with material for her best book in my opinion, Murder Must Advertise, now took six months leave of absence, ostensibly to complete her second novel, but actually because she was pregnant. She gave birth to a boy, John Anthony, who she left with a cousin, while she went back to Benson’s.

The child’s father was John Cournos, her second lover. The man who became her husband, Oswald Fleming, knew all about John Anthony. Indeed Dotty seems to have been at little pains to keep him secret from anybody but her respectable middle-class parents.

Dotty did her best for her child. The money she earned as a writer and an executive sent him to Malvern College and Oxford University. She did right by him but whether she loved him I don’t know. Probably the maternal instinct was rather weak.

She completed her second Wimsey novel, Clouds of Witness, in 1928. Her last, Busman’s Honeymoon, was published in 1937, which means all her Wimsey novels were written in fourteen years. She lived on, and published other things, for another twenty years.

Perhaps here I can interpolate another question, which may be trivial, but anyone who sees photographs of her in later life must find it cogent. Why did Dotty get so fat? Part of the answer was that she ate and drank a great deal and was not particularly keen on exercise. Fatness seems to go with detective-story writing. Chesterton was positively obese. There is the story that he once gave in to a friend’s urgings that he should walk more, but gave up after a couple of hundred yards and took a cab home. Agatha Christie and Marjorie Allingham were also hefty women, growing heftier with the years. Of course one should not make too much of this. Writing is a sedentary life and laziness and greed afflict many of us. I am fat myself.

To return to the novels. they can be grouped into those seven pre-Harriet Vane and those four (generally much longer) post. In the two excellent television series, Lord Peter is played by Ian Carmichael before Harriet and a rather cadaverous Edward Petherbridge after. Carmichael is a fine exponent of light comedy, but Petherbridge is Shakespearean. He would have played King Lear, if illness had not intervened. The novels post-Harriet Vane became deeper, more serious, and Sayers herself knew this:

Taking it all in all I think it is true that each successive book of mine worked gradually towards the sort of thing I had in view. [It should be] a novel of manners instead of a pure crossword puzzle.

I have already touched on Dotty’s near perfect ear for speech styles. She can do the upper class. Look at Peter and the Duke of Denver in Clouds of Witness. Look at the Dowager Duchess of Denver:

“Such an interesting case, and interesting people too, don’t you think, though what the jury makes of it, I don’t know, with faces like hams, most of them, except the artist, who wouldn’t have any features at all if it wasn’t for that dreadful tie, and his beard looking like Christ only not really Christ, but one of those Italian ones in a pink frock and a blue top thing.”

She can do the working class if you don’t object to a Dickensian way of getting at it with apostrophes standing in for dropped aitches:

“It ain’ ’ardly supper time yet,” said Mrs Rumm. “P’raps if you was to do your business with the lady and gentleman, Bill, they might feel inclined to take a bite with us later. It’s trotters,” she added hopefully.

Dickensian too, is the speech of Mervyn Bunter:

“I should perhaps,” resumed Mr Bunter, “apologise for alarming the ladies with so unpleasant an allusion [to death], but that her ladyship’s pen has so adorned the subject as to render the body of a murdered millionaire as agreeable to the contemplative mind as is that of a ripe burgundy to the discriminating palate.”

Hear, hear!

Why do I read and re-read Dotty’s Wimsey books? I read them because they are funny and high-spirited. I read them because they are rarely dull. Five Red Herrings is dull because it is formulaic, more of a puzzle than a book, so I tend not to pick it up. And I have to admit that Gaudy Night is preachy in parts when the love interest gets in the way. Murder Must Advertise, my personal favourite, is very funny about advertising, about which Dotty had first-hand knowledge. She created the toucan for Guinness (“just see what toucan do”) and also the slogan, “It pays to advertise”. Peter’s own slogans are pretty good: this one for soup, “A meal begun with Blagg’s Tomato / Brightens every husband’s heart-o”; this one for margarine, “It is a far, far butter thing”. His Whifflets campaign, which involves collecting vouchers and then cashing them in for travel, is masterly.

I read them because they tell me things about life as lived then, and because they are interesting. It is a world of telegrams and gentlemen’s clubs, a world of steam-trains and Bradshaw, a world where a journey by air is a dangerous undertaking (it still is, though for different reasons), a world where the countryside can be agreeably or disagreeably remote, a world of cigarette cases and calling cards, a world of spiritualist séances and ouija boards, a world that gives me an abiding sense of the pastness of the past.

Note: The biography of Dorothy L. Sayers I have used is Dorothy L. Sayers: A Literary Biography, by Ralph E. Hone (1979). I have also consulted Bloody Murder by Julian Symons. I have read and reread all the novels and short story collections, and watched all the television episodes, which are easy to find on the internet.