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.
Alex Good 