DOROTHY L SAYERS, WRITER AND THEOLOGIAN (17 DEC 1957) (Part 1/2)

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English writer and scholar, born at Oxford in 1893, the only child of an Anglican clergyman. She studied medieval literature at Oxford (Somerville College), being one of the first women to graduate (1915) from that university. Her first published writings were two volumes of verse, 1916 OP. 1 [NOTE: “Opus” is Latin for a work, especially an artistic production.] 1919 CATHOLIC TALES AND CHRISTIAN SONGS

Here (from memory) is the start of a poem from the former volume:

Christ walks the world again, his lute upon his back, his red robe worn to tatters, his riches gone to rack. The wind that wakes the morning blows his hair about his face, and his arms and legs are ragged with the thorny briar’s embrace, for the hunt is up behind him, and his sword is at his side. Christ the bonny outlaw walks the whole world wide, singing: “Lady, lady, will you come away with me, to lie among the bracken, and eat the barley bread? We shall see new suns arise, in golden far-off skies, for the son of God and woman has not where to lay his head.”

She worked for several years writing advertising copy, until she was able to support herself by the sale of her books and stories.

In the following (selective) list of her works, I have starred the ones that I think to be particularly good.

DETECTIVE FICTION:

Miss Sayers’ first commercially successful writings were detective fiction, and she eventually rose to the very top of that field. In Howard Haycraft’s THE ART OF THE MYSTERY STORY, a collection of every notable essay on the detective story written before 1948, her name is mentioned more frequently than that of anyone except Sherlock Holmes. She wrote mostly about Lord Peter Wimsey, a wealthy gentleman and scholar, lover of rare books and fine wines, who solved detective cases because he enjoyed it, and was good at it, and because it was a job worth doing.

In case anyone is wondering what a writer of detective fiction is doing on a list of memorable Christian writers, I reply that a detective story can present the thoughtful reader with many observations and questions about the nature of good and evil, about difficult moral choices, and about ways of dealing with others. Detective stories, like books of any other kind, vary in quality. When you open a novel by Sayers, and find that the first words are

Thou blind man’s mark, thou fool’s self-chosen snare, Fond fancy’s scum, and dregs of scattered thought, Band of all evils, cradle of causeless care, Thou web of will, whose end is never wrought, Desire, desire! I have too dearly bought, With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware.

you know that you are not reading a run-of-the-mill whodunit.

Her Wimsey books include:

1923 WHOSE BODY? In this book Sayers is in the process of creating the character of Lord Peter, and accordingly she tells us that he is witty, instead of simply recording his conversation and leaving us to think, “How witty he is!” (The reader will have noticed the same approach in A STUDY IN SCARLET, the first of the Sherlock Holmes stories.) The story begins as a respectable architect walks into his bathroom in the morning and finds there the body of a complete stranger, naked except for a pair of pince-nez.

1926 CLOUDS OF WITNESS. Lord Peter’s brother, the Duke of Denver, is tried for murder in the House of Lords.

* 1927 UNNATURAL DEATH (or THE DAWSON PEDIGREE) An elderly cancer patient dies suddenly, her death not explained by her illness. However, no means and no motive suggest themselves. Lord Peter is assisted by the elderly Miss Climpson, a devout Christian.

1928 THE UNPLEASANTNESS AT THE BELLONA CLUB. A retired general is found dead in his armchair at his club. The inheritance of a considerable fortune depends on the time of his death. Lord Peter is asked to investigate.

1928 LORD PETER VIEWS THE BODY. Here we have a collection of twelve short stories. By and large, I prefer Miss Sayers’ novels to her short stories, but some of the stories are good, and I know of none that I begrudge the time reading.

* 1930 STRONG POISON. The poet Philip Boyes is dead of arsenic. Circumstances point to the detective novelist Harriet Vane, his ex-lover, who has just rejected him, since it seems impossible that he could have ingested the arsenic anywhere but at a brief meeting with her. Lord Peter sees her at her trial, falls in love at first sight, is convinced of her innocence, finds the real murderer, and the book ends. Harriet (unlike the fair maiden whom the knight has just rescued from the jaws of the dragon) is not prepared to fall into his arms in a frenzy of love and gratitude, and their working out of their personal relationships forms the sub-plot for some subsequent books.

1931 FIVE RED HERRINGS (or SUSPICIOUS CHARACTERS) Lord Peter is vacationing in Scotland at Kirkcudbright, a haven for fishermen and painters. A painter, the most unpopular man in town, is found murdered, and six other painters are logical suspects. Five are red herrings (i.e. distractions or misleading possibilities), and the sixth is guilty. Kirkcudbright is a real locality (a favorite vacation spot of the author), and the story conforms to local geography.

* 1932 HAVE HIS CARCASE. Harriet Vane, on holiday, is walking the seacoast, takes a nap on the beach, and wakes to find herself near a corpse with its throat cut and the blood still fresh, but no murderer in sight. The plot is full of timetables and a cryptogram, as Peter and Harriet work together to find the murderer, and in the process explore their own feelings for one another.

1933 HANGMAN’S HOLIDAY. Here we have another collection of short stories: four with Lord Peter Wimsey; six with another detective, Montague Egg, a traveling salesman for a company selling wines and spirits; and two other stories.

1933 MURDER MUST ADVERTISE. A copy-writer dies under curious circumstances, and Lord Peter takes his job under an assumed name in order to investigate. He is thrust into the unreal world of the drug culture, and the differently but equally unreal world of advertising, but manages to keep his head in both.

* 1934 THE NINE TAILORS. Lord Peter’s auto breaks down in the fen country of East Anglia, and he is offered the hospitality of the local parsonage. He ends up helping to ring in the New Year with a full peal on the 8 tower bells of the parish church, Fenchurch St Paul’s. Each bell was rung about 15000 times — nine hours of continuous ringing! (Change ringing, an old English tradition, involves ringing bells in a mathematical pattern. See “change ringing” in an encyclopedia.) The year is that of the influenza epidemic, and the parish is hit hard. At the death of anyone in the parish, the lowest (tenor) bell tolls his passing. (The words “toll,” “tail”, and “tell” come from the same root and have related meanings, referring either to a narrative or to the numbering of something. Compare the similarly ambiguous meanings of “count”, “account”, “recount”, “number”, “score”, etc.) First, nine strokes for a man or six for a woman (hence the expression “Nine tailors make a man,” which is often misunderstood to mean something like “the apparel oft proclaims the man”), then N rapid strokes for the age of the dead person, and then single strokes at half-minute intervals for half an hour. The corpse of a stranger is found hastily buried in the churchyard, and Lord Peter is asked to identify the victim, and the murderer. The background of the novel includes bellringing and parish life in the fen country of East Anglia, where the author herself spent her childhood as the daughter of a clergyman. This is one of my favorites.

** 1935 GAUDY NIGHT. The background for this novel is Oxford. Harriet Vane returns to her old college for a reunion, and finds that someone in the college is writing anonymous hate mail to various residents, and committing acts of vandalism on a minor but steadily escalating level. Harriet is asked to help identify the perpetrator. The novel reflects Sayers’ love of Oxford, and her commitment to scholarship and the life of the intellect. Lord Peter joins her part way through, and their presence in a place where intellectual honesty is honored and valued helps Harriet to an honest and unflinching look at herself and at Peter.

** 1937 BUSMAN’S HONEYMOON. In this novel, Peter and Harriet are married, go off to spend their honeymoon in a quiet cottage, and find there the corpse of the previous occupant. The author celebrates the glory of love between husband and wife, and explores the notion of commitment to another person and what it implies. This is the last of the Peter Wimsey novels, although a few short stories follow.

1939 IN THE TEETH OF THE EVIDENCE. This is a collection of short stories. My favorite is “Dilemma”, which does not involve Wimsey or Egg, and is not exactly a detective story.

That concludes the Peter Wimsey books and stories.

* 1930 THE DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE (with Robert Eustace). This murder mystery is presented in the form of letters and other documents written by members of a troubled family and a few persons close to them. The novel explores personal relationships, and the question of whether the phenonomenon of life is reducible to chemical terms.

[ To Be Continued ]

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