I’ve always loved stylish mysteries, the ones with piles of atmosphere. British mysteries from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, set in the 1920s and 30s, or just about anything in a foreign setting – armchair travel with a thrill.
Agatha Christie’s more exotic stories have been a long-standing favourite. The 1978 film version of Death on the Nile cemented my determination to visit Egypt in person one day. I thought it would be fantastic to wind up on just such a cruise myself, sashaying along the decks in beautiful clothes while Hercules Poirot brilliantly exercised his little grey cells.
Plus I just love the era, especially when cocktails and glamour mixed with mansions and tea trays, and murder stained dark alleys from New York City to Shanghai to small British towns.
When I discovered the novels of Dorothy Sayers, with her suave, wealthy amateur detective gallivanting around in his classic Daimler car, I was in like a blood-soaked shirt.
We’re introduced to Lord Peter and his privileged lifestyle in Whose Body?, set in 1921 just a handful of years after World War I. He seems an amiable, piano-playing aristocrat who dabbles in solving crimes.
He’s a member of the Savile Club, a prestigious men’s club in London. He lives at 110a Piccadilly, a block of “new, perfect and expensive flats” in the city. He has a “well-trained” butler named Bunter, and as the story begins, Wimsey is on his way to a sale to buy some several expensive first-edition folios (manuscripts), dressed in a “frock-coat” and top hat, from which he feels he needs to change into a less fancy grey suit to go and investigate the body in the bath.
Sayers describes him as having grey eyes and tow-coloured hair (very pale blond), a long receding forehead and long narrow chin, not particularly handsome. He wears a monocle, carries a Malacca walking-stick with a heavy silver knob on the top, affects an air of frivolity that hides an extraordinarily keen mind, and has enough charm to lull all kinds of interviewees and suspects. Later in the series, in the book Gaudy Night, after Peter has fallen in love with a woman he saved from hanging, Harriet Vane, the Dean of Harriet’s old college at Oxford asks about Lord Peter’s current investigation:
“ ‘Will he lay traps all evening for us to walk into?’
‘If he does, he will display all the mechanism in the most obliging manner.’
‘After one is inside. That’s very comforting.’
‘That,’ said Miss de Vine (one of the resident scholars), brushing aside these surface commentaries, ‘is a man able to subdue himself to his own ends. I should be sorry for anyone who came up against his principles – whatever they are, and if he has any.’ “
Wimsey isn’t a ‘peer of the Realm’, as he’s the second son in his family. The title of Duke belongs to his older brother Gerald, a stolid and not-too-bright noble. Gerald’s snobbish wife isn’t fond of Peter, but Wimsey does get along with his charming mother and left-leaning younger sister Mary.
Peter was educated at Eton College, of course, as was any young aristocrat, and then at Oxford as part of Balliol College. He was a superb cricketer, and very bright – so much so that when he later serves in World War I, he’s recruited for intelligence work.
When he’s not out solving crimes, Lord Peter spends mornings in a peacock-patterned bathrobe, reads the Daily Mail “before a blazing fire of wood and coal”, and eats excellent food with “incomparable” coffee made for him by Bunter. His friend in Scotland Yard, Charles Parker, later to become his brother-in-law, enjoys visiting him for the creature comforts he himself can’t swing on a detective’s salary.
Dorothy Sayers once said that, in inventing the character of a wealthy man who begins solving crimes as a hobby, she gave him the money to buy things she couldn’t at the time, when she was struggling financially.
“When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.”
Over the course of the books, Sayers revealed more and more about her detective, from his many love affairs (always politely ended with an expensive gift), to his post-traumatic stress from serving as an officer in the trenches in the Great War, where he met Bunter and formed a lasting friendship. After the war ended, while Wimsey struggled to cope with his “shell-shock”, as it was referred to at the time and little understood, Bunter found his former Major and pressed himself into service to care for him. After Wimsey recovered and took up his hobby, Bunter provided superb photography skills and an entrée into the world of below-the-stairs staff for additional investigation as needed.
Sayers’ novels aren’t renowned for challenging puzzles, but she was innovative at the time for writing well-rounded characters with complex motivations. She became known as one of the four “Queens of Crime” of the Golden Age, along with Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh.
Dorothy was the only child of the chaplain of Christ Church college at Oxford. When she was four years old her father accepted the post of rector of a small country town, which offered a better stipend and a large rectory with considerably more living space, but was more isolating. Without any siblings or friends around, and educated at home, she grew up reading a lot of her father’s extensive library. She won a scholarship at nineteen that allowed her to study modern languages at Somerville, an all-women’s college at Oxford.
She was a distinguished student with a disposition to writing, co-founding the cheekily-named Mutual Admiration Society, where female students could read and critique each other’s work. She was awarded first-class honours upon graduation, but couldn’t receive a formal degree because at the time Oxford didn’t confer them on women. Five years later, when the university changed its rules, she was among the first women to get one.
During her time at Oxford, she was attracted to fellow student Roy Ridley, whose appearance and manner she later used for her famous character, Lord Peter.
After graduating Sayers, published two volumes of poetry, and taught modern languages at Hull High School for Girls, which she didn’t like particularly. In 1917 she began working back in Oxford with publisher and bookseller Basil Blackwell, of the still-fabulous Blackwell’s Bookstore. A friend of the time period described her as having an enormous amount of knowledge about a wide variety of subjects, which eventually made its way into her novels.
Following an affair in France and another in London, during a time when that sort of thing was frowned upon (which formed the basis for the murder charge levied against her character Harriet Vane, along with the condemnation of the era), she took a job as a copywriter at Britain’s largest advertising agency, and used those experiences to write one of her least-favourite novels, but one of my personal favourites, Murder Must Advertise.
When she wasn’t at work, Dorothy tried her hand at writing fiction – detective novels, specifically, which were popular. She studied the best books in the genre at the time, and decided she could make some money writing novels herself. According to another crime novelist, J. I. M. Stewart, she “mastered the art of giving a pleasant literary flavour to her stories”.
Whose Body?, was published in 1923 to mixed reviews. Critiques included that the aristocratic Wimsey was unconvincing as a detective, that the story was too sensationalist, that it was a clever enough mystery but crudely drawn. Not everyone felt that way, though, and she became a successful mystery writer whose legacy has lasted to our modern era.
In 1930 she published Strong Poison, her second novel that year, introducing the character Harriet Vane, whom Wimsey fell deeply in love with while proving innocent of a murder charge. Harriet was a strong, independent mystery writer, also educated at Oxford, and has been described as Sayers’s alter ego. In the book, Wimsey proposed to Harriet, who refused him because she felt that gratitude wasn’t a good way to start a relationship.
Sayers originally planned for Wimsey to marry Harriet at the end of the book and retire from his detecting hobby, thereby ending the series. However, needing the money, she wrote another five Wimsey novels.
In them, as the aristocrat continues to pursue the “blue-stocking” (an old-fashioned term for a educated, intellectual woman, as such women were viewed at the time), she begins to see more of the man beneath the sophisticated veneer, and in Gaudy Night, when she calls on Lord Peter to help her solve increasingly more dangerous events at her beloved alma mater, she realizes that she’s fallen in love with him as well.
My other top favourite Wimsey story is Busman’s Honeymoon, in which Harriet and Peter get married and go down to a farmhouse called Talboy’s that he bought her as a gift. In typical fashion, they find a dead body, and the mystery of its killer to solve. The book is all about the minutiae and charm of old English country life (in between crime-solving) and two strong personalities learning to live with and love each other through a trying time.
Busman’s Honeymoon was the last full Peter Wimsey novel, sadly. Harriet and Peter made brief appearances afterwards in short stories, mentioning their ongoing passion and their three sons. Her novels read a bit politically incorrect now, as she of course included prevailing attitudes about minorities, but many people feel she treated those characters with more sympathy than most other writers of the day.
In her time, she was a founder member of the Detection Club, a group of British mystery writers, that still exists today, and once included Agatha Christie and G. K. Chesterton. The club holds regular dinner meetings in London, with an initiation and a tongue-in-cheek oath written by Sayers herself:
“Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition , Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God?” (Originally it also included other common cliches of the time: “to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics, and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science”.)
Dorothy continued to write, including collaborative plays, and began on what’s considered a definitive translation of poet Dante’s Divine Comedy, finishing the first two of his books but passing away during her work on the third.
Her Wimsey novels have been made into movies, stage productions, and a well-produced series that aired on PBS Mystery in America. In 1973 a small planet was named after her, and in 2000 English Heritage installed a blue historical plaque at 24 Great James Street, Bloomsbury, where she lived between 1921 and 1929. Several biographies have been written about her.
For me, the mysteries generally took a back seat to the atmosphere and the window into an intriguing bygone era, even as they were often lightly satirical: of the dwindling era of aristocrats with magnificent estates and their lifestyle, which even they recognized was fading; of the hard-partying post-war generation; of all the daily details of a time not intimately captured on social media.
Lord Peter Wimsey was as much an escape for Dorothy as he is to generations of readers. I came across one short biography of her speculating that she fell in love with her own protagonist, who became increasingly charismatic and sympathetic throughout the series. Perhaps he was her ideal man, full of intelligence and intellectual conversation whom she would have loved growing old with.
Read the books for their wonderful ambience, and a portrait of a time of great change sandwiched between two massive wars.