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?

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

At the end of my review of The Drowning Pool I drew attention to the scene where Lew Archer goes for a swim in the “cool clear Pacific.” The ocean is an oasis of purity despite the foul run-off dumped into it from the city, which in an earlier novel he had likened to a river of shit. “They poured their sewage into it,” he says of the ocean, “but it couldn’t be tainted.”

Only a few years later in The Barbarous Coast things have gotten worse. At the end of this novel the mentally shattered Isobel Graff sits on the beach and shakes her fist at the “muttering water” of the Pacific, calling it a “dirty old cesspool.” So much for not being tainted. Things have taken a grim turn, even in Malibu.

Or maybe I should say especially in Malibu. And Hollywood. Archer casts a very cold, dyspeptic eye on L.A.’s la dolce vita as he once again takes on a missing person case that ends tragically. The beautiful people of Malibu and Hollywood are all somehow on the make, not to mention in bed with gangsters. They disgust Archer. At the Channel Club’s upscale (and naturally decadent) pool party he grumps how “I felt like slugging somebody. There wasn’t anybody big enough around.” The men are “faeries” (which always means a wimp, going back to Chandler) or phonies. Simon Graff has “lived too long among actors. He was a citizen of the unreal city, a false front leaning on scantlings.” That “unreal city” is I think an allusion to The Waste Land, and when Archer overhears a conversation about arranging an abortion at a party it also made me think of that poem.

Macdonald, who had a Ph.D. in English and was, according to his biographer, “one of the most brilliant graduate students in the history of the University of Michigan,” knew what he was doing. And as I’ve mentioned before, Archer is a learned man as well when it comes to literary matters. When his screenwriter friend asks him if he’s read Flaubert’s Salammbô he responds “A long time ago, in translation. I don’t remember the story.” It’s hard to imagine another private detective of this or any other age apologizing for this. (For the record, I haven’t read Salammbô, even in translation, and don’t know the story either.) In a later conversation at the same party a drunk woman explains how her words don’t always come out like she wants them to. “Like in James Joyce,” she says. Then she goes on to ask if Archer knows that Joyce’s “daughter was schizzy?” Now this is something I was aware of, but it’s not a factlet I would expect to hear at a Malibu party, even in 1956.

Given this highbrow showboating, I enjoyed it all the more when Archer tells the screenwriter that detective work keeps him in beer and skittles, then immediately asks “By the way, what are skittles?” The writer says he lets the studio’s research department look things like that up. In case you are wondering, skittles weren’t a candy back then but a pub game where you try to knock down wooden pins.

The story plays out in a similar fashion to the earlier novels. As noted, it’s another missing person case, though that’s not how it starts out. Archer is feeling his age, which is pushing 40 (the same as Macdonald when he wrote the book). And nearing 40 was middle-aged in the 1950s. Archer’s even giving some thought to dating, as “A man got lonely in the stucco wilderness, pushing forty with no chick, no child.” As it is, his sidekick is a poor romantic sap from Toronto who ends up getting the living crap beaten out of him on several occasions. It’s not a good idea to hang out with these hard-boiled types. “Call me trouble looking for a place to happen,” is how Archer describes himself and his job. No wonder he’s got no chick.

Again the plot is set in motion by a hot girl. Or a couple of them actually. You could blame the older men who chase after them, but the one girl is referred to as “a loco mare in heat” (that’s from her father) and the other a “sexburger.” Archer himself is chaste, though as always his male gaze lingers on every breast in his area code. And one can understand why when they overflow the front of a strapless dress “like whipped cream.” But when we get a description of a breast rising when a girl raises her arm to brush her hair we may wonder at why this part of the female anatomy so fixes his attention. That is what breasts do. Why is Archer always staring?

The plot is bonkers. Macdonald tosses us a kind of explanation at the end and you’ll really have to focus to keep it straight. There’s blackmailing and double crosses and a lot of what seemed to me to be pretty indiscriminate murder. Not to mention some dodgy pop psychology that the head shrink at a sanatorium walks us through. I thought it was all a load of hooey, and the ending really felt rushed, but by this point I think an Archer novel was pretty much set and readers knew what to expect. And they wanted more.

Archer index