Not at all what I was expecting. But then, as I noted in my review of Unnatural Death, Dorothy Sayers did like to throw some curves at her readers.
What we have here isn’t a golden age murder mystery in London or some British country house but rather Lord Peter investigating The Mystery of the Wax Museum on a trip to America. A famous sculptor by the name of Loder, you see, has done away with his mistress and turned her into a life-size, electroplated couch decoration and is about to do the same to the handsome actor that he had suspected (wrongly) of having had an affair with her. But Lord Peter intervenes and it’s the crazy artist who ends up in the vat.
This is so much The Mystery of the Wax Museum that it made me look that film up. It came out in 1933 and was based on an unpublished story by Charles S. Belden that the studio had bought the rights to. Belden’s story had only been written in 1932, and since this story was first published in 1928 it seems Sayers has bragging rights. Did the idea of a mad artist making statues out of people go back further? There’s Browning’s famous poem “My Last Duchess,” but that wasn’t the same thing.
The story here is so nutty it’s hard not to see it as Sayers just making a joke. That’s the sense I got anyway starting with the description of the Egotists’ Club, which is the setting where first the actor and then Lord Peter tell the tale. This is the sort of club where the members are expected, even required, to entertain each other with stories. And once they’ve heard this one I’m sure they all went home satisfied. I would say that none of them believed a word of it, but the way it’s presented suggests we’re supposed to think that it actually happened. Unless the actor and Lord P were somehow in on it together.
The other thing the intro to the club lets us know is that, as Lord Peter puts it, “Nobody minds coarseness but one must draw the line at cruelty.” It’s cruelty that makes what’s Loder has done abominable, but coarseness runs a close second. When Lord Peter visits him at home and realizes what’s been done to the mistress and how narrowly he escaped the same fate he puts it to his audience directly: “I can’t say I had any great fancy for figuring as part of Loder’s domestic furniture. I’ve always hated things made in the shape of things – volumes of Dickens that turn out to be a biscuit-tin, and dodges like that; and, though I take no overwhelming interest in my own funeral, I should like it to be in good taste.” Murder is one thing, but there are also crimes against art.
Alex Good 