Her next novel, Unnatural Death, displayed more interest in character, although the lesbianism of the heiress Mary Whittaker is implied rather than explicit. Thrifty as good novelists are, Sayers used a snippet of information from Bill White about an air-lock in a motorcycle feed pipe to provide a clue to the mystery. In a far from cosy passage, she describes how the arms of a corpse had been nibbled by rats. Years later, she explained to George Orwell (who had spoken of Wimsey’s ‘morbid interest’ in corpses) that in a detective novel, ‘where the writer has exerted himself to be extra gruesome, look out for the clue’. The frisson induced by the image of hungry rats was a ruse to distract readers from the possibility that the arm had been pricked by a hypodermic.
Wimsey is assisted by Miss Climpson and her undercover employment agency for single women. Climpson’s irrepressible verve was Sayers’ riposte to the likes of Charlotte Haldane, wife of the Marxist geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, who argued in Motherhood and its Enemies that a woman’s personal fulfilment depends on her inborn maternal instinct. Haldane is remembered as a feminist, but Sayers’ fiction was more sympathetic to single women, and her attitude towards them more progressive. Unnatural Death focused, as Sayers’ stories often did, more on the means by which death was caused than on whodunit; the culprit is obvious. The murder method involved injecting an air bubble into a vein. An ingenious idea, even if its feasibility was open to question.
She earned money by writing short stories, drawing on her own know-how for material. ‘The Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will’ included a crossword puzzle clue, a nod to the fashionable craze which was also one of her own favourite pastimes. Motorcycling was an unlikely passion. She bought a ‘Ner-a-Car’ motorcycle, complete with sidecar, and rode it ‘in light skirmishing trim … with two packed saddle-bags and a coat tied on with string.’ ‘The Fantastic Horror of the Cat in the Bag’ features a race with a motorbike rejoicing in the improbable but factually accurate name of the Scott Flying-Squirrel.
The weirder realms of advertising presented her with the germ of ‘The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers’, which is perhaps the best Wimsey short story. Sayers’ inspiration came from an American firm of morticians whose advertisements demanded: ‘Why lay your loved ones in the cold earth? Let us electroplate them for you in gold and silver.’
In April 1926, Sayers summoned up the nerve to drop a bombshell on her parents. She wrote a letter telling them, after a lengthy preamble including thanks for the present of an Easter egg, that she was ‘getting married on Tuesday (weather permitting) to a man named Fleming, who is at the moment Motoring Correspondent to the News of the World’. Hoping to soften the shock, she added, ‘I think you will rather like him.’ To her relief, they did.
The new man in her life, Oswald Arthur Fleming, was a divorced journalist twelve years her senior. She had only known him for a few months. A Scot hailing from the Orkneys, he liked to be known as ‘Mac’, though he wrote under the name Atherton Fleming. John Anthony, who knew Sayers as ‘Cousin Dorothy’, remained in Ivy Shrimpton’s care after the death of Ivy’s mother, and did not join the couple in their London flat.
Mac Fleming was a hard-living, hard-drinking newspaperman, keen on motor racing, and chronically hard up. He had two children by his first wife, but provided them with no financial support. He had written a book called How to See the Battlefields, based on his time as a war correspondent for the Daily Chronicle. For a time, he worked in advertising, which may explain how he and Sayers met.
She took to married life with gusto. She accompanied him to race meetings at Brooklands, and bought a motorcycle to ride herself, clad in goggles, gauntlets, and leather helmet. Motor racing was the latest craze, and leading drivers like Malcolm Campbell, Henry Segrave and J. G. Parry-Thomas – all of whom held the world land speed record in quick succession – were household names.
Racing offered thrills in abundance, but danger was ever present. The long, flat beach at Pendine Sands in Carmarthenshire was vaunted as ‘the finest natural speedway imaginable’, but while trying to regain the record, Parry-Thomas crashed his car. He was severely burned, and his head was ripped away from his neck by the drive chain. Mac, a friend of the dead man, was given the wretched task of reporting the horrific crash.
A less personally distressing project saw the News of the World pay for both Mac and Sayers to travel to France. Their task was to solve the murder of the English-born nurse May Daniels. Nurse Daniels had disappeared from a quayside waiting room when about to return to England after crossing the Channel with a friend for a day trip. Months later, her decomposed body, bearing signs of strangulation, was found by the roadside near Boulogne, and her gold wristwatch was missing. Clues (or red herrings) found near the body included a discarded hypodermic syringe, and an umbrella, while Nurse Daniels’ friend said she had spoken about a meeting with ‘Egyptian princes’.
Rumours spread that the dead woman was pregnant by a prominent member of the British establishment, and that the real purpose of her trip was to have an abortion performed by a mysterious Egyptian called Suliman. Questions were asked in Parliament about a baffling lack of cooperation between the British and French authorities, and the Press scented a cover-up. Mac and Sayers faced competition from other journalists, including former Chief Inspector Gough, hired as a ‘special investigator’ by the Daily Mail, and Netley Lucas, a conman turned crime correspondent for the Sunday News. None matched the brilliance of Lord Peter Wimsey, although Netley Lucas’ lifestyle was equally colourful: he later applied his talents to twin careers as a literary agent and a publisher before being sentenced to eighteen months with hard labour for fraud and plagiarism.
The Daniels puzzle remained unsolved. Despite this setback to her embryonic career as an amateur detective, Sayers became entranced by real-life mysteries, and introduced aspects of the Nurse Daniels case into Unnatural Death. After the excitement of the trip to France, Sayers fantasized about moving abroad, but this would have meant an even greater separation from John Anthony, and was out of the question. She hated the way that the Defence of the Realm Act – unaffectionately known as ‘Dora’ – curtailed individual liberties. In her eyes, the curbs on alcohol consumption, and restricted licensing hours, coupled with high levels of income tax, meant England was ‘no country for free men’.
She threw herself into work at Benson’s with renewed vigour. Colman’s of Norwich was a key client, and Sayers wrote The Recipe Book of the Mustard Club to promote Colman’s Mustard. Typically, she littered the text with quotations, and devised a frivolously elaborate history of the club, claiming it was founded by Aesculapius, god of medicine, and that Nebuchadnezzar was an early member. At first, the club was purely imaginary, featuring characters such as Lord Bacon of Cookham, and the club secretary Miss Di Gester, but the campaign was such a huge success that a real club was created. At its height, it boasted half a million members.
Sayers’ creative flair was ideally suited to marketing. She is credited with coining the phrase ‘it pays to advertise’, and collaborated on the most memorable advertisement of the time, part of a long campaign on behalf of Guinness stout. An artist called John Gilroy joined Benson’s in 1925, and he and Sayers became friends as well as colleagues. After a visit to the circus, Gilroy dreamed up the idea of using birds and animals to advertise Guinness. He sketched a pelican with a glass of Guinness on his beak, and Sayers suggested replacing that bird with a toucan. She wrote the lines:
If he can say as you can
Guinness is good for you,
How good to be a Toucan:
Just think what Toucan do.
To this day, there is a healthy market for Guinness toucan collectibles. Gilroy, a young man from Whitley Bay who had started out as a cartoonist, combined his advertising work with portrait painting, and Sayers was one of the first people to sit for him, sporting her silver wig. Gilroy was alive to her earthy physicality, and unexpected sex appeal, and rhapsodized about her: ‘terrific size
– lovely fat fingers – lovely snub nose – lovely curly lips – a baby’s face in a way’.
Sayers was ready to spread her creative wings. She began to translate the Chanson de Roland into rhymed couplets, as well as a medieval poem, Tristan in Brittany. In addition, she dipped in and out of a projected book about Wilkie Collins. She never finished it, but her study of Collins’ methods influenced her own literary style. Her main focus remained on writing detective fiction. Spurred by the desire to support herself and her family, she became intensely productive. In 1928 alone she published three books, including a Wimsey novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. The novel was reviewed by Dashiell Hammett, shortly before the former Pinkerton’s gumshoe established himself as a writer of hard-boiled private eye novels. Hammett’s writing, tastes, politics, and life experiences were a world away from Sayers’, but he felt her novel only missed being ‘a pretty good detective story’ because of a lack of pace: ‘Its developments come just a little too late to knock the reader off his chair.’
She had written enough short stories to publish a collection, Lord Peter Views the Body, under the new imprint of Victor Gollancz. A left-wing firebrand, Gollancz had rejected his orthodox Jewish upbringing and become a highly successful businessman with an unrivalled flair for marketing. As managing director of Sayers’ publishers, he revolutionized the advertising of fiction, with two-column splashes in the broadsheets which made his books seem important and exciting.
When he left Ernest Benn to set up on his own, Gollancz built a list of talented detective novelists, promoting newcomers like Milward Kennedy and Gladys Mitchell. But Sayers was much more bankable, and he begged her to join him. She admired Gollancz’s intelligence and drive, and trusted his judgement – it was Gollancz who recommended her to a new literary agent, David Higham. Author and publisher had starkly contrasting political and religious views, but they enjoyed each other’s company, and their mutual respect and loyalty was lifelong.
Since her next novel was under contract to Benn, Gollancz started with the short stories, and came up with a simple but striking yellow and black dust jacket. Gollancz, who was as desperate as his authors for his titles to be noticed (oddly, this is not a trait which all writers associate with their publishers), honed this technique to perfection in the next few years. The bold, yellow jackets, with typography in varying sizes and typefaces, were as recognizable as advertising posters – and Gollancz duly hired Edward McKnight Kauffer, an American modernist whose posters for the London Underground were much admired, to produce eye-catching abstract artwork for works of detective fiction.
Gollancz claimed to have invented the term ‘omnibus volume’; long before the era of the fat airport thriller, he was convinced that readers liked bulky books, which yielded good profits. He had an idea for a huge anthology of mystery stories, and persuaded Sayers to edit it. With his encouragement, she researched the history of the detective story in the course of compiling a weighty gathering of genre fiction. She was probably influenced by Wright and Wrong – that is, by comparable projects undertaken in the United States by Willard Huntington Wright (better known as detective novelist S. S. Van Dine) and in Britain by E. M. Wrong. Her lengthy essay introducing the first series of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror showed the breadth of her reading and her critical insight.
As Sayers’ reputation blossomed, the intense happiness of the early days of marriage faded. Pressure of work, and personal circumstances, took their toll. During the war, Mac had been gassed, two of his brothers had died and another was badly injured. His previous wife reckoned that this sequence of personal disasters transformed his personality, and not in a good way. Now Mac was afflicted by a series of health problems, and owed money to the taxman. When he had to give up his job and go freelance, his morale – and temper – suffered. Once again Sayers found herself let down by a man. Her reaction was to feast on comfort food and to drink more than was good for her.
Despairing of her ‘rapidly fattening frame’, she had her hair cut in an Eton crop, a severe, boyish style that had recently supplanted the ‘bob’. Her choice of clothes became even more outlandish, and on one occasion she turned up to a public function in a man’s rugby shirt. Her plain appearance and fondness for masculine dress led some people to assume she was a lesbian. But with detective novelists, as with detective novels, it is a mistake to judge a book by its cover.
After her father died in September 1928, Sayers and Mac bought a house in Witham, Essex. Today, her statue stands across the road from her home in Newland Street. Sayers’ mother died ten months after her father, and the double bereavement was a crushing blow. A contract with an American publisher enabled her to resign from Benson’s, but she took on responsibility for caring for an elderly aunt, as well as supporting John Anthony. Money remained tight. Mac Fleming’s health worsened, and as her increasing fame provoked his jealousy, he became depressive and difficult. He had promised to adopt John Anthony, but kept putting off any action. So the boy stayed with Ivy, and when Ivy suggested moving nearer to Witham, Sayers discouraged her. She had her hands full with Mac.
When Anthony Berkeley invited her to dine with fellow detective novelists, he offered her much more than simply the opportunity to socialize with people who played the same literary game. For Sayers, the Detection Club came to mean an opportunity to escape for a few hours, just as the stories the Club members wrote were enjoyed by people in search of escapism.
Sayers was becoming interested in real-life murders, absorbing herself in the fears and passions of victims, suspects and culprits alike. She and her colleagues in the Detection Club understood that these cases posed puzzles of their own – and itched to solve them. These puzzles differed from the contrived complexities of the typical detective story. They concerned guilt and innocence, the mysteries of human motivation, and the frighteningly unpredictable workings of justice. And the crime that made the greatest impression on the Detection Club was the brutal stabbing that led to the equally shocking execution of Edith Thompson.
Notes to Chapter 2
My account of Sayers’ life and work owes much to information supplied by the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, Sayers’ reviews of detective fiction, and the biographies and collections of letters mentioned in the Select Bibliography, in particular Barbara Reynolds’ Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, together with material held in the Sayers Archive at the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois.
One successful Golden Age suspense novel (written by a single woman) even saw a deranged serial killer decide to solve that problem by ridding the world of unmarried females.
To identify the book in question would be too much of a spoiler, but the author was Ethel Lina White (1876–1944), a specialist in ‘women in jeopardy’ novels, and best known for The Wheel Spins (1936), filmed by Hitchcock as The Lady Vanishes. Raymond Chandler co-wrote the screenplay for The Unseen, also based on a White novel, Midnight House (1942).
the Sexton Blake series
Blake was another private eye with rooms in Baker Street; he was originally created by Harry Blyth in 1893. The many later, often pseudonymous, writers of Blake stories (Margery Allingham may have been among them) included the science fiction and fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock (born 1939) whose first Blake story, Caribbean Crisis (1962), a locked room mystery with a corpse in a bathysphere, is now a sought-after rarity. Blake was brought to the television screen in the Sixties, with Laurence Payne (1919–2009) in the title role; Payne later wrote crime novels, starting with The Nose on My Face (1961), a whodunit filmed as Girl in the Headlines.
Philip Guedella, a Jewish historian
Guedella (1889–1954) was a barrister and popular writer who stood five times as a Liberal candidate for Parliament without success. His epigrams include ‘Even reviewers read a Preface’, while his remark about detective stories is quoted in Antony Shaffer’s play Sleuth.
The Daniels puzzle remained unsolved.
Three yea
rs later, a workman called Prudhomme was interrogated by police after his wife accused him of stealing a gold watch, which was discovered at his home. But the watch proved not to be May Daniels’, and justice went no further than seeing the French police charge Prudhomme with the theft of a bicycle, and his wife with stealing vegetables.
a projected book about Wilkie Collins
The surviving fragment was published posthumously: E. R. Gregory, ed., Wilkie Collins. A Critical and Bibliographical Study (Toledo: Friends of the University of Toledo Libraries, 1977).
Clouds of Witness was most notable for a trial scene in the House of Lords
Charles Parker mentions to Wimsey the real-life precedent of Earl Ferrers, the last peer to be hanged, in 1760 (for the murder of his land steward). The novel achieved a strange form of notoriety in 1962, as one of the library books mischievously vandalised by the playwright Joe Orton and his lover and eventual murderer, Kenneth Halliwell; the pair were sent to prison for malicious damage to the property of Islington Public Library.
George Orwell (who had spoken of Wimsey’s ‘morbid interest’ in corpses)
In ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, Horizon, October 1944. Drawing a contrast with the stories about Holmes, Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, and Dr John Thorndyke, Orwell argues that: ‘Since 1918 … a detective story not containing a murder has been a great rarity, and the most disgusting details of dismemberment and exhumation are commonly exploited.’ A modern perspective is supplied in Jake Kerridge, ‘Does Crime Writing Have a Misogynistic Heart?’, Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2014. Thanks to the success of the Carrados stories, Ernest Brammah Smith (1864–1942), who wrote as Ernest Bramah, was an obvious candidate for membership of the Detection Club, but although he corresponded amiably with Sayers, probably his natural reclusiveness led him to decline the chance to join.
The Golden Age of Murder Page 4