Striding Folly Page 2
* Clouds of Witness, p. 71.
He could perhaps have been the sad ghost of a lost war-time lover. Oxford, as everywhere else in the country, was filled with bereaved women, but it may have been more noticeable in university towns when a whole year’s intake could be wiped out in France in less than an hour. The jester simile of the poem is echoed throughout all the Wimsey books, becoming rather absurd in Murder Must Advertise when his lordship rushes round the countryside disguised in a harlequin costume, enticing a wanton woman to her destruction with a tune played on a whistle.
The pose, however, of never taking things seriously is just a front which he found difficult to reconcile with his conscience.
He had taken up criminology as a hobby or, as we would say nowadays, a therapy to help him over his ghastly war experiences. He found it exciting and he enjoyed it – up to a point. When it was clear that his investigations were likely to lead a man to the scaffold, he despised himself for becoming involved because, unlike the professional policeman, he did not rely on the job for his living. Like all the best detectives in fiction Wimsey was an amateur in the true sense of the word. From the first book to the last he never ceased to have bad dreams about the villains he brought to justice. He shied away from responsibility. As his mother who, in spite of her apparent scattiness understood him very well, said, giving orders for nearly four years to men to go and get blown to pieces ‘gives you an inhibition, or an exhibition, or something, of nerves’. Miss Sayers was one of the few detective writers to make her hero follow through the consequences of his work, but fortunately for his peace of mind, not all his villains reached the scaffold. Two of the nicer characters took ‘the gentleman’s way out’. Penberthy in Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club shoots himself as becomes an ex-officer, and Tallboy in Murder Must Advertise allows himself to be run over. In Five Red Herrings the murder was accidental. In Unnatural Death the villainess, quite the nastiest character Miss Sayers created, commits suicide, and the victim is a suicide in Clouds of Witness. Miss Sayers does not shrink from detailed descriptions of the state of her victims, but she is sparing of corpses; in only two books are there more than one.
Wimsey’s looks and behaviour were meant to give the impression of the typical ‘silly ass’ of the period. He had straw coloured hair which romantic young ladies saw as gold. A long face, grey eyes and a pointed chin. A prominent nose which nothing could disguise but which proclaimed his aristocratic breeding. He wore his collars high, affected a monocle which was really a powerful magnifying glass and a proceeding which no reputable eye specialist would recommend, particularly in sunny weather. He carried a sword stick marked out in inches, with a compass let in the top. He was short for a romantic character, standing only 5 ft 9 ins., but strong as steel, expert, of course, at ju-jitsu. On only three occasions are we told that he carried a revolver, and only once is it fired but even then only to disarm the villain. He smoked a pipe, cigarettes or cigars as the fancy takes him. His passions are Bach, John Donne and buttered crumpets. We have ample evidence that Miss Sayers herself had a passion for Bach and John Donne, and, as she liked the good things of life, no doubt she had a passion for buttered crumpets too. He drives, at fantastically high speeds, specially built Daimler sports cars, all called Mrs. Merdle. His favourite epithet for his male friends is ‘old horse’ and his rallying call, ‘Come on Steve’. He moves with ease in the highest circles throughout Europe, and English royal personages have been known to bestir themselves on his behalf. He must have moved too in the same orbit as Bertie Wooster, though he preferred the eccentric Egotist Club to the effete Drones. His man Bunter and Jeeves must have frequently met in the Upper Servants’ Club and at the various country houses where their employers were guests. But it is doubtful if either the masters or their men were ever really friends. Wimsey, who must have been older than Wooster, had seen the horrors of the First World War, and the gap between those who had and those who had not gone through that holocaust is visible even today among old men in their seventies and eighties. Bunter, although cleverer, would not have been entirely at home with Jeeves, who was no doubt bred to domestic service for as many generations as his master’s family had been born to rule him. Bunter, however, was almost certainly a first generation gentleman’s gentleman. He had been Wimsey’s batman in the war, but his beginnings, if his language is anything to go by, were very common indeed!
Why did Miss Sayers make her hero a lord? Well, she was a middle-class lady and, like many of her generation, romantic. Somerville College produced before, during and after the First World War a large number of outwardly formidable feminists – who nevertheless brought forth many dainty volumes of verse, almost all of them inspired by one theme, the quest of the Holy Grail, King Arthur and his knights, and, as the modern young have it, ‘all that jazz’. It was probably a mistake to have placed Wimsey among the English aristocracy ‘with sixteen generations of feudal privilege’ behind him. Very few English noble families go back that far in the first creation; rebellions and monarchial head choppings have seen to that. In Scotland, as in all other matters, it is different. A lordship there can be lost in the mists of time. This constant supply of new blood is one of the reasons why the English aristocracy is as firmly entrenched today as it ever was. Miss Sayers knew that ‘everyone loves a lord’ but assumed the wrong reasons. Everyone in England loves a lord, because almost any Englishman can, if he sets his mind to it, become a lord.
Like King Arthur, Wimsey had his knights around him. Bunter, doing all the things it was not proper for a lord to do: ticking off the servants, courting – for information purposes only – housemaids and other female denizens below stairs. Bunter the expert photographer; the follower of suspects – Wimsey was hopeless at disguises – and being nanny when sickness, accident or nightmare plagued his master. He could, when duty called, perform a vulgar comic song at a village concert. But above all, Bunter performed the impossible by staying on when his lordship married. If ever it had come to the stage where Wimsey had to chose between Bunter and Harriet Vane the balance would probably have tipped towards Harriet, so great was his passion and so rigid his ideas of gentlemanly conduct. But the marriage would have been doomed from the start, and we should have missed two of the stories in this book, The Haunted Policeman and Talboys, which show Wimsey as a married man and father, a state which he embraced rather late in life.
Other characters appear in more than one book. There is Salcombe Hardy – the always sozzled newsman with his ‘drowned violets’ eyes. A common Fleet Street phenomenon, he does little to further the plots except to start up useful trains of thought. The Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot was almost brainless but he knew all about stocks and shares. This was the age of the Hatry scandals and the papers were filled with reports of dubious financial undertakings. Freddy helped to bring to book the murderer in Whose Body?
Unlike so many fictional detectives, Wimsey had a proper respect for the police. A fool detective, Inspector Sugg, did appear in Whose Body? and Clouds of Witness, and was telephoned in Unnatural Death, but was not heard of thereafter. The painstaking, unsurprisable Inspector Charles Parker – later promoted Chief Inspector – was an admirable foil for the mercurial Wimsey. Parker, who paid a pound a week for rooms in Great Ormond Street, was educated at Barrow-in-Furness Grammar School, and his only hobby was reading Biblical commentaries. If Miss Sayers had only invented Parker and left Wimsey out of things, we should still have a valuable asset in the detective fiction market. For Parker is a fully rounded character. His hobby, which sounds on the surface so outlandish, is in keeping. Any senior policeman who wants to keep sane takes up some kind of hobby remote from his daily round, painting, gliding, violin making, or, like Parker, some esoteric form of scholarship. They usually, however, keep their hobbies very quiet even from their colleagues, so it would seem that Miss Sayers must have got to know the police, or at least one policeman, very well indeed. It was a great convenience to marry Parker to Wimsey’s sister, and thus have
a Chief Inspector always on tap.
Being a lord, naturally Wimsey would have access to the finest K.C. in the country, Sir Impey Biggs, handsome Member of Parliament and well known canary breeder. And the great pathologist Sir James Lubbock was always accessible to him. One thing all freelance investigators must have is unlimited wealth. The moderns, like Bond, draw on the state or an agency like U.N.C.L.E. Wimsey was wealthy in his own right. He was able, in an age of Depression and slumps to buy whatever he wanted. He could pay Bunter the fantastic wage of £200 a year, an unparalleled sum for an ‘all found’ situation in 1923. In 1938 he could afford to set up house in the West End with a staff of eight servants besides Bunter and a housekeeper. His money, we are told, did not come from the Denver estates, which were run at a loss, but from London property. Wimsey could not only buy anything, but anybody. He had only to crackle a banknote for hidden files and secrets to be instantly revealed to him and the glint of silver bought him the devotion of small children, char-women, porters and all the lower orders.
It has been said that contemporary fiction gives a better idea of the social life of a period than any learned treatise written in retrospect. Wimsey is now a period piece and if we had no other record of the years 1923–38 than the dozen or so books featuring him, what could we learn from them of that era? It is surprising, taking them altogether, how much social history is, accidentally as it were, packed into them. Oddly enough, much of what we think of today as new, has been about for half a century. This applies both to things and to attitudes. In 1923 Bunter was using a wide angled lens in his photographic work, and travelling on the underground with tickets bought from a machine. The young were spending hours in cafes discussing ‘free love, the prurience of prudery, D. H. Lawrence, and the immoral significance of long skirts’.* A character asks ‘have you heard Robert Snoates recite his own verse to the tom-tom and pennywhistle?’*
* Clouds of Witness, p. 103.
It is unlikely that Miss Sayers heard such a recital; she was satirising the Bloomsbury fringe of the twenties, which has been done, alas all too often. It is amazing what she got away with. Her descriptions of the Chelsea goings-on in Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club would have been banned if it had come out in any of D. H. Lawrence’s books. This book too brings poignantly back to those of us old enough to remember, the Depression and the terrible disillusion of the young officers who survived the war. We can experience again the cathartic atmosphere of Armistice Day, when the evening papers would nearly always have a horror story: ‘Man shouts during Silence’ or ‘Motorist refuses to turn off engine – assaulted by crowd.’ And the next day’s picture would always be of a ploughman halted on the headland, cap in hand, head bowed; children round country cenotaphs, royalty round Whitehall’s. Two minutes of strange, almost sickening national solidarity, lost forever in the betrayal of the dead by the Second World War.
And there was the ever threatening Red Menace. Almost every book mentions the possibility of a Russian takeover plot – as does almost every detective book published today. Something else which has scarcely moved an inch, oddly enough, is advertising.
Tell England. Tell the world. Eat more oats. Take care of your complexion. Shine your shoes with Shino. Ask your Grocer – Children love Laxamalt. Bung’s Beer is Better. Try Dogsbody’s Sausages. Give them Crunchlets. Stop that sneeze with Snuffo. Flush your kidneys with Fizzlets. Flush your drains with Sanfect.
This could be a selection of television trailers for the advertising spot instead of the concluding paragraph of Murder Must Advertise published in 1933. Wimsey who had been taken on the staff of Pym’s agency to find the murderer considered the job immoral. ‘We spend our whole time asking intimate questions of perfect strangers: “Mother, has your child learnt regular habits?” “Are you sure your toilet paper is germ free?” “Do you ever ask yourself about Body Odour?” Upon my soul I sometimes wonder why the long suffering public doesn’t rise up and slay us.’*
* Murder Must Advertise, p. 50.
They did not in 1933, and they do not now. Incidentally one of Pym’s agency’s most successful campaigns was headlined ‘If you kept a cow in your kitchen’. This banner is used in reality today to advertise powdered milk on television.
It is always a literary argument as to how much of herself an author puts into her work. Dorothy L. Sayers was, as I have said, an intellectual woman with a passion for poetry. She gave this passion to her hero who is never at a loss for an apt quotation. Some of the books have verses as chapter headings. To many critics, her habit of quotations, not only in English but in French, Latin and Greek as well, is sheer intellectual snobbery. It is possible she could not help it and, as Wimsey says, a quotation ‘saves original thinking’. She makes no concession to the lesser mind, Wimsey and Harriet Vane telegraph each other in Latin and make love in French (Miss Sayers does not deign to translate). The clue to the whole plot of Clouds of Witness is contained in a three page letter in French and one feels that the English version which follows is only supplied at the insistence of the publisher. But if such things annoy the reviewer who has not had the advantage of a university education, surely it is flattering to the reader. It assumes he is as clever as the author, and apart from the instance quoted above, the quotations in no way detract from the flow of the detective story. . . . If Miss Sayers had a weakness it was in depicting what she shamelessly calls ‘the lower orders’. All the workmen misplace their aitches or talk like Walter Gabriels, but then Walter Gabriel is still at it. Also, in the context of present day thought, some of her remarks about ‘Jewboys’ and ‘niggers’ are hard to take. No one today would dare to write dialogue for a policeman which she writes in the second story of this book, although no one can deny, more now, probably, than then, such sentiments might be expressed.
Wimsey himself is not supposed to be a snob. One of his angriest moments is when a man ‘drove me to the indescribable vulgarity of reminding him who I was’. It is always emphasised that for a rich man he is extremely thoughtful, not accepting an invitation to supper, for instance because he knew the couple couldn’t afford it, and although he would have accepted Bunter’s last drop of blood as of right, he would have remembered to say ‘thank you’ for it. For a woman with her gifts those years in an advertising agency would probably have been purgatory if she had not found some release in writing, and lavishing on her hero all those things she did not possess. But why detective fiction? Why not romance or historical novels? She probably knew history too well to turn it into fiction, and though romance does come into Wimsey it is never an overriding feature because at the time detective stories sold better than any other kind of book. So that is what she wrote. The bare bones of her detection, the laying of clue on clue leading to a logical climax has scarcely ever been better done. Her trouble was, so many of her critics considered, she would go off into unnecessary by-ways and not keep her villain secret until the end. About this she says, when discussing Five Red Herrings:
‘I quite appreciate the point you make about the decline of the “pure puzzle story” but I wanted to try my hand at just one of that kind. I am always afraid of getting into a rut. I have been annoyed (stupidly enough) by a lot of reviewers who observed that in my last book I had lost my grip, because the identity of the murderer was obvious from the start (as indeed it is also in Unnatural Death and The Documents in the Case). Personally, I feel that it is only when the identity of the murderer is obvious that the reader can really concentrate on the question (much the most interesting): how did he do it? But if people really want to play “spot the murderer” I don’t mind obliging them – for once! They have also grumbled that Lord Peter (a) falls in love (b) talks too discursively. Here is a book in which nobody falls in love (unless you count Campbell) and in which practically every sentence is necessary to the plot. . . . Much good may it do ’em!’*
* Unpublished letter to Victor Gollancz.
What with obtuse reviewers, earning her living at a job she did very well b
ut in her heart despised, and hating the kind of Press publicity her writing brought, it is no wonder she sometimes lost her temper, and wrote furiously to Victor Gollancz for advertising her book without the middle initial, ‘L’, in her name.
It is unlikely that she set out with the intention of teaching through detection, but one can learn a great deal from her books. They practically all deal with a specialised subject needing meticulous research. The first Wimsey book Whose Body? (1923) is a short straightforward whodunit in which the victim is clubbed and dissected. But from then on the stories become longer and more involved, and as Wimsey grows older his habit of quoting poetry becomes more pronounced. In Unnatural Death (1927) the method of murder is simple and almost untraceable. I suspect it is not so easy as it appears to be, although it is horribly reminiscent of the way the Nazis disposed of some of their victims.
This is one of the few stories in which there is more than one victim. Of Five Red Herrings (1931) Miss Sayers says, ‘All the places are real places, and all the trains real trains.’ She must have spent a great deal of time walking around Kirkcudbright, making endless enquiries of railway staff and checking time tables. This book is of interest to the growing number of people who have a passion for old railway systems, as well as to fans of Wimsey. This, I think, is what makes Dorothy L. Sayers’ work so popular. The books can be read by people who have special interests apart from a liking for detective fiction. Take for instance Murder Must Advertise (1933). Here we have the authentic setting which she knew so well, the advertising agency. Apart from the story, it lifts the lid off the promotion business in spite of the author’s note at the beginning of the book, ‘I don’t suppose there is a more harmless and law abiding set of people in the world than the advertising experts of Great Britain. The idea that any crime could possibly be perpetrated on Advertising premises is one that could only occur to the ill-regulated fancy of a detective novelist trained to fasten the guilt upon the Most Unlikely Person.’ One cannot help feeling that this was her intention, for throughout the book she says very little in praise of advertising. She is, incidentally, supposed to have invented the slogan, ‘It pays to advertise.’