LIFE WAS NOT EASY IN 1922. AS AUTUMN DREW TO A DREARY close that November, the British nation clung to a kind of wary optimism, a somber hope of the soul. The Great War was truly over, the troops demobilized. Those who would ever return home had done so. Government efforts to ease the transition to peacetime economy met with some success, though a recent slump threatened troubled times ahead. The political situation remained unclear. Lloyd George had resigned as prime minister, and Bonar Law presided for the moment. The next year would bring still another general election. Abroad, a tolerable postwar climate took shape as Germany and Russia stabilized and the Fascists seized control in Italy. It was not an ideal world by any stretch but one in which Britons could only mend their lives and try to go on.
For Dorothy L. Sayers, life experience reflected the national mood. She was young, talented, cautiously confident of the future, yet beset with all kinds of immediate disappointments. She had just ended a tempestuous and unconsummated love affair with writer John Cournos, a memory that would haunt her for years to come. Six months before, she had taken a new job at S. H. Benson’s, an advertising firm. Not exactly a soul-satisfying position for a woman with an Oxford University education, but more palatable than the teaching and publishing posts she had tried before. Popular writing had now become an outlet. One detective novel, completed and typed twelve months before, made the rounds of publishing houses while she worked steadily at a second. There was no pretension to higher literature here, but the writing was great fun and it might someday pay the bills.
The fictional hero whom Dorothy L. Sayers fervently hoped to present to the public was the product of both the mystery writer’s convention and her own eccentric imagination: Peter Wimsey, an ingenious amateur detective with an unfortunate penchant for blither. More than two years before, Sayers had invented him, a minor character in a Sexton Blake story she never finished. She began to experiment seriously with the detective genre the following year, and by November 1921 she produced the first Wimsey novel, Whose Body? The book finally saw publication in May 1923.
Sayers set the novel in the bleak London of November, presumably in 1922. Although this was to be the first actual public glimpse of Lord Peter, she presented him as a man with a complicated (if largely unwritten) past. The “Battersea Park Mystery” detailed in Whose Body? is far from being Wimsey’s first case. He has already undertaken enough major investigations to acquire close friends and bitter enemies among the official police. He is also brittle and impenetrably defensive in manner, the consequence of a love affair only barely suggested in the text. One more component is enmeshed in the Wimsey character: his experience as a frontline officer in the Great War. Lord Peter, the reader eventually learns, is a victim of shell shock.
To arrive at this first incarnation of Wimsey, the blithering young ass of November 1922, we must pursue elements of two separate but related natures: the recent history of England and the history of Dorothy L. Sayers herself. Any fictional character is a product of his creator’s life and beliefs; this is perhaps more true of Peter Wimsey than most. Wimsey is also a product of the world his creator inhabited, a world haunted by memories and bloodstains.
Sayers was born in Oxford on June 13, 1893. She was an only child, much loved and sheltered by parents who indulged her creative whims from a very young age. Her father was a High Church cleric, headmaster and chaplain at Oxford’s Christ Church Choir School. When Dorothy was four, he accepted a parish appointment at Bluntisham-cum-Earith, a remote country town in the fenlands of East Anglia. Educated there by her parents and tutors, Sayers remained at home until the unusually advanced age of fifteen, when she enrolled at the Godolphin Boarding School, Wiltshire. Here she quickly demonstrated her formidable scholastic aptitude, and here also she had her first unhappy encounter with medical practice. Ill with measles, pneumonia, and other ailments through much of 1911, she underwent therapies that caused her hair to fall out.1
Despite leaving Godolphin early with illness, she successfully competed for a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford. Sayers was admitted for the Trinity term in 1912. Somerville, the first Oxford University college for women, was still not allowed to bestow university degrees, but it did offer a thorough grounding in the humanities. Dorothy L. Sayers flourished, becoming one of the leaders of her class and achieving a first in modern languages in 1915. When the university finally relented in 1920, granting women the right to receive the degrees they had earned, Sayers was among the first women’s graduating class. The days at Oxford were perhaps the most treasured of her life. The heady intellectual atmosphere steeped her very essence. No matter her subsequent occupation or situation, she firmly remained an Oxford scholar.2
The Great War touched the life of Dorothy L. Sayers very lightly. Like many young Britishers in 1914, she did not take the threat of war at all seriously, actually going on holiday in France that malignant August. She escaped to England only after the British Expeditionary Force had assumed positions in northern France; the French army was in full retreat westward. Returning to Oxford for her final year, she found the university in disarray. Most of the male students had enlisted; buildings were given over to Belgian refugees and wounded soldiers. Somerville was moved to new headquarters for the duration of the war, the buildings converted to a hospital. Sayers devoted some time to nursing the sick and wounded but never fully committed herself to this task. She was young, with much of a purely intellectual nature to accomplish. For her at least, the horrors of the Great War were very far away.3
Would that such had been true for more of England. While Sayers grew up, attended university, and began the search for a career, the British nation absorbed shock after brutalizing shock as the great conflagration redefined the meaning of warfare. For the vast majority of Britons, the war came to define the routine of existence. Most people were either on the frontline or agonizing for loved ones in danger. The fear was well placed. By November 1918 more than nine hundred thousand English soldiers had died in Europe and Asia Minor. Sayers was one of the very few who did not lose a close friend or relative. It was the tragic end to a century of comparative peace.
As much as anything, the Great War was a consequence of misplaced faith in European cultural superiority. Cultural arrogance led European nations to carve much of the world into exploited colonies, touching off a competition for resources that left them at each other’s throats. Unforgivable smugness and cultural nearsightedness allowed them to believe that they had progressed too far along the path of civilization to descend into general conflagration.
There had been no general European war since the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. In the ensuing century, Britain leapt ahead of its neighbors, exploiting newfound industrial capacity and establishing a vast overseas empire. The nation’s supreme position in world affairs remained essentially unchallenged until the 1890s, when the new German Empire embarked on a military and formidable naval buildup intended to match British strengths. The British felt obliged to respond to this challenge, and the arms race was on.4
At this same time Britain went to war against the Boers in South Africa and discovered it had no friends. No continental power supported the effort to extend British imperial authority; several nations openly sympathized with the Boers. Though Britain eventually crushed all resistance, the lesson of the Boer War was not lost. Continued existence of the empire would depend on finding allies among the European powers.
Traditionally, Britain had remained aloof from all alliances, instead practicing “balance of power” diplomacy, ensuring that no one continental nation became powerful enough to dominate all others. Generally this had meant siding with Prussia against the French and probably against the Russians or the Austrians. Now the aggressive rise of Germany had rewritten the diplomatic map. Germany dominated its weaker ally, Austria, and seemed to have attracted Italy to its orbit. France, fearful of this powerful neighbor and recalling past humiliations, had come to an understanding with Russia. Leery of Russia but still more apprehensive of Germany, the British now swallowed hard and came to an understanding with their old enemy of several centuries’ standing: the French. Europe had resolved itself into two overarmed camps, waiting for someone to toss a grenade.5
The powder keg almost went off any number of times; it finally did so, in June 1914, when a Serbian operative of the “Black Hand” murdered Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, in the streets of Sarajevo. Austria demanded an impossibly grovelling apology from Serbia and attacked when the Serbians did not quite measure up. Russia came to Serbia’s defense, which obligated Germany to support Austria. The French had to come to Russia’s defense. Europe was at war.6
Most thinking people believed that Europe was too civilized to hurl itself into a full-blown conflagration, but they also believed that if war did come, it would be over very quickly. Technology would see to that. The vast network of railroads would allow rapid movement of masses of men, ordnance was louder and far more deadly, and the submarine would destroy overseas supply. Above all, the machine gun would be the irresistible weapon of attack, mowing down resistance as invaders moved across the battlefields. All that mattered was who got the most men, equipment, and supplies to the important points quickest.7
Germany had a plan. Rightly assuming that the ponderous Russian military would mobilize slowly, a rapidly moving German army would sucker punch the French, knocking them out of the war before Britain could mount effective aid. With the western front secure, the Germans could then turn to face Russia. Given that Germany faced enemies on two long, separate fronts, this was, on balance, a realistic set of calculations. But the risks were high. This was a gambler’s plan, and it required a gambler’s nerve to carry it through.
Architect of the German strategy was Count Alfred von Schlieffen, German chief of staff for fifteen years through 1906. Von Schlieffen looked into the souls of his French adversaries and saw character shaped by unthinking aggressiveness and the desire for revenge. The French still smarted from the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. As soon as hostilities broke out, the French would march westward to reclaim the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lost to Germany in the war settlement of 1870. This was exactly what von Schlieffen needed to execute his plan. He would place a small residual defense in those provinces, men who would beat an orderly retreat before the French onslaught, drawing the enemy ever eastward. All the while, the main body of German forces would drive through Belgium and wheel southward, falling on the French rear. The vise would close; victory would be achieved.
By the time war finally came, von Schlieffen was long in retirement, his place taken by Helmuthe von Moltke, a good soldier but not one to roll the dice. Von Schlieffen’s plan called for an audacity that von Moltke simply could not muster.8
The war began early in August 1914. As Dorothy L. Sayers and hundreds of equally foolish tourists struggled to flee from panicked France, the French army acted as anticipated. Wearing glorious red uniforms, they rushed eastward, completely misreading Germany’s disposition of forces and its underlying intent. The result was unparalleled slaughter, a German victory so complete as to ruin von Schlieffen’s carefully constructed strategy. By August 20, the French were in full retreat westward.
The main German thrust, passing north of the French invasion, crushed “poor little Belgium” in thirteen days. The invasion of neutral Belgium forced Britain to declare war on August 4, but it would be another seventeen days before the British Expeditionary Force could reach the fighting. It was up to the retreating French to rescue the situation.
Retreat was exactly what von Schlieffen had not wanted the French to do. The force on the German frontier was intended to engage the enemy and hold them in place, not bloody them so badly that they moved westward. When the French did that, they encountered the main German invasion coming down from Belgium. The French were in disorder, but they offered enough opposition to bog down the German advance. As the British fell into line, allied resistance stiffened; the German invasion stalled. By September 5 any German hope for quick victory was gone. The two sides spent more than a month trying to outflank each other, a desperate business ending in cold rain with both lines firmly anchored to the North Sea. The troops dug in to escape the constant and brutal hail of enemy ordnance. In mid-October, three hundred miles of trenches stretched from the North Sea to Switzerland. Neither side would move very much over the next four years. The price for that stalemate would be horribly high.9
Two months of massive warfare should have been instructive, but many lessons were lost on those in command. They did give up on cavalry charges rather quickly, but the massed infantry assault remained a staple of war for the next three years. “Always attack” was the French mantra; the British accepted this, though no one had an answer for the ugliest fact of the war: the machine gun was the ultimate defensive weapon. Time after time, troops were sent over the top in well-organized, open assaults, target practice for a handful of defenders wielding a well-placed machine gun. Death tolls were unforgivable.
The Somme, Vimy Ridge, Caudry, the Marne—lessons in French geography written in blood. Sayers mentions these and other battles of the Great War in her eleven Wimsey novels; contemporary readers recognized the names instantly. These were the places where illusions of advanced civilization dispersed, where men exchanged their faith in progress and glory for the dubious advantages wrought by technological butchery. In the autumn of 1916, while Sayers assumed her first job at the Hull High School for Girls, teaching modern languages and trying to keep her head during zeppelin raids, more than one million men fell in France. By then, dreams of rapid victory had long given way to the harsh realities of a war of attrition. Nobody could win, but everyone had to empty their country of the able-bodied, sending them to the nightmare in the trenches. Too much was already spent; no one dared to lose.10
If the French and English lines were hell on earth, the German experience proved worse in the end. A British naval blockade strangled the country, and food became critically scarce. Although the allies did not know it, by 1917 the Germans had to win the war soon or starve. Again Germany decided on a desperate gamble.
The only answer to British naval superiority was unrestricted use of submarines to prevent supplies reaching Britain—an attempt to starve that island first. Whenever the Germans sought to play this card, sabers rattled in the United States. America was the leading “neutral” supplier, England the chief beneficiary. Facing internal collapse, the German high command resumed unrestricted submarine attacks on February 1, 1917, calculating that Britain would surrender before the Americans could mobilize to intervene.
It was a huge mistake. German submarines were unable to make much of a dent in British supply lines, and the United States entered the war on a massive scale. Had the Germans simply held out, they probably would have won. Russia began to collapse early in 1917; by year’s end their leadership, elevated by the Bolshevik Revolution, was happy to end the war on the eastern front. The Germans would have faced only France and Britain, both nearing exhaustion.
By spring 1918 the Germans were completely desperate. The tactical leadership of both sides had learned a lot from the three years of debacle. New attack strategies ended the stalemate, and armies began to move. Needing to win quickly, the Germans moved first, shock attacking the British at the Somme late in March. They drove the allies back forty miles toward Paris, but the British lines would not break. The Germans tried again in April and May, gaining vast amounts of ground but failing to rout the enemy. They lost six hundred thousand soldiers in the three offensives.
The Spanish influenza struck as the Germans mounted a fourth attempt. Because of malnutrition, their troops suffered far worse than did the allies from this new horror. The Germans gained only four miles in this attempt. In July they tried one last offensive at the Marne but with no success. German offensive capacity was exhausted, and morale was crumbling. The allied counterattack began on July 18.
In less than two months, British, French, and American forces recaptured all the lands taken by the Germans in the spring. Britain’s chief war innovation, the tank, paved the way. Allied ground tactics now bore a curious resemblance to naval deployments, and German resistance slowly melted. Germany’s only hope was to maintain a functioning army long enough to achieve a voice at the peace negotiations. The merciless pounding carried on into late autumn, as thousands died fighting Germany’s well-ordered retreat. The firing stopped suddenly at eleven o’clock on the morning of November 11 as an armistice was signed. The date was etched in the minds of millions. The killing stopped; the pain would linger forever.11
The next year brought “peace”—a hopeless, vengeful, witless peace guaranteed to plunge Europe into war again before long. Allied leaders simply refused to accept that this war had killed the past, that nineteenth-century passions and politics could not recreate nineteenth-century stability. They fell back on nineteenth-century values: nationalist competition and revenge. Germany was humiliated, forced to accept guilt for the war and to pay the entire debt. Stripped of army, navy, and industrial capacity, Germany was left economically moribund. Still, the allies expected this crippled economy to turn over vast sums to support their own national economies. It was a formula for financial disaster, and it worked all too well. By 1931 all of Europe was in massive recession.12
November 12, 1918 began a long, anguished process of building a new world. For the war’s survivors, there could be no return to the comparative innocence of older days; they had witnessed too much death. Those at home helped as they could, but they too had burdens. Virtually every family in England had lost a brother, a son, a husband, a close cousin, or a dear friend. With the struggle over, long-swallowed grief could be loosed at last.13
As Robert Graves observed, only two classes existed in England after the war: those who had served at the front, and everybody else. The gulf between was painfully wide. Neither had the least ability to look into the heart of the other, to feel empathy. For the soldier, the return to civilian life was a shock. The war had further mechanized industry and accelerated the use of motor vehicles. Life was faster. Women were everywhere in public, smoking openly, voicing opinions on political questions (including their own right to vote), wearing clothes that flattened breasts and de-emphasized sexuality, and holding jobs they did not want to leave. Everyone wanted to be nice to the soldiers, but no one knew quite what to say. Everything seemed so different, so hollow.14
Society wanted very much to welcome the men back but, at the same time, people did not want to give up what they had gained in the soldiers’ absence. Most women returned to the home reluctantly, and a significant few held on to a new life in the public sphere. War veterans found the adjustment to changing women’s roles especially difficult. Long stretches of abstinence in the trenches inclined the troops to objectify women as just so many desirable bodies. The idea that British women might desire something more—a job, security without marriage, common respect—seemed utterly foreign.
Return to civilian footing, even in the most elemental fashion, proved difficult. Many soldiers found their old jobs gone, either mechanized out of existence or taken over by others. Pensions and other forms of public aid were inadequate to meet the desperate need. Especially poignant was the exigency of those mutilated by the war. Many walked the streets with missing limbs, wrecked faces, or gassed-out insides. Resentments simmered on both sides of the great gulf.15
Most critically, perhaps, the soldiers did not wish to talk about the war or about the loss of life; whereas the rest of society needed to. Nine hundred thousand deaths required public grieving, public remembrance. Bodies of half the men killed in the war were never identified, much less recovered. Following the armistice, Parliament established the Imperial War Graves Commission to oversee the creation of proper cemeteries in France to honor the deceased. Few British casualties returned to British soil. For the nation to bring closure to so stupefying a loss, the British people had to commemorate, to grieve publicly as one. Over the silent protests of thousands of survivors who would just as soon forget, communities throughout England held ceremonies to honor the veterans and to dedicate monuments to those who were gone. Homage to the dead was critical to getting on with life.16
The first war memorials were separately sponsored by the religious and lay communities. The business of honoring the dead was traditionally the domain of the religious, but here the Church of England found itself in an awkward position. The Church’s chaplains were bitterly resented during the war—they had mouthed all the patriotic guff the soldiers came to hate and they had failed to accompany the men to the front, to the gates of hell. The parsons could do little to compensate for that kind of failure. Any attempt to recall the glory of imperial Britain, the dedicated spirit of Victorian days, met with bemused disaffection. Church memorials were shunned, and overly patriotic monuments fared no better. Lord Peter encounters such a monument in Yorkshire in Clouds of Witness; he can only regard “that thing” as incongruous. Like most soldiers, Peter had seen the war through, but not for any reasons of traditional patriotism.17
The right chord was struck in London, almost accidentally. The government commissioned Sir Edwin Luytens to construct a temporary monument in Whitehall, centerpiece for a celebratory march by British forces and their leaders during demobilization in 1919. Luytens delivered a spare, geometrical shape, an empty tomb bereft of all religious and patriotic connotations. The cenotaph was simple and sobering, a spare shell over a gnawing emptiness. The work so perfectly reflected public feeling that the government had no choice but to permanently install the monument at Whitehall as a national symbol of all that was lost in the Great War. Dorothy L. Sayers made prominent mention of the cenotaph in two of her novels.18
The grief did not end with the dedications and the ceremonies. The war cast a silent pall that lasted more than a decade. But life had to go on. There was much to resolve, much to build, much to face. The transition to peacetime footing led to rampant inflation followed soon by the inevitable contraction of government buying. The resultant recession left many to face criminally high prices with no source of income. Parliament extended unemployment insurance benefits in 1920, demonstrating a sympathetic comprehension that was historically unusual, if inadequate.
There was much unfinished business. The Irish situation demanded immediate attention. The government had quelled a rebellion on Easter Sunday, 1917, but the Irish were clearly fed up with British misrule. The Irish Republican Army organized in 1919. Terrorism mounted. The Government of Ireland Act stabbed at the problem in 1920; one year later came the Irish Free State. In 1921, Parliament also passed an act intended to give the people of India greater control over their own affairs.
At home, a new Parliamentary Reform Act, adopted in 1918, sought to deflect pressures from still other sources of massive dissatisfaction. The Act gave the right to vote to virtually all men over the age of twenty-one and some women over the age of thirty. 1919 brought the Sex Qualification Removal Act, removing bars to public employment on the basis of sex. The government had at last begun to recognize the rights of women, if only in a minimalist fashion. The legal voting age for women was at last lowered to twenty-one in 1928, essentially completing Britain’s ratification of democracy.
Working class unrest became endemic in the years immediately following the war, despite the political gains of the Labour party. 1919 saw a national railway strike, the following year a coal strike. Parliament created the Sankey Commission to study the problems of persistent poverty and dangerous conditions in the mines, but little was accomplished. In 1921, the owners locked out the coal miners, resulting in a humiliating reduction in wages.19
Troubled times. Dorothy L. Sayers struggled along with everyone else, a young, well-educated (most men would have said overeducated) woman trying to make her way in a tight economy, competing against thousands of returning soldiers who wanted her to go home. Sex Qualification Removal Act or no, England in the immediate postwar era had little room for women in the public economy. Sayers’s choices for employment were severely circumscribed by her advanced education and her sex.
She struggled to maintain an optimistic outlook. An intellectual above all else, in the three years after leaving Oxford Sayers published two volumes of poetry, both printed in very small numbers. This, sad to say, was her happiest achievement during the war years. Life after Oxford was difficult to accept. She took the teaching position at Hull but found the work trying and unfulfilling. Next she tried her hand as a publisher’s assistant at Black-well’s, the small firm in Oxford that had brought out her own books, only to discover that there was no money in it. Infusions of funds from her father kept body and soul together through the end of the war.20
The armistice brought new opportunities. Leaving Blackwell’s in May 1919, she took a job as headmaster’s assistant at the L’Ecole Des Roches in Verneuil, Normandy. Sayers ventured into French education mainly to pursue Eric Whelpton, an invalided soldier she had met at Oxford. Her love for Whelpton was not encouraged or returned. In 1920 he left France and her life, after offering to sell her his interest in the school. Sayers returned to England soon after. Two more teaching jobs followed, both of them brief, before she took an advertising position at Benson’s in May 1922. The job was less than ideal for a woman of Oxford education, but it was far better than staying home. Unfulfilled in her job prospects, unhappy in affairs of the heart, Sayers found some solace by turning to popular fiction.21
It was in Normandy that she first demonstrated her interest in detective stories. A friend at Oxford sent her a steady diet of Sexton Blake, that much-bloodied denizen of the mass market pulps. When Eric Whelpton teased her about lowbrow tastes, she announced her intention to enter into a syndicate with college friends to produce new detective fiction and make lots of money. Whelpton seemingly was unimpressed.22
Whether the syndicate existed outside Sayers’s defensive imagination is difficult to say. One thing is certain: Sayers first attempted detective fiction in Normandy in 1920, trying her hand at a Sexton Blake novel. Like characters in much mass market fiction, Blake was the product of no single author. His publishers purchased Blake yarns from any number of sources, printing them with no author credit at all. Sexton Blake was not so much authored as produced assembly-line style.23
The story that Sayers outlined in France was very much a product of postwar conditions—a story built on themes of international intrigue and war-weary mistrust between agents of Britain and France. It was to be firmly in the Sexton Blake tradition: murder and mayhem among the rich and famous, many high speed chases through land, sea, and air, daring escapes by masters of disguise, and the recovery of a valuable jewel after a violent climax. The intrepid Blake must have possessed a hard head to withstand all the blows dealt him in the series.
The unfinished manuscript of Dorothy L. Sayers’s effort to produce a Sexton Blake mystery survives intact, providing a glimpse into the genesis of a fictional hero. This fellow named Wimsey was to appear as a secondary character in the adventure. The murder touching off the entire chain of events was to take place in the Wimsey flat in Piccadilly and put Sexton Blake on the trail of the international archfiend, Renault. In his first incarnation, Lord Peter is introduced as the son of the Duke of Peterborough, but much of his later character is instantly recognizable. He is described as a “harmless sort of fellow, I think. Distinguished himself in the war. Rides his own horse in the Grand National. Authority on first editions. At present visiting the Duchess in Herts. I’ve seen his photo somewhere. Fair-haired, big nose, aristocratic sort of man whose socks match his tie. No politics.” Harriet Vane’s description of Peter in Gaudy Night was not much different.24
Sexton Blake is supposed to investigate the murder in Piccadilly, of course, and to follow up the incredible string of criminal events that would ensue. Lord Peter refuses to stand quietly aside. Entering the chase, he flies to Rome to discover that Renault has disguised himself as a woman and intends doubling back to England. Peter cleverly diverts the scoundrel’s luggage to Paris, where it is opened, revealing Renault a jewel thief. Sexton Blake then lays a trap to capture the fiend and recover the jewel he has stolen.
Sayers never concluded this story and later chose to forget it completely. It is not difficult to hazard why, though it is the plainest guesswork. For one thing, she left France without Eric Whelpton; the work she did there may have held unpleasant associations. More probably, she gave it up because Sexton Blake was not her own creation but that of a syndicate. More fun was to be had inventing from scratch. Finally, there was the fact that she had invented this fellow Wimsey, an intriguing character. He had shown every capacity for taking over the Blake story. Why not put him to work on his own?25
Her first thought was to feature Wimsey in a play. Back in England and teaching at Clapham High School, Sayers roughed out a few pages of The Mousehole: A Detective Fantasia in Three Flats. The action was to begin with the discovery of a financier and a woman not his wife dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in the flat above Lord Peter’s in Piccadilly. On the scene immediately, Peter was described as “sleek, fair, monocle, dressed in a grey suit, with the exception of his coat, whose place is taken by a luxurious dressing-gown.” Peter soon meets Police Inspector Sugg, a familiar antagonist in the published Wimsey tales.
Though Peter has already acquired his eyeglass, his character is not entirely crystallized. At thirty-two he is a bit too old; more importantly, his speech has not yet acquired the clipped pronunciations of East Anglia’s upper class: “Excuse me butting in like this Mr. ?—er—I’m so sorry, I really don’t know your name, but—is anything the matter? I thought I heard somebody knocking—Oh, dear! (Observing the bodies.) How distressing. Did—er—did they have a fit or something?” Not quite right. Still, Peter readily admits to Sugg that his hobby is “other people’s business.”26
The Mousehole got no further. Sayers dropped the play to take up a more promising premise in January 1921. Years afterward she confided to a reporter that the basic story line for Whose Body? evolved at a party, with several friends adding elements to the puzzle.27 In a letter to her mother, Sayers described the initial idea: “My detective story begins brightly with a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez. Now, why did she wear pince-nez in her bath? If you can guess, you will be in a position to lay hands upon the murderer, but he’s a very cool and cunning fellow.”28 She set Peter Wimsey to work to find the “cunning fellow.”
The Wimsey character that took shape under Sayers’s pen between January and November 1921 became the essential basis for all the elaborations of the following fifteen years. He was the product of a portentous time, a literary transition embracing the best aspects of the lost prewar world while facing the uncertain future with determined cheerfulness. If his amiability is a bit mannered, his air self-consciously light, there is good reason for it. Like English society as a whole, Wimsey has been scarred, perhaps irreparably, by the war.
Just as any writer of detective novels in the twenties, Dorothy L. Sayers had first to acknowledge the formidable influence of Sherlock Holmes, the stereotype for all would-be amateur detectives. Sayers is quite forthright in acknowledging her debt to Arthur Conan Doyle. Five pages into Whose Body? Wimsey prepares himself mentally to take on the mystery by announcing, “Exit the amateur of first editions; new motive introduced by solo bassoon; enter Sherlock Holmes, disguised as a walking gentleman.” Later, facing up to a small but important error in the observation of minutiae, he calls himself Watson.29 The name of Sherlock Holmes is invoked in every one of the ten novels that follow.
Wimsey, of course, had to be discernibly different from Holmes, had to be something new in a detective. Where Holmes is tall, rather dark, and ugly, Wimsey is short, fair, and unremarkable to look at, with at least a strong chin. Holmes is of uncertain class but the embodiment of middle-class mentality; Lord Peter is emphatically of the aristocracy. Holmes cares little for wealth or appearance; Peter is a fashion plate with money and a connoisseur of what it will buy. Both are musical virtuosos, though they prefer different instruments (Holmes the violin, Wimsey the piano).
The differences run far deeper than these simple comparisons of characteristics. Sherlock was the evocation of an age, a paragon of all that the Victorian male might aspire to be. He was virtuous and displayed great chivalry toward women, but he was careful to maintain a complete and masterful separation from the opposite sex. He was a man of science, skilled in experimentation, determined to place the work of detection on an empirical footing. Relentlessly logical, he regarded all emotion as weakness. To Holmes, things were just what they were. This made him the court of final appeal, the ultimate source of justice.
Sherlock Holmes was still going strong in the 1920s (Doyle published his last Holmes story in 1931), but he had become an anachronism. These last stories either were placed in retirement settings or were tales of adventure from the good old prewar days. Holmes was no longer the ideal; he had become an impossibility. Peter Wimsey was more the man of the twenties, brilliant but scarred and unsure. Wimsey triumphed through reliance on an uncertain combination of scientific observation, deductive intuition, psychological insight, real assistance from close associates, and occasional good luck. His was a brilliant mind but a mind that acknowledged the existence of factors beyond his control. Wimsey would never be the complete master of a situation.
The difference between the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and that of Dorothy L. Sayers is manifest in the very tenor of the stories. Holmes was best suited to the short story format: a quick visit to 221B, the proposal of the problem, the logical weighing of the factors to point up probabilities, the testing of the hypothesis, and the exposure of the felon. Apart from Holmes himself, there is little character portrayal; it is extraneous to the plot.30
The successful Wimsey stories are the long narratives. (The short stories are enjoyable only if you have read the novels and therefore know something of Wimsey and other participants.) Character development is crucial to the novels. From the very first, solution turns not so much on the analysis of clues as the understanding of character. For a Sayers story to be fulfilling, the readers must have a fairly complex understanding of the people involved. Only the novels provide that opportunity.
At the heart of the first nine novels is Wimsey himself. He emerges from the first chapters of Whose Body? as a clever if somewhat unconscientious chatterbox, a blithering talker of the first order. He is capable of celebrating in song when presented a body in a bath, calling a close friend a “fathead,” and mercilessly lampooning a dull-witted police inspector. It is difficult to believe he can be completely serious about anything. As the medical student, Mr. Piggott, noted of Peter, “He talked the most fatuous nonsense, certainly, but in a disconcerting way. He didn’t dig into a joke and get all the fun out of it; he made it in passing, so to speak, and skipped away to something else before your retort was ready”(188–89).
Wimsey is, however, a man of taste, as even Mr. Piggott (of suspect mercantile antecedents) could attest. We glimpse little more of Peter’s belongings than his library in this first novel, but we are immediately made to understand that this “was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London.” The decor is darkness set off by primrose, the furniture elegant but dutifully comfortable, the wall shelves taken up by priceless first editions bound in leather. A baby grand piano, often used, graces one corner. Oh yes—this is the domain of a wealthy man (26, 189).
And a wealthy, aristocratic man was Wimsey. Sayers determined finally that Lord Peter was the second son of the Duke of Denver, a noble family with roots extending back at least to the Norman invasion. His mother, the Dowager Duchess, is very much in evidence in the story; his father has passed on, leaving the title to Peter’s older brother, Gerald. The current duke is a model of convention; like his father, he will not entertain self-made men at Duke’s Denver.
Though Sayers does not allude to the fact, Denver and his family are examples of a rapidly vanishing country tradition. The twenties saw a visible contraction of aristocratic landholding as the nobility sought to rid itself of an unprofitable commitment to highly taxed agricultural properties. As the elite divested, both their influence and their privilege among the rural population declined. Sayers envisioned Denver as an exception to this trend, subsequently explaining that Gerald, the wealthiest of England’s dukes, could afford to maintain the agricultural traditions at an economic loss. By the end of the series, both he and Lord Peter are convinced that the heir to the title will inevitably sell the properties to Hollywood.31
In Whose Body? it is Peter who seems prepared to cast away the traditions and entitlements of his station. Gerald is much irritated by Peter’s lack of proper aristocratic mien, wants him to “marry and settle down and live quietly, doin’ something useful.” For reasons left obscure in this first novel, Peter’s attempt to conform to the model has been a washout. Now Gerald has to worry that Peter might off and marry a chorus beauty. It is bad enough having him appearing as witness in police court.32
Even if he is a “beastly blot on the ’scutcheon,” Peter is a beneficiary of aristocratic privilege. In Whose Body? we learn little more than that he possesses an Oxford education, and we can infer that he attended the best of the public schools, Eton. “The playing fields of Eton” is a watchword for a standard of upper-class English assumption, a very expression of the culture. It is on the playing fields that young men learned the necessary value of fair play, of being a good sport. The game itself is tantamount, sacred—more important than any individual player. Every participant is expected to adhere to the letter and spirit of the rules while giving all they have to win. At the same time, no player could ever suggest, by word or action, that he was trying to win or even cared about the outcome. Wimsey belonged to a family of sportsmen, skilled hunters who nonetheless had never killed a fox. (Much later in the series, Sayers, speaking of sport through Harriet Vane, observes that the “tom-fool word has got more people in trouble than all the rest of the dictionary put together.”)33
The sense of fair play stands Wimsey well in his proper social circle but is a definite impediment to his chosen career as an amateur detective. Peter has no impelling reason to chase down criminals; the work is neither dictated by his class standing nor necessary due to straitened circumstances—quite the opposite. The essential justification he offers in Whose Body? is simply that investigation is a kind of hobby, a distraction. Not unlike crossword puzzles or other exercises for the mind, criminology provides mental stimulation, exhilaration, adventure (73, 186, 216).
At least that is how matters begin. As long as the body in the bath is an abstract puzzle, the perpetrators faceless, detective work can be an unusually enjoyable kind of game. As soon as suspects acquire identities, become people with traits of character, admirable or otherwise, Wimsey suffers an attack of conscience. Suspecting real people of heinous activity, in some cases (of necessity) unjustly, and snooping into their lives is not playing the game. Peter’s closest friend and associate, Police Inspector Charles Parker, makes this plain: “You want to look dignified and consistent—what’s that got to do with it? You want to hunt down a murderer for the sport of the thing and then shake hands with him and say ‘Well played—hard luck—you shall have your revenge tomorrow!’ Well, you can’t do that. Life’s not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You can’t be a sportsman. You’re a responsible person” (159).
This conflict of emotions lies at the core of Peter Wimsey’s character throughout his career. At first blush he seems superficial, a man playing a game with life. But he is responsible. He cares about what happens to the people he encounters, even the most evil of murderers. Yet he is also sanguine enough to understand that he possesses unique powers that he must use. His most important duty is to society.
In allowing Peter Wimsey to agonize over such a fundamental issue, Dorothy L. Sayers fashioned a singular kind of popular fiction hero: a man who carefully considers his own motivations and explores the consequences of his actions. Sherlock Holmes, along with most of the great fictional detectives of the postwar era, bows out with the solution of the puzzle, the author paying little more than lip service to the fact that exposure of the criminal will fundamentally alter the lives of many people. Sayers explores this fact. Peter Wimsey’s triumphs are muted by the certainty of human suffering to follow.
The reader catches the merest glimpses of Peter’s ingrained sense of responsibility in Whose Body? Mostly he portrays himself as a regular cheerful idiot, blithely irresponsible about money, appointments, or just about anything. Charles Parker is obliged to warn him that he will never make a true detective “till you learn to do a little work.” The one person able to comprehend the necessity of this blither is the great nerve specialist, Sir Julian Freke. Examining Wimsey with the latest scientific instruments, he determines that Peter “must learn to be irresponsible.” Wounds exist in Wimsey’s brain, producing a “sensitive nervous temperament.” The only hope of avoiding further trauma is to avoid opening the old wounds. Peter Wimsey must be frivolous (218–19).
The wounds are a consequence of Peter’s service in the Great War. Sayers reveals this to the reader suddenly and unexpectedly. Peter, grasping the solution to the puzzle of the man in the bath, recoils in horror. Abruptly, he is in the manservant Bunter’s bedroom, ordering him to keep the lights out, babbling of sappers and artillery. Major Wimsey has returned to the war, to the trenches. His teeth chatter; the terror he feels is palpable. With difficulty, Sergeant Bunter gets his man to bed. Subsequently, we learn that this is the latest of several such attacks, that Peter was “dreadfully ill” in 1918 (171, 173, 214).
From that moment on, the frivolous, babbling Wimsey of the early portions of Whose Body? staggers to the finish as a damaged, fragile individual. We learn few specific details of Peter’s war record save that he must have done some intelligence work at one point. He “remembered having once gone, disguised, into the staff-room of a German officer.” For the rest, he must have served as a frontline officer, as fears of the enemy penetrating his entrenchments lay most heavily on his mind (214).
Just what was the nature of this war that it could lie so deeply ingrained in the aristocratic mind of a Peter Wimsey? Why was Peter’s condition so recognizable to Sayers’s readers in 1923, a full five years after the war had ended? Why did the fact of shell shock make an otherwise frivolous character so universally sympathetic to the postwar world? The answers lie in the very nature of the trench warfare that comprised too much of the Great War.
The trenches were the war. Strategically, historically, the war was fought elsewhere as well. It can be said quite honestly that the war was lost and won on the seas. But the trenches were the grinding fact of life, a perpetual horror punctuated by occasional moments of terror. When all was calm, as many as a thousand men a day fell victim to sniper fire. Artillery barrage shattered earth and sanity all too often; poison gas wafted across the fields when the wind was right. Technology remained omnipresent, but it had turned its face against humankind. The trenches meant shelter and survival at a dehumanizing cost.
Between 1914 and 1918 Europe’s governments issued more than ten million shovels to their infantrymen. The men used them to dig a series of three parallel ditches ten feet deep and three hundred miles long, generally two hundred fifty yards from the enemy. One or more support trenches lay behind the frontline diggings. Some distance behind the support trenches lay the main encampments, with barracks, headquarters, hospitals, ordnance and supply, and so forth. Members of the British Expeditionary Force in France rotated between front lines, support lines, and the encampments, hoping to experience three days of relative quiet for every four days of exposure and danger. The true rotation varied greatly from place to place. There were only a few places where geography realistically gave the enemy any opportunity to attack. Those places were often in an uproar for weeks on end, forcing thousands to endure what seemed eternal frontline duty.34
There was literally no language to express what soldiers saw and heard. Enemy artillery laid down sustained barrages with concussive impact to rob men of sleep and sanity, if not life and limb. No-man’s-land became a lifeless, barbed-wire hell pockmarked by muddy craters in which wounded drowned. Corpses, often disintegrated, littered the landscape. Rats, sleek and fat, fed lustily.
Three full years of savagery wrought only more of the same. Cold rain, perpetual mud, rats, lice, dysentery, sniper’s bullets—those were the lot for a calm and average day. Strategists seemed to have no more answer than to send more men over the top to near-certain death. French forces finally mutinied, refusing to attack anymore. British morale did not sink quite so low, but the war did shatter precious cultural institutions. Well-educated, aristocratic leaders of the military became the blimps—uninformed, uncaring, hopelessly outdated and dull witted. It became impossible for the private soldier to even mouth the platitudes of deference to their “betters” when obedience only got them killed. The last illusions of corporate hierarchy died in the trenches.35
Faith in progress and civilization, so central to Victorian thinking, withered in France. The sense of community grew smaller and smaller, defined at last as the mates who shared a dugout while enemy shells shook the earth. Men struggled to sustain some semblance of middle-class values, knowing that it was all an illusion. It was hard to maintain a sporting desire for fair play against an enemy issuing poison gas—better to poison them first. Many dreamed of leave, of returning to England long enough to bed a “nice girl” feeling sorry for a poor infantryman.36
Traditional values were displaced by a harsh and cynical humor. Broadsides advocated lice (in a variety of sizes and colors) as pets. Unit newspapers asked the common soldier if he suffered symptoms of optimism. One unit put on a play, written by the soldiers themselves, behind the frontlines. The scene was the trenches, the year 1966. They were all still there, staring across no-man’s-land at the Germans. So were their grandchildren.37
Dorothy L. Sayers steered a careful but inspired path in concocting Peter Wimsey’s war record. To be acceptable to a public acutely cognizant of who had served and who had not, a young aesthete such as Wimsey had to possess a service record. But Wimsey was an aristocrat—dangerous ground. How easy to imagine him a young blimp. By placing him in the frontlines as a major who actually suffered shell shock, Sayers preserved the credibility of his lordly upbringing and education while giving him a real experience of horror shared by millions. And, in refusing to talk about it or dwell on it until forced to do so, Wimsey walked in step with just about every frontline veteran. They had seen far too much that was unspeakable.
The barest hint of service as an intelligence officer provides a bridge between Wimsey the trench officer and Wimsey the detective. Although it is never stated in Whose Body? Sayers has successfully planted the possibility that Peter’s interest in police work stems from his intelligence work. We are provided little information on the transformation, but it is plain that in 1922, when a man is found in the bathtub, Wimsey has been at this sort of thing before. He is familiar with civilian police methods and with civilian police inspectors. Charles Parker is already a close friend at the beginning of Whose Body? and Inspector Sugg his inveterate enemy. Sayers mentions Wimsey’s role in the sensational recovery of the Attenbury emeralds but provides no details. (Perhaps this “previous experience” is a partial remnant of the Sexton Blake plot reaching into the new story [14, 216].)
In an essay published in 1937, Dorothy L. Sayers reviews Whose Body? finding the book “conventional to the last degree,” not at all the clever invention she thought it in 1923. Later, she argues, she had to go to the long labor of making Peter Wimsey “a complete human being, with a past and a future, with a consistent family and social history, with a complicated psychology and even the rudiments of a religious outlook.” In casting this revision, Sayers is not entirely fair to herself. Although at times Wimsey’s true personality could be discerned only in the barest hints and allusions, all of those elements that she would later require of her main character were established at the outset in Whose Body?38
If Wimsey was a character ready made to step into the adventure of the man in the bath, much remained to be done before he could occupy a sensible world that his readers would recognize and understand. This was no easy task, given that the familiar world of England seemed to be changing, shifting, and metamorphosing even as Sayers observed it. To provide a proper setting for Wimsey was to capture the bustle and uncertainty of the postwar world.
The year is 1921 or 1922—there is no precise way to date the novel absolutely—but the month is most definitely November, a typical London November filled with leaden skies, frequent and bone-chilling rains, and drizzling fogs. The weather is relentlessly heavy, a severe contrast to the forced lightness of Peter’s banter. This is the aura of the immediate post-war world, a world where sympathy and trust are at a premium. A coroner orders the windows opened, bathing his attending audience in cold fog. An attorney of the gentlemanly old school cannot recognize a bona fide visit from the English nobility, accusing Peter of attempting blackmail. Even the postwar beer is lousy. Peter’s study is an oasis of civility in the midst of a drear reality, but its master is uncertain. He can only go forward, keeping things light, burying the old wounds, hoping for the best (109–10, 188).
The reader encounters the bustle of modern London at the very outset. The novel begins in the swirling traffic of Piccadilly Circus, as Peter’s taxi driver desperately threads past “a 19 ’bus, a 38-B, and a bicycle” to gain Lower Regent Street. Wimsey’s request to return for a forgotten catalog is more than an inconvenience; it is a request to buck the tide of a transportation network in total disorder. Returning home, he is instantly faced with a telephone call; Peter “sat down to the telephone with an air of leisurely courtesy, as though it were an acquaintance dropped in for a chat.” Technology has acquired a life of its own (9–10).
This hectic pace of daily life remains a factor throughout the novel: there is not enough time to do everything. Following up legitimate leads, Peter nearly misses Lady Swaffam’s luncheon (his absence might have proved disastrous), and he does miss the Battersea inquest. His confrontation with Julian Freke near the finish occurs as events pass them by—the final procedures leading to Freke’s arrest are already in motion.
Wimsey’s investigation allows the reader the briefest impression of the dizzying world of international finance. American millionaire John P. Milligan thinks nothing of sailing across the Atlantic to sew up a railroad deal, returning home to have some fun cornering the wheat market in Chicago with his brothers, and then returning to England to give a little talk at Duke’s Denver. This is a world where failure of a deal in the Argentines can upset the entire British market, where bankrupt Peruvian oilfields can inspire a flutter of excitement in London. This is all very different from the back-country images of Peter’s birthplace where “the local people can’t understand much beyond shootin’ and huntin’” (75–76, 78–84).
This is also a world where anti-Semitism was all too current and all too familiar. Some critics have levelled the charge of conscious anti-Semitism at Sayers, but this seems a case of reading backwards from present knowledge into the contemporary evidence. Certainly Jewish stereotypes are common in Whose Body? Sir Reuben Levy, the ultimate victim of the novel, is a classic stock character. He is treated by essentially all concerned as a man apart: cheap, financially shrewd, ruthless in business dealings yet devoted to family. Everyone in the novel accepts this stereotyping without thought or comment. Peter refers to Sir Reuben as a “wandering Jew,” Bunter allows that “a good Jew can be a good man,” Peter’s mother recalls the difficulties of Christine Ford, a good Christian girl (as her very name implies), marrying a Jew. Later, medical students identify one of the dissection subjects at St. Luke’s Hospital as a “Sheeny” by glancing at the physical features. In Wimsey’s world, the Jews, resident in England for centuries, were not quite English (47, 56, 65, 195–96).
Incorporating these stereotypes, Sayers mirrored her world, a world that in some ways had learned painfully little. Even after the cataclysm of the Great War, the world could not stand as one. In fact, the war seems to have encouraged ethnic and cultural discrimination. The Germans were still Huns, the Americans uncouth moneygrubbers (such as John P. Milligan), the French altogether too French, and the Jews still Hebrews, a race apart. How easy it was to let those ethnic slurs roll off the tongue in 1922, never thinking twice, never envisioning the evil this heedless behavior could inspire. Too many still blamed the Jews for the death of the Christian savior; too many also blamed Jewish finance for the outbreak of the war. Better to lay fault with the outsider than face up to the responsibility that rested in every European heart. Casual anti-Semitism seemed harmless enough in 1922. Even a woman as educated and sensitive to the human condition as Dorothy L. Sayers could include it in a novel as natural and innocuous behavior. Thirteen years later, she was still surprised to discover that a French translator of Whose Body? wanted “to soften the thrusts against the Jews.” She felt that the only persons in the story “treated in a favourable light were the Jews!”39 Unconscious anti-Semitism was a part of life, a condition of mind, an expression of the culture. It put the world on the road to genocide.40
If Sayers was unconscious of the danger in her hackneyed portrayal of Jewish people, she was fully cognizant of her approach to questions of science, physical and social. These were an integral part of the coming world, and she did not altogether approve. Science, medical science especially, enters the novel in the person of Sir Julian Freke.
Freke is a classic example of the heroic scientist, attacking the frontiers of ignorance through hypothetically impartial inductive research and application. He is an expert on the human nervous system, a selfless genius whose achievements allow him to successfully treat Russian refugees, careworn financiers, and shell-shocked war veterans. He is also a monster, a man who has placed himself beyond the moral reach of society. At first the Battersea mystery is intractable because it consists of two seemingly separate and unrelated sets of circumstances, both comparatively trivial. It is only when Peter Wimsey, in a moment of deductive intuition, splices the two stories together that he can see the enormity of what has happened. Sir Julian Freke has committed a crime beyond the scope of any moral scruple that Wimsey can imagine (168, 170).
To Freke, human feelings and emotions are products of the body chemistry. There is no altruistic reason to experience guilt or regret; these are aberrations caused by secretions of the body in reaction to outside stimuli. To Freke, the concept of conscience is outmoded and scientifically insupportable. There is no soul, no God to answer to. The man who can understand, who can learn to control his body’s chemical reaction, can do anything. He becomes superman, beyond the reach of law or religion (165–67).
Sir Julian was deluding himself. Interestingly, Peter Wimsey employs an essentially (if superficially) Freudian approach to demonstrate the flaw in Freke’s reasoning. For all his cold detachment and devotion to pure reason, the great scientist was acting under the influence of one of the most powerful and blinding of all human emotions: jealousy—sexual jealousy. As a young man, Julian Freke thought to marry Christine Ford. He was beaten out by “a little Jewish nobody.” For almost a quarter of a century, Freke bided his time, built up his plans with methodological precision. Then came the blow—revenge, at last. What part of Freke’s body chemistry had betrayed him and allowed him to cling to this paralyzing emotion? “Sex is every man’s loco spot,” Wimsey observes. “You needn’t fidget, you know it’s true—he’ll take a disappointment, but not a humiliation” (203).
Sayers would find occasion to return to this theme, both in later novels and in some of her short stories. The message remains basically the same. Science deserves great respect because it has accomplished much for humankind. But, watch out for scientists. By its nature, science embraces no values, provides no sense of morality. In the hands of an amoral scientist, science can become a tool for unparalleled evil.
Having established her essential characters, her settings, and the principal themes, Sayers still had to address the matter of style—no small consideration for an Oxford-educated woman with a degree in modern languages. In her own mind, as well as in the estimation of her own social group, Sayers was “slumming” to attempt popular detective fiction at all. Surely she was more at home with poetic forms if not with the “high” literature of Europe’s last thousand years. To write popular literature was to enter a different kind of world altogether, one her training would identify as a much lower form. Yet she was making her daily bread working for an advertising agency by 1922. She needed the ability to communicate with the masses just to survive.
A voracious reader, Sayers familiarized herself with the essential conventions of the detective story by devouring numerous examples, ranging from Sherlock Holmes and Sexton Blake through the novels of E. C. Bentley. To Sayers, the essential ingredient was that the writer “play fair” with the reader. Whatever evidence the fictional detective possesses must be made available to the reader. (Sherlock Holmes did not always do this!) To Sayers, the mystery story was a form of intellectual puzzle that the reader must be given a fair opportunity to solve. The plot must be coherent, the behavior of the characters logical and believable, and the crime accomplished without resort to such legerdemain as unknown poisons, evil twins, or divine miracles.41
The story also had to be plainly written. While many of Sayers’s readers would derive from the “smart set,” a detective story had to appeal to the “middlebrow” taste at least to be successful. This fact severely circumscribed the occasions for literary experimentation. Still, the story Sayers produced for the popular reading public of 1923 demonstrated a cognizance of the rise of the modern in literature.
Modernist sensibilities antedated the Great War, but the war experience provided credibility for their critique of European civilization. The confident assurances of the Victorian age had given way to profound un-certainty: was humanity the agent of cultural change, or its helpless victim? Could Europeans break free from the traps, from the limitations imposed by their own history? That history had dragged them all to the edge of the abyss, a nightmare dug in the ground and called a trench. How was the artist to voice the desperate anxieties wrought by the modern world?42
Confronting the cultural crises of the twentieth century, the moderns reflected their uncertainties in the “form and idiom” of their art. In the work of authors such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and T. S. Eliot, the principal narrator of the action is not so much an agent as a victim of events: “I” is “acted upon.” In composing Whose Body? Sayers seems to have struck for a middle ground between the moderns and their nonmodernist contemporaries. Her criticisms of society and the world are articulated in the accepted forms of traditional discourse, yet the narrator of Whose Body? refuses to remain consistent. Assuming a variety of voices and points of view, Sayers imposes a wealth of narrative perspectives on the action.
The novel begins with what might be described as an imagist poem, perhaps Sayers’s only study in that style. For the modern writer, the image is a kind of epigram, capturing, with the speed and the shocking picture of the moment, “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”43 The image that Sayers draws to convey the essence of Wimsey is simple enough, but oddly hideous: “His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola” (9).
In this case, the image recalls vermin overrunning the trenches, thereby foreshadowing Peter’s shell-shocked flashback at the moment when he solves the crime. The Battersea mystery comes too soon after the war; the gruesome horror of the truth is too vivid. The horror of the image ramifies through the text as a whole—the bizarre circumstances of the murder, dissection, and exhumation scenes to come are insinuated in this seemingly innocuous miniature grotesque.
As the image became the staple of modernist poetry in the postwar era, the diffuse point of view came to dominate narrative literature. In the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or William Faulkner, the standard Victorian narrator seems the victim of an explosion. There is no neutral, steady, reliable perspective, only a multiplicity of ill-defined, partial views supplied by unreliable participants including (and not always especially) the author.44 This fragmentation occurs in Whose Body? as well, though with careful limitation.
Generally on her best British behavior, distanced and omniscient, Sayers nonetheless refused to remain on the outer fringes of her story. She intrudes on the narration first in the form of a few footnotes, then dares more, darting into official discourses during the inquest and then into the voices of the witnesses. When Gladys Horrocks “wished she were dead,” she has, for a bare moment, become the narrator of the action. Later, at Lady Swaffham’s tea, Sayers injects language such as “soulfully,” “anxiously,” and “little scream” into the text to accompany the exhalations of Mrs. Tommy Frayle, a woman too inanely worshipful of Lord Peter. Sayers and Mrs. Frayle achieve an odd communion in consequence. The cumulative result of these intrusions is to create a fragmented, almost disembodied narrator; there is no single identifiable narrative voice. This is a far cry from Doctor Watson (125, 150–54).
Although she experiments with modernist perspective, Sayers drew the line at stream of consciousness. Unlike Woolf or Joyce, she seldom speaks the minds of those whose discourse she adopts. This is popular fiction, after all; there are conventions to be observed. Her reluctance to go to this extreme is clearly demonstrated in the stark impact of the few passages where she does enter the minds of her characters, exploring the effect of their thoughts on their emotions. Sayers first applies the technique in exploring the character of Mr. Piggott: “You wondered what the carpet had cost on which Parker was carelessly spilling cigar ash; your father was an upholsterer—Mr. Piggott, of Piggott & Piggott, Liverpool—and you knew enough about carpets to know that you couldn’t even guess at the price of this one” (189).
Sayers tried this experiment just one time more in this first novel, allowing the voice of the narrator to speak the thoughts of Peter Wimsey: “The feel of Parker’s old trench-coat beneath your fingers was comforting. You had felt it in worse places. You clung now for fear you should get separated. The dim people moving in front of you were like Brocken specters.” (223)
The profoundly physical sensations she records separate the narrator from the character even as the words unite their experience. The narrator is not Piggott, not Wimsey, however close the narrator (and the reader) come to sharing the experience. The message is Freudian: there exist unfathomable depths within one’s own mind. Viewpoints may shift, but in the last analysis all is relative. Even the world of the fictional detective is ultimately unknowable.45
If Dorothy L. Sayers was willing to toy with the relativistic stratagems of the moderns, her detective fiction was rooted in her finely honed sense of the classics, one more characteristic she shared with Eliot and Joyce. Subsequent Lord Peter novels drew heavily from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton, John Donne, and always from Wilkie Collins. In Whose Body? the action is framed by references to Dante. As the novel begins, Peter Wimsey is the wealthy and garrulous man about town, off to bid for a Folio Dante to add to his collection. The Folio arrives as the investigation deepens; it is available for inspection by Mr. Piggott as the circle closes around Sir Julian Freke. With resolution of the matter out of his hands, Wimsey attempts to draw solace from Dante. Instead, he determines to confront Sir Julian. By the climax, Sayers has imported images from Dante directly into her story to lend a sense of decency to the grim proceedings at the workhouse burial ground. Wandering amidst the maze of graves, Wimsey clings to Parker’s coat sleeve to keep from blundering into “the mass of freshly turned clay” about an open grave.
Two Dantesque shapes with pitchforks loomed up.
“Have you finished?” asked somebody.
“Nearly done, sir.” The demons fell to work again with the pitchforks—no, spades.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The sound of the spades for many minutes. An iron noise of tools thrown down. Demons stooping and straining.
A black-bearded spectre at your elbow. Introduced. The Master of the Workhouse.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A mutter of voices. The lurching departure of the Dante demons—good, decent demons in corduroy. (223–25)
Then comes confirmation of all the horror Peter Wimsey has surmised. The body exhumed by the Dante “demons”—the gravediggers at a pauper’s cemetery—is none other than Sir Reuben Levy, murdered and dissected by Sir Julian Freke. The good doctor is a denizen of the deepest parts of hell.
The extent to which Whose Body? anchors the entire body of Peter Wimsey material is striking. Sayers employed many of the characters appearing in the stories time and again, providing Peter a stock community of family, friends, and acquaintances who support his activities. On those later occasions when Wimsey stepped outside the normal bonds of this community, it generally signified that Sayers was allowing Peter room to grow.
Probably the most important of the supporting cast introduced in Whose Body? is Police Inspector Charles Parker, Wimsey’s only real friend. Parker is Wimsey’s complement—a pleasant, generally unexcitable, professional investigator. He lives a rather spartan life. Single, occupying a drab flat in Great Ormond Street, served by an openly judgmental woman who comes in on days, Charles is dependent on the meager salary he earns at Scotland Yard. Wimsey finds him unimaginative and maddeningly cautious, a welcome check to his own flamboyant air. Charles Parker is not Conan Doyle’s Doctor Watson nor his Inspector LeStrade. He and Wimsey are genuinely a team. Parker—steady, plodding, but very intelligent—is capable of performing the grinding police work that Wimsey cannot. His sole source of recreation is reading theological works, commentaries on the Epistles and such. This, he states amiably, is how he learned caution. As Wimsey grows and changes in subsequent novels, Parker grows as well yet remains a touchstone of reality for Peter (26, 67, 156).
Sayers intended Inspector Sugg to be a foil for her team of clever and determined detectives. He is the exact opposite of everything Wimsey and Parker represent, a paragon of bullying stupidity. Presumably Sayers intended Sugg to provide a form of low comedy for the story, a fool engaged to reflect the brilliance of the master. With the presence of Parker at Wimsey’s side, however, the ploy does not come off well. It is not that the official police are stupid (Charles disproves that); it is only that Sugg is stupid. Sayers allows him a modicum of dignity in the end and uses him only incidentally thereafter (18, 24).
Two characters appearing briefly in Whose Body? recur in several additional works. Early in the novel, Peter and Charles discuss a recent court performance by the brilliant barrister, Impey Biggs. We learn little more here than that Biggs used the inherent uncertainty of medical evidence to secure the acquittal of an almost certainly guilty man, but Biggs is a character Sayers will employ several more times (35).
The reader catches a somewhat fuller glimpse of a character personally closer to Wimsey: his financial friend, the Honourable Freddy Arbuthnot. Freddy’s antecedents are by no means clear, but he has money and the peculiar ability to make more at will. His specialty, apparently his sole interest, is the stock exchange, which he knows intimately. He shares with Peter an appreciation of wealth, a fine taste in men’s fashion, and a discriminating palate. But Wimsey never spends much time with him, in this story or any other. Freddy does not possess the wide-ranging intellectual curiosity that drives Wimsey (74–78).
Family ties are important in Whose Body? Sayers will later broaden and flesh out Peter’s relations, but we learn fairly quickly that his father is dead, that his brother is every inch the narrow-minded country squire his father was, and that (unlike Sherlock Holmes) Peter has a mother, one who takes an active interest in his adventures. The Dowager Duchess of Denver is one of Dorothy L. Sayers’s most memorable characters. After a few pages with her, it is not difficult to discern the source of Peter’s ability to prattle on. Small, plump, and good-humored, she is not nearly as circumvolved in speech in this first novel as she will later become, but she is very elliptical, jumping from one subject to the next as thoughts strike her, not quite at random (52, 277):
By the way, such an odd thing’s happened about the Church Restoration Fund—the Vicar—oh, dear, here are these people coming back again; well, I’ll tell you afterwards—do look at that woman looking shocked, and the girl in tweeds trying to look as if she sat on undraped gentlemen every day of her life—I don’t mean that—corpses of course—but one finds oneself being so Elizabethan nowadays—what an awful little man the coroner is, isn’t he? (115)
For all that, she is shrewd and quick to think on her feet as well as a fountain of strength in a crisis. Charles Parker calls her “wonderful,” and Peter agrees. She is the first of several strong older women that Sayers will introduce, eventually establishing a discernible pattern of interpretation. Dorothy L. Sayers admired Victorian women with spirit; they pointed the way to the “new woman” of the twenties (223).
One last critically important stock character takes shape in Whose Body? We do not yet learn that Bunter has a mother in Kent and that he was one of eleven children, but we do come to understand very quickly that the presence of this most capable manservant is crucial to Peter Wimsey’s survival. It is not simply that Bunter buttles, that he supervises Wimsey’s wardrobe, that he cooks and cleans for him, that he serves as technical assistant in Wimsey’s investigation. Mervyn Bunter takes care of Lord Peter with carefully cloaked affection. This is no small thing, once the reader comes to understand Wimsey’s precarious emotional health. Severely correct, “a truly terrible manservant,” Bunter understands his place and has no desire to transgress his role. When Peter threatens to sack him, merely to provide him the opportunity of venting an honest opinion of his master, Bunter allows that even then the wall of servitude would not crumble. He is a servant and must never express an ill opinion of his noble employer.
The relationship of manservant to master was one of the few remaining anachronisms from days of rigid social hierarchy then rapidly disappearing. There was real inequality here. Even “in these democratic days” of the early twenties, Lord Peter and Bunter would never meet eye to eye as equals. Yet they would be intimate associates in a long string of adventures.
Although Bunter is a servant, this is not to say he is servile. Sayers drew him as a capable and complex individual, dropping hints from the start that Bunter is a man of many talents. Most obvious is his skill and devotion to the craft and art of photography. Bunter’s work with the lens provides a material basis for the connection of the two ends of the Battersea mystery. This is something he is quite passionate about; one of the few cracks in his otherwise correct facade occurs when he respectfully proposes the purchase of a “Double Antistigmat with a set of supplementary lenses.” The care he takes in photographing evidence appalls others of his caste. To destroy a possible clue is to do “as much as my place is worth,” but one gets the impression that the sentiment is even more Bunter’s than his master’s.
For all his formidable correctness, Bunter is capable of exercising great charm within the context of his own class. A few soft and encouraging words make Mabel (Sir Reuben Levy’s kitchen maid) his steady assistant. Bunter will exhibit his way with women in several more stories. But he is able to gain the confidence of male servants as well. With a little show of friendly drink and comaraderie, Bunter induces Cummings (Sir Julian Freke’s man) to relate a detailed picture of events in the household. Sayers employs this episode so as to elicit not only clues to the mystery, but to demonstrate by comparison how truly superior Bunter is as a manservant. Bunter’s letter also certifies his unswerving, unquestionable loyalty to his master, the “bloody little fool,” Wimsey: “May I take this opportunity of expressing my grateful appreciation of your lordship’s excellent taste in food, drink, and dress? It is, if I may say so, more than a pleasure—it is an education, to valet and buttle your lordship.” (178) Note the perfect correctness of Bunter’s grammar—in every sense (25, 64, 179–85).
Taken together, this company of stock characters lends dimension to Peter Wimsey’s imagined life. Moving among a community of familiar figures, Wimsey’s activities present the reader with a sense of returning to familiar ground with each future story. Peter is more than a detective; he is a human being with a close, if trying, family. His investigative work brings him into close contact with the official police, but he has other friends as well. The supreme loyalty of so superior a servant as Bunter also implies an important fact about Wimsey: he is a superior individual.
Dorothy L. Sayers worked on Whose Body? throughout much of 1921, finishing the manuscript in November and paying seven pounds she could ill afford in order to have it typed. She was not terribly sanguine about its prospects, writing her mother on November 8 to say, “I don’t suppose anything will come of it. I haven’t the least confidence in the stuff, which is a pity, because I really enjoy turning it out.” She had already begun work on a second novel.46
Her skepticism seemed justified for a painfully long while. Lord Peter made the rounds of publishing houses, was taken up by an agent who promptly died, and got nowhere through the first half of 1922. Finally an American publisher nibbled. After some protracted agonies, the book was brought out by Boni and Liveright, New York, in May 1923, and T. Fisher Unwin, London, in October. Response was modest but enough to continue. Peter Wimsey was on his way.47