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?

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