Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  Harriet continually found herself putting her work aside—“to clear” (as though it were coffee). Novelists who have struck a sag in the working-out of the plot are rather given to handing the problem over in this way to the clarifying action of the sub-conscious. Unhappily, Harriet’s sub-conscious had other coffee to clear and refused quite definitely to deal with the matter of the town-clock. Under such circumstances it is admittedly useless to ask the conscious to take any further steps. When she ought to have been writing, Harriet would sit comfortably in an armchair, reading.29

  Harriet’s largest problem was that Robert Templeton had begun to talk like Lord Peter Wimsey.

  By this time, Lord Peter had been a part of Dorothy L. Sayers’s subconscious for about a dozen years. He had assumed a strange kind of separate reality, shaping action in his novels to suit his own convenience as much as his creator’s needs. He has already refused to marry Harriet, as much as he and Sayers would have liked him to; he cannot change himself to fit the demands of the author’s moment. He is a character whose attributes have been shaped by six previous novels; he cannot allow himself to be altered. Sayers can only add to him. At times, he even mocks her plans for him. This is most plain when Peter and Harriet get to arguing about her books. It is as if Lord Peter is quarreling with his creator, or, more precisely, as if Sayers was debating with herself: “‘And that reminds me, in one of your books—’ ‘Bother my books! I quite see what you mean.’”30

  The Peter Wimsey of Have His Carcase largely returns to the form exhibited in Strong Poison and the two previous novels. He exhibits a far greater range of emotions, beginning, of course, with his painfully awkward approach to gaining Harriet’s love. He is reduced to treating his own “sincerest feelings like something out of a comic opera” (175), a condition that somewhat handicaps but does not negate his abilities as an investigating detective. In fact, working in tandem with Harriet seems to inspire him to greater efforts.

  In the early cases, Charles Parker was apt to complain that he did all the hard, grinding work while Peter blithely examined the results and spun theories to fit the facts. In Strong Poison, this tendency reached a dramatic pass when Peter was unable to act, having to rely desperately instead on his confederates to find the necessary evidence to clear Harriet. As Peter moved into the 1930s, he began to show a disposition to undertake a little legwork. This tendency is demonstrated time and again in Have His Carcase. Peter first exerts himself in the matter of tracking the straight razor that cut Paul Alexis’s throat. He follows this with a house-to-house examination of the residents of the village of Darley, closest to the crime scene. (In the old days, this would have been Parker’s job, or Bunter’s.) Peter then proceeds to Haviland Martin’s campsite at Hinks’s Lane, where he studies the ground with exquisite care, even unfolding the “distasteful sheets” of a “greasy newspaper.” Peter has become a meticulous seeker after material clues. His determination will pay off; the discovery of “a piece of thinnish rope about three inches long” will provide the key to how the murder was done (147).

  If Peter Wimsey has become more meticulous, he is not, at least in this case, self-sufficient. Armed with the unique perspective acquired as a novelist and an advanced woman, Harriet Vane works several angles that Peter cannot. The process begins with her discovery of Paul Alexis dead on the beach. Truly alone, Harriet can only investigate in her best Robert Templeton manner, with the strengths and weaknesses such an approach implies. She does an excellent job of gathering clues for identification and scouts the scene for evidence of other visitors quite thoroughly. But she fails to grasp the implication of the freely flowing blood; Wimsey must explain its significance.

  There are, in fact, several important gaps in Harriet’s knowledge, products of her upbringing and her life experiences to date. Her parents had died when she was young; her (presumably) one serious opportunity to observe a man’s personal habits was the year she spent living with the self-absorbed Philip Boyes. She knows nothing about men’s clothing, nothing about the esoteric process of shaving with a straight razor; as a town woman, she knows nothing about horses. This is by way of pointing up the odd bits of information that the mystery writer must pick up to produce a believable mystery. Sayers does know about shaving, if Harriet does not.

  Still, Harriet Vane is a capable and inspired investigator on her own ground. In a series of woman-to-woman chats with Flora Weldon, Harriet extracts a wealth of valuable information regarding Flora’s proposed marriage with Paul Alexis, the disposition of her money, and her relationship with her most unsatisfactory son, Henry. In turn, Harriet becomes extravagantly feminine in “a slinky garment, composed of what male writers call ‘some soft, clinging material,’ with a corsage which outlined the figure and a skirt which waved tempestuously about her ankles” (235). An oversize hat completes the outfit, making her into a femme fatale to prise information from an overconfident Henry Weldon. Vamping him perhaps a little too successfully, Harriet discovers that Henry and the mysterious Haviland Martin, the camper at Hinks’s Lane, are one and the same person.

  Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey are a true team, each collecting and interpreting information in a manner beyond the reach of the other. Peter knows the arcane habits of men and horses; he also has a rich and varied experience investigating actual crimes. Harriet knows the ways of women and the womanly woman; she can, in addition, analyze the stories provided by suspects from a fiction writer’s perspective. The teamwork necessary to gaining a solution is emphasized when the two sit down together to decipher the cryptogram found on Alexis’s body. Peter is the experienced former intelligence officer, Harriet the word-smith. Together, they break the thing in an evening; if only the path of love had been so smooth.

  As Sayers had promised Victor Gollancz, Have His Carcase turns on a curious alibi and an obscure bit of medical knowledge. In consequence, both rational planning and pure chance play critical roles in obscuring how the murder was done; this makes the crime doubly hard to bring home. The three conspirators, Weldon/Martin, Morecambe/Bright, and Mrs. Morecambe, have carefully scripted an elaborate, fully orchestrated brutality designed to provide multiple layers of defense. When Harriet penetrates Haviland Martin’s disguise to reveal Henry Weldon, she and Peter encounter only a new fiction. Henry supposedly concealed his identity merely to better investigate the activities of Paul Alexis; he still has a perfect alibi for the time of the murder, thanks to Mrs. Morecambe. When Bunter discovers that the itinerant hairdresser Bright is actually a commission agent named Morecambe, the explanation is ready: Morecambe had adopted the role to gain local atmosphere for a play he is writing for his wife, an actress. Every word of his tale about giving the razor to Alexis is still true, he swears. Peter, Harriet, and the police must peel away layer after layer to get at the real truth. Harriet’s experience as a writer is unusually invaluable for just this reason. The investigators must see through the layers of long-prepared fictional invention.

  Yet even when the last stories are stripped away, when the police have established a long and intimate connection among the perpetrators, there is still no solution. Nothing any of the three has claimed is true; there is nothing to show where Henry Weldon really was on the morning of Thursday, June 18, 1931. It does not matter. The medical evidence clearly demonstrates that Paul Alexis did not die until 2 o’clock that afternoon. The alibis for all three conspirators for that hour really are watertight. Chance has intervened and almost saves them.

  Sayers begins dropping hints as to Paul Alexis’s medical condition early on in the narrative. In reconstructing his life as a gigolo, Peter and Harriet quickly discover that he was sickly as a boy—a playground accident had left him prostrate for some time—that he had trouble with his joints, that he feared any kind of rough physical encounter, and that he kept a neat beard primarily to avoid the necessity of his shaving. Combine this with the many pointed references to his Russian heritage, especially his claim to “the blood of the czars”; hemophilia becom
es obvious. As Peter explains, “It’s a condition in which the blood doesn’t clot properly; if you get even a tiny little scratch, you may bleed to death from it” (444). The medical evidence was worthless. Cut at eleven in the morning, the dead Alexis would continue to bleed until his body was utterly emptied; the slash would continue to appear fresh three hours later. Grasping the significance of the hemophilia, the investigators finally arrive at the real time of death—the time for which the three conspirators could furnish Henry Weldon no real alibi.

  Following on the heels of the one-dimensional Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase stands as an elegant and multifaceted work. Sayers has continued to employ the elements of puzzle making in this second Harriet Vane novel, this time posing a criminal investigation in which the reader must perceive both planning and happenstance. Though it is relatively simple to finger Henry Weldon as the murderer, it is very difficult to grasp the nature or extent of the conspiracy behind him. More difficult still is the boggling combination of perfection and ineptitude in Weldon’s alibi; why is it so plainly manufactured, yet so perfect? The addition of a fluke of fate gives the narrative an artful and inventive twist; no matter how cleverly the conspirators plan, it is chance that makes their paper-thin fables at all palpable.

  But this is not a simple puzzle, as Harriet reminds the reader with her caustic remarks about Dr. Thorndyke. For all its convoluted structure of plot, this is a plainly brutal human tragedy. Flora Weldon wished to marry Paul Alexis because he gave her the illusion of perpetual youth; her wretched desires got him killed. Alexis, scrupulous though he was, agreed to marry Flora for her money; he could not last much longer as a dancer. Still, he harbored dreams of greatness and was foolish enough to believe in them. That was his doom. The Morecambes and Henry Weldon used Alexis’s dreams to ensnare him. Alexis travelled to the Flatiron Rock expecting to reclaim the throne of the czars. Instead, he got his throat cut with a razor. The motive was money, the weapon cold, sharp steel. What could be more elemental?

  The plot turns not on the convolutions of alibi but on the personalities of all concerned. For all his machination, Henry Weldon quickly reveals himself a rude and brutish bully, a thick-headed masher at best. His mother is vain and stupid, without interests or purpose, wandering a forlorn life made possible by an inheritance—a sorry waste to everyone, most especially herself. Probably she and Alexis deserved one another; both were equally self-deluding. The other principals in the story, the Morecambes, are marginally more intelligent, but they richly deserve what they get. They have concocted a fabulous story and then relied on a witless amateur to help them carry it out. Their only excuse is desperation; business reversals have driven them to the wall.

  The smaller fry are equally vivid. Alexis’s fellow gigolo, Antoine, is a memorable and sympathetic character despite his loathsome profession. His realistic fatalism, combined with the fact that he willingly supports his aging mother and imbecile brother, make him human. Readers may wish him well—even as they shudder—as he plays on Flora Weldon’s affections at story’s end. The professional dancing women, in invigorating youth and disparaging the predatory hags, are equally believable, as is Mrs. Lefranc, Alexis’s discrete and motherly landlady. Why shouldn’t she be a former circus acrobat?

  Finally, there are Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey, the most vivid characters of all. Have His Carcase was Dorothy L. Sayers’s first opportunity to explore Harriet’s character. She rounds into a full human being, an articulate and ingenious self-supporting modern woman. She has been hurt, bruised in the heart by betrayed love and false accusations of murder, but she is determined to look only forward. Still, she protects herself, choosing a relentlessly self-directed, solitary life as the best answer to her sorrow.

  And Peter is still Peter, past age forty now. If ever he thought a noble birth and untold riches could bring whatever he wanted, he now has discovered otherwise. Fate has been unkind. The one woman for him is a woman wounded; all he can do is stand patiently by, hoping she will heal. And there is detection still, to give his life some meaning. Sadly, the meaning comes with pain. Peter sums up the Alexis murder for what it was: “‘Well,’ said Wimsey, ‘isn’t that a damned awful, bitter, bloody farce? The old fool who wanted a lover and the young fool who wanted an empire. One throat cut and three people hanged, and £130,000 going for the next man who likes to sell his body and soul for it. God! What a jape. King death has asses’ ears with a vengeance’” (448). Harriet can only echo his fervent desire to escape from it all. It is a page out of Wilkie Collins.

  Gollancz published Have His Carcase in April 1932, ten months after the events related in the story ostensibly took place. Sayers by that time had begun work on two additional Wimsey stories, neither of which would feature Harriet Vane. She planned originally to push The Nine Tailors to completion first, thereby putting the finishing touches on the process of giving Wimsey a soul. When technical problems intervened, she turned her attention to the second project in order to meet contractual obligations. In this new novel, Murder Must Advertise, Sayers stretched her limits as a detective novelist as far as she could toward the other end of the scale.

  Dorothy L. Sayers found Murder Must Advertise the most unsatisfactory of her Wimsey novels, both at the time of writing and in retrospect. Writing to Victor Gollancz in September 1932, she could only say, “The new book is nearly done. I hate it because it isn’t the one I wanted to write, but I had to shove it in because I couldn’t get the technical dope on The Nine Tailors in time.”31 Forced to turn something out in a hurry, she chose to center the novel in a London advertising agency—something she knew intimately. Unfortunately, the plot turned on drug trafficking—something she did not know at all. In a letter to Harold Bell written in March 1933, she admitted that the “plot is rather hasty and conventional, because I wrote against time and rather against the grain.”32

  Sayers re-examined the story for an essay published in 1937, but remained unhappy with it. She regarded Murder Must Advertise as her first real attempt to produce a combined detective story and novel of manners. Looking back over the previous dozen years, she saw herself growing as a writer in the Wilkie Collins tradition; each novel after Whose Body? was a little less conventional, a little more human than its predecessors. By the time she reached her eighth novel, she should have been fully prepared to write the true work of her dreams. In her own estimation, she made a hash of it:

  I think the first real attempt at fusing the two kinds of novel was made in Murder Must Advertise, in which, for the first time, the criticism of life was not relegated to incidental observations and character sketches, but was actually part of the plot, as it ought to be. It was not quite successful; the idea of symbolically opposing two cardboard worlds—that of the advertiser and the drug-taker—was all right; and it was suitable that Peter, who stands for reality, should never appear in either except disguised; but the working-out was a little too melodramatic, and the handling rather uneven.33

  Melodramatic was certainly the right word for what happened. The sad fact of the matter was that Sayers allowed Lord Peter to slip his leash.

  If Peter Wimsey had grown as a human being through seven novels, the list of his talents also had grown enormously. He started off rich, possessed of a sumptuous London flat and a really valuable library of rare volumes; he was something of an expert on book collecting. By 1923 he was an experienced international traveler, by 1926 a sometime agent for the foreign office. 1927 brought him a brand new, sleek, black, twelve-cylinder Daimler-Benz, custom made to purr along at heart-arresting speed without racket. Naturally, an exquisite driving skill accompanied the car. By the close of the decade he was an expert on art, a gifted musician, a connoisseur of fine food and finer wines, and an expert (if sensitive) lover. About the only thing he openly admitted he could not do is play chess.

  Presumably, Sayers did not set out to make Wimsey some sort of superman. He just gradually accrued more aptitudes as the series moved along, as more and differen
t talents were required of him. Still, she had succeeded in making Wimsey believable. There is no ongoing display of natural superiority, no endless exhibition of skill after skill. The impression delivered through the first seven novels is that of a sensitive man, one who is willing to experiment with life and generally make good at what he tries. If Peter exudes a general quality with respect to his gifts, that quality has to be quiet self-confidence. This multiplicity of talents is, after all, merely a collection of things; they do not make him a superior, or even a better, human being.

  The Peter Wimsey of Murder Must Advertise is a disturbing departure from that carefully nourished approach. In many ways, Sayers has allowed him to return to the character he displayed in Clouds of Witness. Once again, Lord Peter has become intrepid. In fact, for the first time since the day he broke it, Peter refers in this novel to the collarbone damaged during the investigation that freed his brother.

  A couple of early references to Edgar Wallace intimate that Sayers intends to slide to the sensational side of the mystery story in this novel. The model closest to her heart, however, is one rooted in the earliest days of Lord Peter: Sexton Blake. Sayers pays tribute to the most sensational of all detective heroes not once, but twice, at great length. Early on, Ginger Joe Potts, Peter’s young assistant at the advertising agency, lends him a Blake adventure. Peter reads it avidly, sharing a description of the action with his sister Mary and (finally) brother-in-law, Charles Parker. Not much later, the reader discovers that Ginger Joe imagines his own life as a sort of Sexton Blake adventure. After fighting with his brother to keep secret a report that Wimsey has asked him to write, Ginger Joe curls under the bed covers and summarizes the day’s activities: “Bruised and battered, but unshaken in his courage, the famous detective sank back on the straw pallet in the rat-ridden dungeon. In spite of the pain of his wounds, he was happy, knowing that the precious documents were safe. He laughed to think of the baffled Crime King, gnashing his teeth in his gilded oriental saloon. ‘Foiled yet again, Hawkeye!’ growled the villainous doctor, ‘but it will be my turn next!’ Meanwhile . . .” Sayers’s comment: “The life of a detective is a hard one.”34