Where the solution to a plot depended on accurate timing, she would check this herself over and over again. In the case of
Murder Must Advertise
this involved her and a friend rushing up and down the iron back staircase of Benson’s after office hours. Miss Sayers was a somewhat large lady (she has been likened to a ‘refined elephant’ by one writer, and to ‘an eighteenth century admiral, with a kind of Rowlandson jollity about her’, by another) so this task cannot have been easy.
Wimsey is always ‘trying to be funny’ – and quite often he is. There is a vein of humour running through most of the books and in some cases, particularly in
Gaudy Night
(1935) there are scenes which are probably funnier now than they seemed when the books were first published.
Gaudy Night
is set in a women’s college at Oxford – again a venue Dorothy L. Sayers knew very well – and although it is a true mystery story, there is no murder, although one is attempted. The scene at a literary party is timeless; there is much backbiting chat about a recently published prize-winning novel called ‘Mock Turtle’ of which one of the guests gives a summary.
It’s about this swimming instructor at a watering place, who contracts such an unfortunate anti-nudity complex through watching so many bathing beauties that it completely inhibits his natural emotions. So he gets on a whaler and falls in love at first sight with an Eskimo because she’s such a beautiful bundle of garments. So he marries her and brings her back to live in a suburb, where she falls in love with a vegetarian nudist. So then the husband goes slightly mad and contracts a complex about giant turtles, and spends all his time staring into the turtle tank at the Aquarium. I think significant is the word that describes the book. Yes, significant.
*
*
Gaudy Night
.
Miss Sayers no doubt thought she was concocting utter nonsense, but that is the kind of book which is often published nowadays, and which wins literary prizes! The whole party scene has little to do with the plot – but it puts the characters in their right setting.
Gaudy Night
also contains some highly charged love scenes between Wimsey and Harriet Vane. They first met in
Strong Poison
(1930) when Harriet was tried and convicted for the murder of her lover. In the short time left between the verdict and the time of execution Wimsey has to discover the real murderer and prove Harriet’s innocence. He falls hopelessly in love with her, but through several books Harriet keeps him at bay because she believes she is under no obligation to him and that he is sorry for her. He wins her at last in
Gaudy Night
. Like all Miss Sayers’ heroines she has a weird taste in dress, being married in gold
lamé
, which seems a bit much for a bride past her first youth. Throughout the chronicle it is obvious that Wimsey is adept in the arts of love, but his affairs are only mentioned in passing. There was the youthful folly of Barbara, vaguely referred to by Wimsey, and related more fully by his uncle. There were hints about a Viennese opera singer, and the assumption is that a close relationship had once existed, outside the books, with the artist Marjorie Phelps, who appears in
Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
and
Strong Poison
. It was not until he was 45 that Wimsey gained his ‘America, his new found land’ in Harriet.
The
Nine Tailors
(1934) is generally regarded as the best of all Wimsey stories. The setting is the wild Fens of snow and flood, and the plot is woven round the art of campanology (a word which this book brought into general use) which is the complex science of bell ringing and is peculiarly English. In her forward to the book Miss Sayers asks ‘the indulgence of all change ringers for any errors I may have made in dealing with their ancient craft’. Although a pedantic clergyman claims to have found Miss Sayers in error 36 times, whatever these may be they do not detract from the story and one does at least learn a great deal about an art which might have passed one by. I know of at least two young people who were inspired to take up bell ringing solely through reading
Nine Tailors
.
The last full length Wimsey book appeared in 1938, but he continued for many years in short stories. The art of short story writing is quite different from that of writing long novels, and short detective stories particularly difficult. The crime, the unravelling and denoument has to be crammed into about 10,000 words at the most, whereas with a novel it is possible to roam through any number. Considering the discursiveness of some of the Wimsey books, it might have been thought impossible to confine him in such a narrow compass, but without losing any of his character or mannerisms Miss Sayers manages to do this admirably. We lose Bunter almost entirely (he has to be content with a message or a telephone call); and Chief Inspector Parker makes few appearances. Some of the short stories are as macabre and horrific as the modern trend could wish. Ian Fleming’s
Goldfinger
merely covered people with gold paint, but in
The Abominable History of the Man With Copper Fingers
the villain electro plated his victims and made one of them into an art deco chaiselongue. This story contains some useful hints on copper plating which shows that even for a short story Miss Sayers took a great deal of trouble with her research. For sheer nastiness
The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach
is unbeatable.
Many of her short stories do not concern either Wimsey or Montague Egg and are not always detective stories. Some are exercises in Gothic horror, such as
Scrawns
which is Miss Sayers taking the micky out of the Frankenstein cult.
The Cyprian Cat
is very sinister indeed.
The first story in this book
Striding Folly
is more a horror story than detection. The other two are positively the last glimpses of Wimsey. First as a new father in
The Haunted Policeman
; and then as a mature married man with three bouncing sons keeping his hand in with an investigation into stolen fruit. Both stories contain some very sensible remarks on child care!
Looking back over the Wimsey saga is like reviewing the life of an old friend. His character deepened as time went on. He had his failings, but the reason why he has kept his place in our affections is that he was not only Miss Sayers’ ideal, but our ideal too of ‘the perfect English gentleman’ (an ideal that goes back to Chaucer and his ‘parfait gentil knight’). He suffered a slight eclipse in the rough, tough fifties and early sixties when good manners, correct speech and any kind of ‘graciousness’ in the true sense of the word, were looked upon, not only as ‘old hat’ but positively bad. Now, I detect, in spite of what we read in the press and see on the television, a return to the more Wimsey-like virtues. It was held a few years ago that all readers wanted to know about was people like themselves, so-called ‘real’ people, as if the inhabitants of
Coronation Street
and Alf Garnett were more ‘real’ than a member of the House of Lords. They all exist and are therefore all ‘real’.
As another lady novelist, Ouida, wrote in the 1890’s: ‘Realism! The dome of St. Peter’s is as real as the gasometer of East London, the passion flower is as real as the potato. I do not object to realism in fiction; what I object to is the limitation of realism in fiction to what is commonplace, tedious and bald.’ To which Miss Sayers would no doubt have added ‘Hear! Hear!’
Wimsey has survived, and will continue to survive, because he is well written, beautifully constructed, and above all, amusing. He was, to begin with, not only a modern King Arthur, but in a way Miss Sayers’ dream of herself. He had all her tastes, did all the things she longed to do and had all the money she did not possess. When, through him, she did get the money, she was glad to have done with him.
People who knew Miss Sayers speak of her jollity (where are the
jolly
ladies of today?) and kindness, of her great good humour and ability to laugh at herself. Both men and women found her excellent company. She never mastered the art of clothing well her tall figure. In the early days when money was short she made her own black dresses (‘it doesn’t show the dirt’) cut on a medieval pattern. In later years her clothes were expensive but, as someone described them, ‘obsolete’. Wimsey is a great food enthusiast and so was his creator. When she could afford good food she was quite unable to resist it, and in her later years put on rather too much weight. But these are only superficial things; we know little of the real Dorothy L. Sayers, for she guarded her private life like a tigress, always refusing interviews or requests for memoirs. Again she would no doubt have agreed with Ouida who thought memoirs ‘a base betrayal of others, and show great vanity in the writers. To possess any interest they must be treacheries – in general to the dead who cannot defend themselves.’ No one could accuse Dorothy L. Sayers of this kind of treachery. In 1926 she married Captain Atherton Fleming – a shattered war hero – and cared for him with love and infinite patience until his death in 1950. Wimsey’s war-tormented dreams were no doubt his, but we cannot know for sure. Her faith was strong, and much of her later writings and broadcasting work was on theological themes. But she was not ritualistic, she had no room for form and ceremony for its own sake. ‘Perhaps if the churches had had the courage to lay their emphasis where Christ laid it, we might not have come to this frame of mind in which it is assumed that the value of all work, and the value of all people, is to be assessed in terms of economics,’ she wrote in an essay called
Christian Morality
.* The young ladies of today, when they’ve run out of ammunition in their war against men should recharge their magazines from another of her essays
The-Human-Not-Quite-Human
.
*
Unpopular Opinions
. Originally.
She was a member of the Detection Club and edited a number of volumes of detective stories. She was always anxious to stress the difference between being a writer of detection, and a crime and thriller writer. The one is the solving of a puzzle, in which no violence need occur – indeed there is no violence in the two Wimsey stories in this book; the other cannot exist without murder, or at any rate some kind of violent crime. As Miss Sayers says, detective fiction is the art of framing lies . . . ‘but mark! of framing lies in the
right way
. There is the crux. Any fool can tell a lie, and any fool can believe it; but the right method is to tell the
truth
in such a way that the
intelligent
reader is seduced into telling a lie for himself. That the writer himself should tell a flat lie is contrary to all the canons of detective art.’ It is this phrase ‘the
intelligent
reader’ that might cut Miss Sayers off from some people. One criticism of her work was that it was only written for people with high-grade brains. That her readership is so wide would seem to refute this criticism. It is more likely that Miss Sayers assumed that all her readers were intelligent, which is not quite the same thing as writing only for the very bright.
She began her writing career as a poet, and even the most frivolous of her tales contains poetic imagery.
Below in the cool cellar, lie row upon row of dusty bottles, each an enchanted glass coffin in which the Sleeping Beauty of the wine grows ever more ravishing in sleep
is one.
He walked in and out of her mind as if it was his own flat
is another.
The Man Born to be King
which caused such a furore when it was first broadcast in 1941–42 because it set Christ in an ‘ordinary’ world using the language of today, stirred not a ripple when it was re-broadcast two or three years ago. Some classical scholars do not think a great deal of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Dante translations, probably because she has made Dante so easy to read and understand. These two works would appear to contradict the theory that she wrote only for other intellectuals. She considered that all great literature should be available to everyone not just to the classical few.