It’s easy to compare Dorothy L. Sayers with her creation Lord Peter Wimsey. Easy, and fair. Just as Lord Peter is a cultured, brainy type slumming it as an amateur detective (a “noble sleuth” looking for “something new in thrills”), Sayers was doing the same as a mystery writer. Which doesn’t mean she enjoyed it less, or found it any less worthy an occupation, than Lord P enjoys his work. What it means is they both entered into it in the spirit of a game. In Unnatural Death Lord Peter even makes a wager with his Scotland Yard buddy (and brother-in-law) Parker about whether he’ll be able to bring Miss Whittaker to justice. And this before anyone knows if a crime has been committed.

So this is another mystery that pitches us a curve ball. In Whose Body? the curve was the discovery of a body that nobody could identify in a bathtub. In Clouds of Witness the curve was a murder investigation without a murder. In Unnatural Death it’s made clear who the guilty party is, or who at least Lord Peter thinks the guilty party is, right from the start and the only question is how he’s going to prove it. This is what I meant by the way Sayers, like Wimsey, approaches these things in the spirit of a game.

Already by the 1920s the mystery had taken a form that readers felt comfortable (or cozy) with. The locked room. The body in the library. The line-up of the usual suspects. The genealogical tables and maps showing the layouts of rooms. So the challenge for a mystery (and it’s really the same for any genre) writer became how to give readers what they expect (and want), but at the same time give it enough of a twist to make it fresh. I think Sayers did a great job with that.

I think Sayers and Wimsey also shared a similar cultural headspace. Well-read, well-educated (they came to nearly the same thing a hundred years ago), and fascinated by crime and other tabloid events. This results in Lord Peter’s inner and outer monologues where it’s like he’s tossing a salad that’s full of bits of poetry, current affairs, famous criminal cases, and other trivia. I mentioned in my notes on Whose Body? how it could have really used endnotes explaining names and quotations (often slightly mangled, unconsciously or on purpose, “Did somebody write that, or did I invent it? It sounds reminiscent, somehow”). The same goes for Unnatural Death. Once Lord Peter starts humming along it’s hard to keep up. I’m sure a lot of what he throws out would have been picked up on by readers at the time, but today I don’t think there are many people who know Hillaire Belloc’s poem “The Python,” or that Elinor Glyn coined the phrase “It girl.” And these are just a couple of examples that I think at least some people might still get. They’re the easy ones. Now when Lord P says “Criminals always tend to repeat their effects. Look at George Joseph Smith and his brides. Look at Neill Cream. Look at Armstrong and his tea-parties,” I got two out of three of these, but had forgotten the Armstrong case (if you want to look it up: Herbert Rowse Armstrong, executed in 1922 for poisoning his wife, which was just five years before this book came out). But you’d need nearly a page of notes to sort out the following list of headlines:

Chamberlin and Levine flew the Atlantic, and Segrave bade farewell to Brooklands. The Daily Yell wrote anti-Red leaders and discovered a plot, somebody laid claim to a marquisate, and a Czecho-Slovakian pretended to swim the Channel. Hammond out-graced Grace, there was an outburst of murder at Moscow, Foxlaw won the Gold Cup and the earth opened at Oxhey and swallowed up somebody’s front garden. Oxford decided that women were dangerous, and the electric hare consented to run at the White City. England’s supremacy was challenged at Wimbledon, and the House of Lords made the gesture of stooping to conquer.

I managed to check out a number of these, while others remained riddles (who laid claim to a marquisate?). But I don’t think they were riddles in 1927. They were the stories most people, or at least most people who read books, would have been up on.

Leaving this part of the texture of the novel aside and turning to our cast, I was pleasantly surprised by Unnatural Death. Alongside Lord Peter and Parker there are two dominant female figures literally fighting it out. The bad ‘un is Miss Whittaker, Lord P’s worth adversary. She’s a killer in the great golden age tradition, meaning a nurse with a knowledge of drugs and poisons who also has a flare for the dramatic. She’s also a barely concealed lesbian, and the scene where she drugs Lord P, who resists by accident while he’s barking up the wrong tree, plays like Wodehouse comedy, and very effective Wodehouse comedy at that. It’s one of the truly great scenes in the mystery fiction of the period.

Fighting alongside Lord Peter is Miss Alexandra Katherine Climpson, “a spinster made and not born – a perfectly womanly woman.” She’s also an amateur detective with a penchant for writing breathless letters to her boss about what she’s found out. These read almost like social media posts, with their underlinings and exclamations and all caps. She’s a lot of fun, and equal to Lord Peter both in her detection skills and her inability to see the obvious. I say that because one of the reasons I enjoyed this novel so much is that I had it basically all figured out about halfway through. Which actually helps tighten the suspense at the end as Lord P and Miss Climpson keep failing to make contact, leaving them working towards the truth in a stumbling way that puts them both at risk.

Sticking with the cast, we have Lord Peter himself and Parker. As for Parker, I’m unsure of what actual work he does for Scotland Yard as he mainly seems to just toodle around with Lord Peter. But this was before the day of police procedurals and professionalism. Lord Peter, meanwhile, is an unashamed amateur:

I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don’t you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an’ suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit – not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.

And yet . . . in a biographical note prepared by his uncle this dilettante is also said to be imbued with the “underlying sense of social responsibility which prevents the English landed gentry from being a total loss, spiritually speaking.” Ah, noblesse oblige. Whatever happened to it? It was good for the soul. As it is, Peter is certainly a toff, perhaps a little callous about the little people (Sayers upbraids him at one point for having “the cheerful brutality of the man who has never in his life been short of money”), but he is still one of the good guys and I found myself warming to him for the first time here.

As a student of crime, Lord Peter also has some theories of his own to put forward. The most interesting of these comes by way of a long disquisition he directs at Parker on the subject of “abnormal crimes,” by which he means crimes that have failed because they have been discovered and the perpetrators caught. “But how about the crimes which are never even suspected?” People are only caught if

“they were fools. If you murder someone in a brutal, messy way, or poison someone who has previously enjoyed rollicking health, or choose the very day after a will’s been made in your favour to extinguish the testator, or go on killing everyone you meet till people begin to think you’re the first cousin to a upas tree, naturally you’re found out in the end. But choose somebody old and ill, in circumstances where the benefit to yourself isn’t too apparent, and use a sensible method that looks like natural death or accident, and don’t repeat your effects too often, and you’re safe. I swear all the heart-diseases and gastric enteritis and influenzas that get certified are not nature’s unaided work. Murder’s so easy, Charles, so damned easy – even without special training.”

Is reported murder only the tip of an iceberg? Are the people who get caught only fools, and the annals of true crime filled with exceptions to a more general slaughter being carried out every day unsuspected? Or is Lord Peter just being superior? This puts me in mind of Eliot Spitzer talking about how stupid most criminals were just before his own downfall. But I’d have to give an endnote now to explain who Spitzer was . . .

I really enjoyed Unnatural Death. Critics were quick to jump on the unrealistic way Miss Whittaker did away with her victims, but I can’t say I cared much about that. I was too busy having fun. As I think Sayers was. And Lord Peter too. How can you not smile at a chapter beginning like this? Here’s a man who enjoys life:

The rainy night was followed by a sun-streaked morning. Lord Peter, having wrapped himself affectionately round an abnormal quantity of bacon and eggs, strolled out to bask at the door of the “Fox-and-Hounds.” He filled a pipe slowly and meditated. Within, a cheerful bustle in the bar announced the near arrival of opening time. Eight ducks crossed the road in Indian file. A cat sprang up upon the bench, stretched herself, tucked her hind legs under her and coiled her tail tightly around them as though to prevent them from accidentally working loose. A groom passed, riding a tall bay horse and leading a chestnut with a hogged mane; a spaniel followed them, running ridiculously, with one ear flopped inside-out over his foolish head.

Lord Peter said, “Hah!”

Ha-hah!

Wimsey index

Uncle Meleager’s will is a “fascinating problem” because he sets it up as a treasure hunt for his champagne-socialist niece Hannah to figure out. If she doesn’t, all his money will be left to some Tory charity. Luckily for Hannah, the one clue that he leaves her is that she needs to be frivolous, and if anyone knows about being frivolous it’s Lord Peter Wimsey, who is soon on the case.

Things kick off with Bunter drawing Lord P’s bath and making his breakfast, one of those scenes that make you shake your head at how the upper class lived just a hundred years ago. Then Peter’s sister Mary shows up and puts him on the case of the will. What follows feels like a riff on “The Musgrave Ritual,” with the ritual taking the form here of a crossword puzzle. This puzzle is, in turn, what I think Sayers was really interested in. It’s probably something she always wanted to do. I didn’t play along though, as I can’t stand crossword puzzles. I don’t know why. The riddling clues just strike me as annoying.

If you like those sorts of games, and everyone in the story apparently does as even the resistant Hannah and the reserved Bunter get into the spirit of things, then you’ll probably enjoy this. It’s more fun than I was expecting, which was something more along the lines of the dry discussion of estate law in Unnatural Death (original U.S. title The Dawson Pedigree). You may also expand your vocabulary. I had to look up “ambsace” (the lowest throw of dice, or anything worthless or unlucky), “inspissated” (thickened or congealed), and “viridarium” (an arboretum or ornamental garden). I’ll note in passing that my Word program doesn’t recognize any of these as being proper words. I also didn’t recognize “shingling” or “shingled” as a hairstyle. Apparently this was a short cut or bob cut that was very popular in the 1920s and ‘30s. Shingling was (I believe) a reference to the way the hair looked on the nape of the neck. Anyway, there must have been a lot of it going on, as Sayers refers to it a number of times.

Wimsey index

I don’t rate the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers among my favourites, but I do give them credit for being better written and less formulaic than the usual detective fare. Sayers wasn’t afraid to try new things, and it’s notable how she plays a bit with the way this story is presented, beginning with a big chunk of exposition taking the form of a transcript from a murder inquest. Then there is the matter under consideration, which is wrapped up in a bait-and-switch fashion that would, I think, leave most mystery lovers shaking their heads and smiling just a bit. When is a murder mystery not a murder mystery? I won’t give that one away.

Unlike Whose Body?, which had a wacky body-swapping premise playing out in London, Clouds of Witness presents itself as a more traditional country-house mystery. A bunch of aristos, including Lord Peter’s brother Gerald, the Duke of Denver, and Peter’s sister Lady Mary Wimsey, have gathered at a hunting lodge in Yorkshire. One night the body of Mary’s fiancé, Denis Cathcart, is found shot dead just outside the conservatory door. Because they’d recently had a big argument, Gerald is arrested for Cathcart’s murder, and he doesn’t help his case any by telling some silly stories about what happened on the night in question. Obviously he has something to hide, as does Mary herself. So “the Sherlock Holmes of the West End,” without a lot of help from his siblings, has to go to work to find the real murderer aided only by his “confidential man and assistant sleuth” Bunter and Parker of the Yard.

Sayers has fun tossing around a basket of red herrings before having Lord Peter descend in an airplane arriving from the U.S. as a deux ex machina to save his brother (and the family name). Along the way there are the sort of references that I said in my review of Whose Body? probably require footnotes today. That is, unless you’re the kind of person already familiar with the story of Earl Ferrers (pass notes: the last peer of the realm to be hanged as a common criminal, in 1760) and the Seddon Case (a notorious case of poisoning that was tried in 1912). You also might want notes to let you know what a clerihew is, or that Lord Peter is freely adapting lines from The Merchant of Venice when addressing a ditch. I’ll admit I wasn’t sure about that one and had to look it up. I did not have to look up the word “taradiddle” though, having already discussed it on this blog. But I have to say its appearance here still bothered me, and left me a bit confused as to how it is (or was) regularly used. I think Lady Mary just means a fib.

Moving on to more important matters, there’s a lot of class commentary that I’d like to say is meant to play as comedy but feels like something more. Of course Lord Peter is the ultimate toff. The novel’s first sentence has him waking in Paris, stretching “himself luxuriously between the sheets provided by the Hôtel Meurice.” Soon after, Bunter arrives to inform him that “Your lordship’s bath-water is ready.” For Lord Peter, being a detective is just a “hobby,” and that only one among many:

To Lord Peter the world presented itself as an entertaining labyrinth of side-issues. He was a respectable scholar in five or six languages, a musician of some skill and more understanding, something of an expert in toxicology, a collector of rare editions, an entertaining man-about-town, and a common sensationalist.

All that, and more, being said, Lord P is also a distinguished veteran of four years of combat on the Western Front and can handle himself against muscular ruffians when things get physical. Truly a man of many qualities.

Where I think the class issue comes more into play is in the sexual hijinks. There’s lots of bed-hopping among the lesser nobility, as both Lord Denver and Lady Mary like to slum it between the sheets in adulterous or nearly-adulterous fashion. Mary has agreed to marry Denis, but only to keep up appearances: “I didn’t care about him, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t care a half-penny about me, and we should have left each other alone.” She’d actually been planning on running off with “some quite low-down sort of fellow,” “a Socialist Conchy of neither bowels nor breeding” with the dismal name of George Goyles who’s a member of the Soviet Club but who only likes to talk the talk. (“Conchy,” in case you were wondering, is short for “conscientious objector.” I had to look that up as well.) Goyles, it turns out, was really just looking to sponge off the family’s wealth. This leads to a family discussion that is the funniest part of the book, and I’m sure intentionally so. Nevertheless, it’s not a very edifying portrait of the nobility, with Mary only agreeing to marry Denis so long as “she should be considered a free agent, living her own life in her own way, with the minimum of interference.” This is the 1920s mind you, and what being a “free agent” means is basically having an open marriage, among other things. Add to this the fact that Denis, much like Mr. Goyles, has no interest in Mary aside from her money and only wants (in his own words) to go on “keeping my mistress on my wife’s money” and we start to think like D. H. Lawrence about how beastly are the bourgeoisie.

Nor is Gerald, the Duke of Denver, much better in this regard. He’s married, but is carrying on an adulterous affair with a local beauty in Yorkshire, who is also married. This actually puts her life at risk as her husband is an abusive brute. You’d like to think that some things just aren’t done, but the fact is that they are done. Apparently quite a lot. It’s easy to skim over a comment made in the report on the inquest, that “In the kind of society to which the persons involved in this inquiry belonged, such a misdemeanour as cheating at cards was regarded as far more shameful than such sins as murder and adultery.” We’ve been warned.

The Duke of Denver does have some standards though, choosing to protect the identity of his rustic mistress even to the point of putting his own life and liberty in jeopardy. And this is a source of comedy too, as comes out when he meets with his brother just before the trial and explains his own theory on how the justice system should work:

“It ain’t my business to prove anything,” retorted his grace, with dignity. “They’ve got to show I was there, murderin’ the fellow. I’m not bound to say where I was. I’m presumed innocent, aren’t I, till they prove me guilty? I call it a disgrace. Here’s a murder committed, and they aren’t taking the slightest trouble to find the real criminal. I give ‘em my word of honor, to say nothin’ of an oath, that I didn’t kill Cathcart – though, mind you, the swine deserved it – but they pay no attention. Meanwhile, the real man’s escapin’ at his confounded leisure. If I were only free, I’d make a fuss about it.”

Ah, such naivety. As the high-powered defence lawyer had earlier explained to Lord Peter, a criminal trial forgoes such illusions. “I don’t care two-pence about the truth,” he says. “I want a case. It doesn’t matter to me who killed Cathcart, provided I can prove it wasn’t Denver. It’s really enough if I can throw reasonable doubt on its being Denver.” This is a point most laypeople should keep in mind. Trials are never about discovering the truth. They are about the preponderance of evidence. To win, a lawyer doesn’t need the truth but “a case.”

It’s a silly story, but at least it’s not quite as silly as Whose Body? Perhaps because I was reading it at the same time, I thought I saw various connections to The Hound of the Baskervilles, from the sucking bog to the exotic beauty of Mrs. Grimethorpe mirroring that of Beryl Stapleton. But perhaps I was just imagining things. In any event, I think most readers will guess what’s going on ahead of schedule. “What frightful idiots we were not to see the truth right off!” Lord Peter says to Parker. And he was. Meanwhile, the actual events of the fatal evening involve such a crazy series of coincidences that one is reminded again of farce. And the business of Lord P hopping on a plane for a quick skip across the pond to get the evidence he needs to save his brother struck me as a bit much. But this was entertainment a hundred years ago. It was a different sort of place. I mean, out in the country Lord Peter is still getting around by dog-cart.

Sayers began working on Clouds of Witness as she was still writing Whose Body?, so obviously she was already planning on Wimsey being a franchise figure she could surround with a cast of recurring supporting characters. The ball was just starting to roll.

Wimsey index