Thoughts on things...

2. Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane

It was in 1923 that Dorothy L. Sayers, then aged thirty, published her first detective novel - Whose Body? - so I’ve just crept in under the centenary banner; although this post is really about the four novels that trace Lord Peter Wimsey’s relationship with Harriet Vane. The first - Strong Poison - appeared in 1930. Have his Carcase followed in 1932, then Gaudy Night (1935) and lastly Busman’s Honeymoon, which began life as a co-written play and appeared as a book in 1937. The first three of these were televised with Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter (above); I’ve started watching them on YouTube and they are absolutely marvellous - slow by today’s standards (all the better for it) - remarkably faithful to the books, and the two leads are SUPERB. Chemistry flying all over the place.

I was thinking about Gaudy Night recently when I spent a few days working in the Bodleian, where Harriet Vane goes to research her study of Sheridan Le Fanu - in between investigating an outbreak of criminal activity at her fictional Oxford college, Shrewsbury (based on Dorothy L. Sayers’ own Somerville). The intensity with which I pictured Harriet - felt her earnest, sometimes charmless, somehow sexualized presence in the Radcliffe Camera - recalled the moment when ‘Shortly before noon, a hand touched her shoulder’ - Lord Peter Wimsey’s hand… All this is testament to the passionate engagement with which Dorothy generated the story of this couple, which she had intended to end with marriage in Strong Poison then, for financial reasons, kept going for another three books - thereby creating a courtship of detailed and satisfying complexity.

At this point - allowing counsel for the prosecution to speak early - I should say that lots of people seem to dislike and even despise the Sayers oeuvre. Appallingly snobby, somebody once said to me (a criticism that can be levelled at most Golden Age crime novels, although I suppose the character of Lord Peter Wimsey - second son of a duke, awash with money, replete with ‘the arrogance of caste’, dropping consonants like so many casual sovereigns into the palms of the lower orders - underscores the problem). Then there is this, from A. N. Wilson in the London Review of Books:

For the purposes of writing this essay, I have reread Gaudy Night, Have his Carcase and The Nine Tailors [1934], setting myself the sole and compulsorily generous criterion that I should attempt, during this rereading, to recapture what I enjoyed about these books when I was in my teens. There seems absolutely no point in making a catalogue of their faults…. Presumably, for those who like that sort of thing, one of the highest moments in modern fiction occurs when Lord Peter, wearing academic costume, proposes to Harriet Vane, standing in the moonlight in New College Lane….

There was a time when, reading such an expression of polite contempt, I would have felt real embarrassment at my admiration for these books, which has lasted long past my impressionable teens. As for this, again from Wilson - The fact that her novels are not to my taste does not blind me to the fact that they have increased the sum of human happiness - I have rarely read a more patronizing endorsement; but today, I’m glad to say, I don’t give a stuff. Nor do I think that Lord Peter’s proposal on New College Lane is a high point of modern fiction, incidentally. Yet I can see it, and it is alive, and that means something.