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

Introducing Lord Peter Wimsey. And he sure doesn’t seem like much in the first description we have of him: “His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.”

He does better after that, but the takeaway is that Lord Peter is an eccentric character. A dandy in his dress, a toff in his manners. He can put on a monocle and top hat to go out, or lounge at home “in a bathrobe cheerfully patterned with unnaturally variegated peacocks.” His clothes, we’re told “are a kind of rebuke to the world at large.” He collects incunabula and plays Brahms on his piano. He also talks to himself and drops his “g”s, which is something I didn’t think British aristos did, but I’ll defer to Sayers as an authority. Though I’ve tried and I’m still not sure what pronouncing “ordinarily” as “or’nar’ly” actually sounds like.

For such a fellow, becoming a detective is something incongruous. As one serving lady complains to Lord Peter’s butler Bunter, “policework ain’t not fit occupation for a gentleman, let alone a lordship.” And it’s a handicap he recognizes, feeling himself to be an “amateur” who has been “hampered in his career as a private detective by a public-school education.”

But being a member of “the real aristocracy” (his mother’s a duchess, his older brother a duke) has real advantages. For example he gets hired here because the mother of a man who has been falsely charged with murder feels “safe in the hands of a real gentleman.” And even more than this his being a member of the upper class gives him powerful connections that put him on an equal footing with the police. Indeed, they have a tendency to defer to him. When the lead detective on the case tries to get Lord Peter to butt out of the investigation, his chief phones him up and tells him that “every facility is to be given to Lord Peter Wimsey.” The Chief is a close friend of Peter’s mother, you see.

Of course, the police defer to Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple too. You tend to see this most often in British detective fiction and I guess some of it has to do with the class system. Though it rubs off on the one American character we meet here as well, who makes time to be interviewed by Lord Peter because “if he had a weak point, it was the British aristocracy.” And much the same goes for forensics. I’ve mentioned before how often Miss Marple is casually invited in to look over crime scenes along with the police, and something similar happens in this book as apparently police tape hadn’t been invented yet and Lord Peter can examine the corpse that is found in the bathtub on his own, even having pictures taken, before the police arrive.

Other people though are aware of Lord Peter’s preciosity, and in the case of his Scotland Yard buddy Parker they can even call him out on it:

“You want to be consistent, you want to look pretty, you want to swagger debonairly through a comedy of puppets or else to stalk magnificently through a tragedy of human sorrows and things. But that’s childish. If you’ve any duty to society in the way of finding out the truth about murders, you must do it in any attitude that comes handy. You want to be elegant and detached? That’s all right, if you find the truth out that way, but it hasn’t any value in itself, you know. 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 it like that. Life’s not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You can’t be a sportsman. You’re a responsible person.”

To this Lord P can only make the sulky response that all of Parker’s reading in theology have had “a brutalizing influence.” That’s quite funny, in a dry way, but the fact is Parker is another eccentric. And I could expand further on the number of weirdos in this book who fall into the category of “men without women” but my notes are likely long enough as it is.

As readers of golden age detective fiction, however, we know that Lord Peter’s persona does have a “value in itself,” just as the posturings of Holmes and Poirot and countless other fictional detectives have. It makes them fun to read about. And further in his defence, the eccentric killer (who Lord P likens to an “artist” and a “poet of crime”) takes a similar “sportsman” tack, effectively shaking hands with his nemesis at the end by way of a written confession. I wouldn’t say it takes an amateur to catch an amateur, but in this case it probably helped.

Finally, Lord Peter gets points for having had a distinguished record in the Great War, an experience that still haunts him. I don’t know, but seeing as this book came out in 1923 I think it likely he’s one of the earliest cases in the fiction of the period of PTSD.

Sayers wanted to write detective fiction that would also have literary merit. Or, in her own words, she set out to produce something “less like a conventional detective story and more like a novel.” Many people think she did. I don’t, but that’s not a knock against what she did achieve. The thing is, genre fiction has its own special qualities and I don’t think trying to be literary helps it at all.

I did, however, think that a book like this would be helped by including the sort of academic textual apparatus that you find in novels that are part of the Penguin Classics or Oxford World Classics series. Endnotes in particular would have been helpful. Among the names that I thought general readers might appreciate some assistance with were Adolf Beck (a famous case of false conviction from the 1890s), Leon Kestrel (an adversary of the fictional detective Sexton Blake, a contemporary of Sherlock Holmes), Charles Garvice (a prolific author of romance novels who died in 1920), George Joseph Smith (the Brides in the Bath killer, referenced twice here for obvious reasons), G. A. Henty (a late Victorian adventure novelist), Joey Bagstock (a character in Dickens’s Dombey and Son), and Michael Finsbury (a character in the Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne novel The Wrong Box). I got about half of these and I thought that was doing pretty well.

So far I haven’t said much about the actual mystery being solved. It’s a double-barreled affair, with a dead body being discovered in a bathtub at the same time as a prominent financier goes missing. Obviously the two crimes are linked, but it’s hard to say what’s going on when the body in the bath can’t be identified.

I don’t think it will take many readers long to figure out whodunit. Why he dun it the way he dun did it is another matter. The killer sees himself as a criminal genius, but despite having years to plan the perfect crime what he comes up with is the silliest ruse imaginable. Just for starters, why does he stash the body in a bath, and give it a pair of pince-nez? Just because he happened to pick up the pince-nez by accident, and putting the body in his neighbour’s tub struck him as a lark. “It occurred to me pleasantly how delightful it would be to deposit my parcel with him and see what he made of it.”

We had been warned by Sayers about putting much stock in a killer’s motive, but that’s not the issue here. The killer had as reasonable a motive as any killer does. What’s disturbing is that he had no motive aside from whimsy for arranging things the way he did. Admittedly, disposing of a body is where a lot of real killers, especially serial killers, fall down. But I don’t see why such a clever fellow as this couldn’t come up with something better than what he did. I guess, when it came to killing, he was just another amateur.

Wimsey index

An index to my reviews of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories and Novels by Dorothy L. Sayers (and others).

Whose Body?
Clouds of Witness

Mystery and Detective Fiction

This is called a “mystery” in the title, but I think it would have made more sense to have called it, as Watson dubbed most of Holmes’s early cases, an “adventure.” Holmes himself isn’t involved, having been sent away by Watson for some much needed rest and recuperation, and the story has our narrator heading off alone to Wiltshire and the usual pile of a country estate, apparently to act as a sort of bodyguard for Sir Harry Fairfax, the sixth baronet of Darkwater Hall. Sir Harry had sent one of the local peasants, a degenerate churl by the name of Black Ralph, to jail (or gaol, as they say in the old country), and now that Ralph is out he is apparently gunning for revenge.

Watson, using skills picked up from assisting Holmes, is able to figure out some elementary things and in the end he stops Ralph from killing Harry, though not without a bit of luck. There’s no mystery to any of this though. The only mysterious business going on is the S&M playacting that the lord and lady are up to, and Watson just blunders his way into finding out what that’s all about. Otherwise, this seemed a pointless sort of a story, interesting mainly for being written by Kingsley Amis and for the sexy subtext (it was first published in Playboy). This latter point shouldn’t be held against it though because Playboy really was a magazine worth reading, back in the day. When you were done looking at the pictures.

Holmes index