Of the dozen stories finally chosen for inclusion, none is in any way remarkable. A handful create mild interest because they provide detail on some of Lord Peter’s early cases, but they in no way advance the reader’s understanding of the character or of his community. The lead story, “The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers,” is set in New York City in April 1920, making it the earliest of Wimsey’s cases to find print—a creepy pulp thriller. The second, “The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question,” apparently takes place almost exactly two years later. Sayers seems to have borrowed somewhat from her unfinished Sexton Blake story; the villain, a female impersonator, speaks masculine French, tipping Peter off that she/he is an international jewel thief. The introduction to this insipid story mentions several additional cases that Sayers never intended to record. She was merely borrowing a page from Conan Doyle.12
In “The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran,” Sayers again seized an opportunity to explore the failings of science. The story takes place on a hot summer day in 1921, when Wimsey and Bunter assist a Doctor Hartman with his medical experiments. The doctor’s reaction to a murder committed in the flat above only points up his inadequacy:
“What is wrong with the doctor’s theories, Bunter?”
“You wish me to reply, my lord, that he only sees the facts which fit in with the theory.”
“Thought-reader!” exclaimed Lord Peter bitterly.13
Again, the man of science is blind to his own inadequacies, a danger to his fellow human beings.
There is no evidence to date the year of “The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention,” but it seems right to place it in the late autumn of 1922, just after the events of Whose Body? Peter is desperately in need of rest, and his desire to visit country friends and swap war yarns in a harmless way makes sense in the aftermath of a last unexpected episode of shell shock. This story is one of the best of the short works, perhaps because it is by far the longest, running almost seventy pages. It is also notable because it is one of the very few stories in which Bunter and the other stock players make no appearance whatsoever. Of the rest, only “The Learned Affair of the Dragon’s Head” creates mild interest because of the introduction of a new stock character: Peter’s “ten-year-old nephew, Viscount St. George,” the Duke of Denver’s son and heir. The story itself is a rather tepid treasure hunt.14
The one intriguing story in Lord Peter Views the Body is the last, “The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba,” and that for most unusual reasons. The tale is straight out of the pulps, as Peter goes underground for two years to get the goods on a highly organized criminal syndicate specializing in theft. The gang kills when they have to, and Peter very nearly becomes the latest victim when he is unmasked. The Wimsey portrayed here has much in common with the intrepid daredevil of Clouds of Witness, decidedly out of sync with the creation developing in the novels.15
“The Cave of Ali Baba” could be summarily dismissed as a potboiler, save for one factor: its dating. In a letter written in 1933, Sayers advised Harold W. Bell, an American enthusiast and Sherlock Holmes scholar, that “as regards the dates—I’m afraid I usually mix these up on purpose, to prevent people like you from attributing the events narrated to any particular year!”16 This was not altogether true. The two earliest novels are difficult to date exactly, and several of the short stories are maddeningly vague, but Sayers grew more explicit and precise in later works.
As a kind of working hobby, Sayers had taken an interest in the dating of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures, entering into a long correspondence with H. W. Bell.17 Sayers considered his Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: The Chronology of their Adventures the most complete attempt to unravel this really arcane subject. However, anyone familiar with Doyle’s cavalier approach to the subject of dating (or consistency in the names of his characters!) has to realize how impossible the task really is. Many have tried, and one set of guesses is really as good as another. To produce a comprehensive chronology of the Holmes adventures, the scholar simply must be arbitrary somewhere. The debates center on where best to be arbitrary. In her own work, Sayers came to be the antithesis of Doyle’s approach, despite protests to the contrary. The events ascribed to Unnatural Death are definitely set in the spring of 1927, and it is difficult to conceive that The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club took place at any time other than the late autumn of the same year. Several references in these works and others place Peter’s birthday in 1890, providing a continuous frame of reference. In sharp contrast to Doyle, Sayers took assiduous care over her dates, consciously constructing a biographical chronology of Wimsey’s adventures. That is what makes “The Cave of Ali Baba” so curious.18
The story begins with a faked announcement of Peter’s death. The newspaper obituary announced that he was killed at age thirty-seven while hunting in Tanganyika in December. The staged death therefore takes place in December 1927, just after the events surrounding the Bellona Club mystery. For the next two years, Wimsey poses as an ex-footman named Rogers to gather evidence against the syndicate, which he finally exposes. Presumably, these events take place throughout 1928 and 1929, a view supported by the fact that Sayers never set any other cases during this period. The difficulty is that this story—highlighting appallingly melodramatic events of 1929—appeared in print in 1928. Sayers was describing events that would take place in Wimsey’s imaginary future.19 This has to be the ultimate form of creative biography.
Sayers perpetrated a similar trick in the novel Strong Poison. Peter, weighed down by the most critical investigation of his career, spends Christmas with his family and their friends at Duke’s Denver. Almost without exception, the bluebloods gathered together prove overbearingly insensitive to Peter’s aspirations and fears. Sayers introduces this ordeal by stating that “Wimsey was accustomed to say, when he was an old man and more talkative even than usual, that the recollection of that Christmas at Duke’s Denver had haunted him in nightmares, every night regularly, for the following twenty years.”20 The difficulty is that Strong Poison was not published twenty years after the imagined events. In fact, the novel was released just scant months after the Christmas of 1929, when this fictional nightmare occurred. Again, Sayers was looking into Peter’s future, giving him twenty years of life that none of his enthusiasts had yet lived.
This peculiar playing with the dates on the part of Dorothy L. Sayers would be nothing more than a strange anomaly, had she done it only once or twice. Yet she consciously tinkered with the concept of time in a variety of subtle and inventive ways during the next few years. She cast Wimsey into the future, she pushed him into events of the more distant past, and she arranged events of later novels to fit within the time frames of those already published. And she did this with a purpose. By placing the Wimsey adventures in the proper time sequence that Sayers created for them, the reader can observe both the proper evolution of his character and the expression of his author’s deepest beliefs on the most important of all subjects: the nature of human love.21
This complicated fictional chronicle was a further product of the complicated tangle that Sayers’s life continued to be. Although contracts with Gollancz and American publishers brought the promise of steady publication, financial security did not bring happiness. After eight years and half a million words, Sayers was growing a bit restless with the demands of Lord Peter. Writing the kind of breezy chatter that had become his trademark was wearying work, and his defined role and station in society did rather narrow his opportunities to uncover really unusual criminal activity. In “Gaudy Night,” the essay written in 1936 to explain the origins of the tenth Wimsey novel, Sayers recalled that she entered into the writing of Strong Poison, the fifth novel, with every intention of marrying him off and having done with him.22 Her correspondence for 1928 and 1929 offers no indication of such a series-ending intent. It is difficult to believe that she would turn off her bread winner just as the future was looking so bright
.
Sayers did enter into a new writing partnership at this time, branching out to experiment with the mystery genre in novel ways. Her associate was (of all things) a physician, Doctor Robert Eustace Barton. Barton had previously cooperated with a number of mystery writers, providing proper scientific background material for L. T. Meade and Edgar Jepson. Sayers included examples of their works in her first anthology for Gollancz, then wrote to Barton to express her admiration. They met and subsequently corresponded, evolving an intricate plot turning on the distinguishing characteristics of natural and synthetic muscarine, a poison derived from mushrooms. Sayers spent much of 1929 writing The Documents in the Case, a mystery story told through a collection of “primary” documents—mostly letters and diary entries written by the participants. Though she included Sir James Lubbock, a stock character from the Wimsey series, in Documents, she had from the beginning ruled out the inclusion of her great detective:
Dear Dr. Barton . . .
I am so glad you like Lord Peter. I certainly don’t intend to kill him off yet, but I think it would be better to invent a new detective for any tales we do together. . . . Lord Peter isn’t supposed to know a lot about chemistry and that sort of thing, and it would mean inventing a doctor or somebody to help him out. Also, I’m looking forward to getting a rest from him, because his everlasting breeziness does become a bit of a tax at times!23
Had the book proven an unqualified critical success, the career of Lord Peter might well have been different—and much shorter. Sayers herself felt that she had made a hash of the narrative, and then she discovered that Barton’s information regarding muscarine was seemingly incorrect. The novel was a twice-flawed fiction. Sayers would turn to Barton for medical information for later stories, but a potentially creative alliance ended with just the one book. Strong Poison, written in tandem with The Documents in the Case, would become the latest rather than the last Wimsey story.24
Both books were written in an atmosphere of personal trial and tragedy. On September 20, 1928, just a few weeks after Dorothy wrote to tell her parents of the automatic chair, her father, the Reverend Henry Sayers, died of pneumonia at age seventy-four. This was the first time death had touched someone close to her, and the loss came hard. Father and daughter had been especially close through the years; he had supported her, emotionally and financially, in all her career struggles and had lived just long enough to see the beginnings of her great success. True, she had been something of a wayward child, forced to hide some very large sins from the devoted old clergyman, but this as much as anything demonstrated the depth of her love.25
The grieving was difficult, and with it came responsibility. Sayers’s mother and her Aunt Mabel really had no one else to turn to. After the burdensome fuss of the funeral, Dorothy and her husband began to search for a quiet home out of town that they could share with her mother and aunt. As Dorothy had to return to her responsibilities at Benson’s, much of the actual search activity fell to Mac, who was still unable to work steadily. Thanks largely to Fleming’s efforts, they quickly located “a pretty old Georgian house in Witham, Essex,”26 some forty miles northeast of London. Dorothy purchased the property herself, combining funds left her by an uncle with a loan from her mother. Helen Leigh Sayers and Mabel Leigh would occupy the house as rent-free tenants, while Dorothy and her husband continued to live in town.27
Fleming took the lead role in readying the house for occupation, struggling with the unremitting gloom and unrealistic goals of Dorothy’s mother to the brink of a nervous breakdown. His own health was not good, and his mother-in-law was prey to persistent depression. Helen Sayers did not cope well with her sudden loss. Dorothy explained the situation in a letter to her cousin: “He bored her to death for forty years, and she always grumbled that he was no companion for her—and now she misses him dreadfully. That’s life, I suppose.”28
With Mac’s attentive help, the two sisters took up residence in December 1928, with Dorothy arriving on the 24th to help celebrate Christmas. The arrangement, stressful as it was, lasted just seven months. In July 1929, Helen Sayers fell ill with an intestinal blockage. She died on July 27, just ten months after her husband. With the loss of both parents so unexpectedly, the sudden void in Dorothy’s life seemed unbridgeable.29
Sayers had written several times to her mother since 1926, sharing her successes and expressing her fears. She wrote at times of more than nettle-some matters—the ongoing difficulties in her relationship with Mac Fleming. Her husband was a most unhappy man, and this made life with him very trying. While Dorothy L. Sayers’s career flourished, his own went nowhere. He had given up reporting for The News of the World, attempting to freelance but working only sporadically. He was subject to nervous attacks and digestive problems, and each winter brought a nagging cough—a chronic effect of poison gas, Sayers suspected. In several depressing ways, she had come to play Sheila Fentiman to his George. She was the major breadwinner, and he had difficulty accepting that.30
Still deeper emotional problems were at work as well, problems Sayers could not share with her mother. For the past five years, Dorothy’s son, John Anthony, had been in the care of her cousin. At the time of their marriage, Mac Fleming had agreed that the couple should soon assume responsibility for the boy’s care. Fleming had even promised to adopt John Anthony and raise him as his own. When her father died in 1928, Dorothy made a will reflecting this promise and hope. Yet her son was never adopted and never brought into their home to live.31
Fleming’s excuses rested on his ill health. He did seem to worsen with each year, showing little stamina or ability to work on any project for very long. He talked of writing a cook book, an idea that Sayers encouraged, as he was most wonderfully adept at cooking despite his own stomach problems. The actual work went at a snail’s pace. Mostly he seemed to need prolonged periods of relaxation. Before marrying Sayers, he had made a habit of taking his vacations in the west of Scotland, at Gatehouse of Fleet in Kircudsbrightshire. Now Sayers accompanied him, spending her days peacefully writing while he pursued the activities he enjoyed most: painting, fishing, and betting at the races. Fleming at times remained in Scotland when Sayers was required to return to her work at Benson’s.32
When her mother died, Sayers and Fleming decided to leave London and take up full-time residence at the house in Witham. Her success as mystery writer and editor gave her enough security to leave Benson’s for good in August 1929. Though the move out and away from the press of the city must have been something of a relief to Mac’s health, the success and notoriety achieved by his wife most emphatically was not. He became increasingly impossible to live with. By 1933 Sayers was seriously considering leaving him.33
Dorothy L. Sayers was definitely a star on the rise by 1929, with a new and successful novel, a collection of short stories, and an edited anthology to her credit over the previous twelve months. She had even found time to return to “higher” forms of scholarship, publishing a translation of Tristan in Brittany with Ernest Benn in July 1929.34 Freed from her advertising work at Benson’s, she was now able to devote her full attention to writing, generally developing at least two projects at more or less the same time. But it was a triumph tinged with bitterness, as the course of her life refused to run smoothly. The grievous loss of both parents, the memories of ill-fated love affairs, the presence of an ill and trying spouse—all of this and more occupied her attention. Much of the psychological burden found its way, in one form or another, into her Peter Wimsey stories. Even Wimsey on vacation was drawn from the real-life experiences of Sayers and Mac Fleming. Lord Peter’s questions about life and its duties were those Dorothy L. Sayers would ask.
Three Wimsey novels grew out of the personal anguish felt by Sayers in the years following the deaths of her parents. They were written at different times—Strong Poison was published in 1930, The Five Red Herrings in January 1931, and The Nine Tailors in 1934—to meet very different needs, but each in some way addressed the same complex of f
undamental human issues. To emphasize this fact, Sayers carefully wove the time element of the three novels together: all of Peter Wimsey’s activities in all three books take place over a period of fourteen months, between December 1929 and January 1931. Writing to a devoted enthusiast in January 1934, she warned that “The Nine Tailors, by the way, goes back a few years to an almost pre-Harriet period.”35
The Nine Tailors was indeed pre-Harriet. “Harriet” is Harriet Vane, former lover of Philip Boyes and his accused killer. She is also the flame that sets Peter Wimsey’s heart afire. He sees her for the first time, in Strong Poison, in the dock, standing trial for her life. The narrative obliquely refers to the fact that Peter had been away a long time (“The Cave of Ali Baba”); Parker had investigated the Philip Boyes murder without him. Rushing to his mother, Peter announces: “Look here! here’s the absolutely one and only woman, and she’s being put through a simply ghastly awful business and for God’s sake come and hold my hand!”36
The trial of Harriet Vane for the arsenic murder of Philip Boyes ends in a hung jury in December 1929. Sayers is exceedingly clear about the dates of this mystery, placing several references tracing the exact chronology of events into the mouth of the judge summarizing the case against Harriet Vane. When Harriet wins her reprieve, it will be one month, more or less, before a new trial can commence. Peter has that long to uncover evidence that can clear her. Working desperately and haphazardly, he pushes the investigation as far as he can take matters himself by the week following Christmas. Then he must place the active work in the more than capable hands of Miss Climpson for a week. In the novel, Sayers observes that “to chronicle Lord Peter Wimsey’s daily life during the ensuing week would be neither kind nor edifying.”37
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