A curious affair indeed, as this is a story that goes in a couple of directions I didn’t anticipate. We begin traditionally enough, with Watson describing Holmes in one of his drug-soaked longueurs between cases. But then one of Watson’s calls – to attend upon a visiting American who has been beaten up during the theft of a painting, presumed a Titian, he had brought to London for verification – turns into one of Holmes’s clients. And from there we take several twists and turns before a revelation at the end not of who was behind the theft of the painting (though that’s included) but of the dual investigation that was going on all this time.

You see, this isn’t primarily a Sherlock Holmes mystery but one starring the American detective Miss Butterworth, the creation of Anna Katherine Green. Something very alert readers (not me!) will have twigged to in the name of the hotel manager being Gryce, since Ebenezer Gryce was the main detective created by Green. (Inspector Whicher gets name-dropped too, but that’s just a throwaway.) Anyway, it’s Miss Butterworth who really solves the case and then has to explain it all to Holmes. This puts him out to the point where he is said to be furious at her condescension, but she tells him he shouldn’t sulk because nobody’s perfect. I have to say though in Holmes’s defence that he has no reason to feel one-upped because Miss Butterworth had been investigating the case for months before he got involved, and she had far more personal information about what was going on.

Sara Paretsky, the creator of V. I. Warshawski, is obviously making a feminist point here, but it’s not one that I found took anything away from the story, which was enjoyable all the way through and stands well enough on its own.

Holmes index

It’s curious the way the Lord Peter Wimsey stories by Dorothy Sayers are so different in tone from the novels. To be sure the novels have a comic spirit to them, but the stories, at least in the early going, dial this way up. You can tell as much just from the titles, which seem intent on wearing their silliness as a badge. They can also be clever too though, as in this story and “The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question,” where there’s a pun that you’re not expecting.

This is also not a true mystery story. A society woman approaches Lord Peter and asks him if he can retrieve some stolen jewelry. But she knows who stole it, and Lord P doesn’t doubt her, so all that happens is that Lord P has to figure out a way to trick the thief into giving the jewels back. You may think of stories like “The Purloined Letter” or “A Scandal in Bohemia,” but in those cases Dupin and Holmes respectively have to find out where the item in question is. That takes some detection skills. Here Lord Peter just has to find a way to blackmail the blackmailer, and that turns more on sleight of hand than ratiocination.

Another thing that got me wondering here is the way Sayers presents Lord Peter as not just a toff and a dandy but effeminate. This despite the fact that he served with distinction on the Western front in the Great War, has a love of motor cars, and can manage himself in a fist fight with local roughs. But his first appearance in this story is that of “a young man, attired in a mauve dressing-gown of great splendour, from beneath the hem of which peeped coyly a pair of primrose silk pyjamas.” I think the pyjamas go with his “sleek, straw-coloured hair.” In any event, if an author described a character in this manner today you would immediately catch the implication that he was gay, and that might have been true in the 1920s as well. But Lord Peter isn’t gay, he’s just eccentric. I’m not sure what Sayers was about in drawing him this way. Perhaps it was to show why people so often underestimate him, which is something he frequently turns to his advantage. But then are the silk pyjamas only meant to be a disguise?

Wimsey index

While reading Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism I came across an account of contemporary conspiracy thinking, and how such ideas as that of George Soros as evil puppet-master “could never have taken root if multiple economic and social crises, not to mention the unpunished ruling class crime wave preceding the financial crash, hadn’t established the orectic conditions for their uptake.” In other words, people had to be first primed to believe things that there was little evidence for. They had to want to believe, which is what “orectic” refers to.  The dictionary definition is “relating to appetite or desire.” It’s not a word I’d encountered before, but comes from the Latin for stimulating appetite and the Greek for desire.

I didn’t know “orectic,” but it made me think of an obscure word that I do use occasionally for desire: esurient. This comes from the Latin esurire (to be hungry) and has the meaning of hungry or, more often, greedy. I remember first coming across it when reading Will Durant’s History of Civilization, in a description of greedy heirs waiting for the deaths of their parents as “esurient ghouls.” That’s always stuck in my head. But orectic, which has a similar meaning, was new to me. I don’t think either word is used much now, though spellcheck recognizes esurient while orectic is flagged.

Words, words, words