Case number two for 2024 is by Dame Agatha’s contemporary. A blog commenter convinced me to give Lord Peter Wimsey another shot (I found Whose Body? well-written, but underwhelming), and they recommended the Harriet Vane starrer Gaudy Night.

The Story: A Book Review

I’m maybe two-thirds of the way through this book, and I’m absolutely adoring it! As someone who studied at an all girls Catholic school all the way from kindergarten to high school, and as an adult (ahem) woman close to a milestone (ahem ahem) high school reunion, Sayers’ descriptions of Shrewsury College at Oxford and their Gaudy Night reunion weekend gave me lots and lots of nostalgic feels. (I went to a co-ed university, so the associations aren’t quite the same.) My high school reunion, called a velada, is also colloquially known as Old Girls Day. I can’t find the specific line anymore (downside of print!), but there’s a reference to Gaudy Night being for the old gals or some similar phrasing, and it warmed my heart to see it.

I also very much enjoyed seeing Harriet experiencing the old campus after a decade or so away. I too haven’t been back to my alma mater’s campus in years, but I can imagine walking through it very much as Harriet does. I can imagine noticing both the familiar and the differences in sights, scents, and sensations. And while I still keep in touch regularly with my closest high school friends (thank you, pandemic Zooms!), I feel Harriet’s sensations of dismay and/or admiration as she meets old classmates for the first time in years, and realizes how little or much they’ve changed.

There are moments when Harriet does come off rather judgey, but well, that’s what naturally happens at these kinds of reunions, isn’t it? I’m sure, and Harriet is also aware, that her old classmates are judging her in turn, whether for her success as a mystery writer, or for her previously being suspected of murder. In a wonderfully mundane but real throwaway line, an old friend calls Harriet “successful,” and Harriet reflects that she knows the friend really meant “hardened.”

Beyond the nostalgia factor, Gaudy Night is also a wonderful exploration of women’s lives in the 1930s, when this was published. Sayers is fantastic at creating characters who breathe. In this novel, women from a diverse range of social classes, backgrounds, and lifestyles give voice to the societal tensions between pursuing academic accolades versus domestic bliss. All of this gets mixed in with Harriet’s own dilemma between wanting to remain independent and intellectual, and falling in love (despite herself) with aristocrat Lord Peter Wimsey. There are many fascinating conversations throughout this story, and I can imagine present-day university students geeking out in lively discussion about this novel and the societal contexts within which it was written. It’s fantastic!

The Mystery: What Actually Happens?

The incidents begin at Gaudy Night, when Harriet receives a couple of poison pen letters, of the O.G. cut-out letters from newspapers type. Even when she returns to London, she continues to receive mean notes. Yet she isn’t the sole target; students and faculty at Shrewsbury College also receive these notes, and all-in-all, the story spans an entire school year or more.

Some notes are petty (one accuses a student of stealing another’s boyfriend); some are mean (the ones to Harriet remind her of her previous murder charge). And one particularly vicious set of notes tells a student she is mentally ill and needs to die by suicide.

Beyond the notes are acts of mischief attributed to a ‘poltergeist,’ and like the notes, they form a spectrum of intensity. Some are mostly nuisance: the school library is turned topsy-turvy, a pile of scholars’ gowns is set on fire, and a book is burned. One is threatening: a dummy wearing a scholar’s gown is hung from the ceiling with a knife through its belly. And one seems particularly cruel: the manuscript that kind-hearted and naive scholar Miss Lydgate has been working on forever is defaced and destroyed, so that she has to start all over again. In an utterly chaotic and confusing chapter, the poltergeist targets several campus buildings in one evening; they cut the power, commit random acts of vandalism, and run off to the next building while Harriet, the Dean, and random assortments of residents give merry chase.

The Mystery: My Spoiler-Free Thoughts

As a case to solve, this mystery is rather baffling. The incidents (too benign to be actual crimes; too malicious to be merely pranks) strike me as without rhyme nor reason, and the targets too spread out to make the motive clear. Unlike Christie who provides us with a fairly manageable list of potential whodunnits, Sayers is unfortunately accurate in showing how challenging it is to narrow down a list of an entire campus-full of suspects. And each potential suspect has tons of opinions on the topic of women in academia. There are so many potentially important details that, for the first time, I used two pens to keep my notes straight; blue ink for suspects, and black ink for important events and clues.

In fact, the sheer volume of incidents even makes me consider if there could be a whole team of perpetrators. Could one person seriously commit all these acts by themselves? Yet there doesn’t seem to be a unifying motive strong enough to make several of them team up. On the other hand, amongst the twenty or thirty potential suspects I’ve met, which of them actually has a strong enough motive to do all these things? When Lord Peter Wimsey arrives to help solve the case, he tells Harriet, “There’s a method in it.” Harriet replies, “Isn’t the motive only too painfully obvious?” [p 358] I’m glad they think so, because alas for my poor ego, I don’t.

At this point, there is only one person whom I think makes sense as the perpetrator, and really, one particular scene that finally gave me a foothold to confidently name a suspect. Yet Peter and Harriet seem to be focusing on a different character, someone whom I suspected at first, yet eventually discarded in favour of my current prime suspect. I’m not gonna lie; their suspicions are shaking my confidence. Whereas I’m used to Christie throwing around red herrings galore, my (very limited) experience with Sayers is that she’s much more straightforward.

Most worrisome for my verdict is a scene where Peter is doing his sly best to pick up clues, and Harriet is noticing how productive his tactics seem to be. Alas for my ego, my suspect isn’t doing nor saying anything at all noteworthy! What on Earth are Peter and Harriet picking up on, that I’m missing?

Part of me wonders if my challenge stems from applying too modern a perspective on this case. Sayers steeps her mystery so much within the social milieu of her characters that I feel like the key lies in something that women of that era find incredibly important, but perhaps may not be as obvious to women in 2024. Or perhaps I’m just trying to make excuses.

Regardless, the suspect Peter and Harriet seem to be focusing on truly does not make sense to me. So I’m going to go with my gut, hope that Sayers is doing a last-minute red herring, and lock in my verdict.

Did I Solve It?

Yes I did! Boo-yah for going with my gut, and boo-yah for not letting Dorothy L Sayers lead me astray with her tricksy little red herrings along the way!

*** SPOILERS BELOW ***

My Verdict

I think Annie did it. She’s a scout (servant) at the dorms whose husband died of suicide, because he couldn’t cope with the financial difficulties he’s facing. A scene where Annie introduces Harriet to her daughters implies that Annie blames women for taking up jobs when there already weren’t enough to go around for the men. She chides her daughter for wanting to open a garage when she grows up, and tells Harriet she is raising her daughters to be “good wives and mothers.” [p 273]

Beyond that, she tells Harriet that she finds academia to be an “unnatural” choice for women.

“Some of these clever ladies are a bit queer. No heart in them… I always think of what it says in the Bible, about ‘much learning hath made thee mad.’ It isn’t a right thing.” [p 143]

The one target all the incidents have in common is Shrewsbury College and the women who’ve chosen to use their degrees towards careers. The vandalism at the library could have caused public humiliation with a VIP visiting that day. The destruction of Miss Lydgate’s manuscript sets her back months, possibly years, in completing her magnum opus. Even the notes to Harriet could be an indictment of how much she’s pushing back at domestic bliss with Peter simply so she could continue her career as a mystery writer.

Annie even points out to Harriet how the incidents didn’t start until after Miss de Vine joins Shrewsbury as a research fellow. That could be her trying to throw Harriet off the scent, but also, Annie could have a personal grudge against Miss de Vine, whom Harriet has described as the ultimate career woman, a “fighter” who cares only about her work.

Annie’s motivation could be revenge towards the college, partly for guiding women towards careers rather than marriage. There could also be a more personal reason behind her revenge; we don’t know what caused her husband’s financial difficulties, but there’s a scene where characters talked about former college employees who’d lost their jobs, so if her husband had been fired by the college, that could add to her anger.

Finally, she could also be attacking the college and its reputation as a preventative measure, to try to shut it down and discredit women’s colleges in general, before her daughters are old enough to become students themselves. Annie very strongly desires for her daughters to choose domestic life over careers, yet her daughters don’t seem to agree, so she may be trying to remove that option from her daughters’ futures. Such an attempt seems totally futile — how can random incidents take down an entire societal system? — yet perhaps that speaks to the fragility of women’s place in society when this book was published.

My Runner-Up Suspect

I also suspected Miss de Vine, simply because of convenience. Harriet gets the first note shortly after meeting Miss de Vine, and so she had the opportunity to leave that first note in the quad, in a way that I don’t think Annie did. At my current chapter, Peter and Harriet also seem to be strongly considering her as their prime suspect, and that’s making me revisit her character, in case I’d dismissed her too soon.

My problem with Miss de Vine as prime suspect is that I can’t figure out the motivation. The one motive I can think of is that she gave up an engagement to focus on her career. She doesn’t seem to regret her choice:

“I simply wasn’t taking as much trouble with him as I should have done over a disputed reading. So I decided he wasn’t my job. …He married an excellent woman who is devoted to him and does make him her job.” [p 213-214]

But perhaps she’s lying into order to ward off suspicion?

Ultimately, the case against her feels too thin for me. She says something that I sense is significant, that people who make someone else their job are “dangerous.” If she does turn out to be the perpetrator, I think the key lies in that particular belief. If, however, as I believe, she is just a red herring, I think that line could be referring to Annie. Annie has made both the memory of her husband and the futures of her kids to be her job, and that’s what makes her dangerous.

At least, that’s what makes sense to me. Let’s see how I do!

The Actual Reveal

Yes, it was Annie!

The one detail I missed is that Miss de Vine is the cause of Annie’s husband’s financial troubles, and therefore Annie blamed her for the husband’s suicide. Peter was focused on Miss de Vine not because he suspected her as the perpetrator, but because he realized she was the initial and primary target that set the perpetrator off. So he looked into her past to see what could have prompted someone to hate her to the extent that they did all the poison pen notes and vandalism incidents.

In that scene I mentioned where Peter and Harriet seemed to be picking up a lot of clues that I was missing, Peter sparks a lively debate over dinner about academia and women’s places in society. Annie doesn’t participate in the debate; she’s in the scene but only to refill Harriet’s coffee cup. That threw me off, because I thought Peter’s goal was to get the perpetrator to say something incriminating, but he was actually trying to learn more about Miss de Vine’s past.

During the debate, Miss de Vine shares a story about a former colleague whom she caught cheating on an academic project. The man, who we later learn is Annie’s husband, had published something about an important historical figure that is actually false. Miss de Vine provided the proof that the man was not only wrong, but also deliberately hid a letter that contradicted the theory he’d published. His crime was academic dishonesty, and Miss de Vine, like the other scholars at Shrewsbury valued academic integrity above everything, and so ended his career.

Possibly because I’m not an academic, but while I understand Miss de Vine’s actions in principle, part of me also sympathizes with Annie’s argument that his lie about a long-dead figure would hardly harm anyone, and exposing the truth wouldn’t even keep a cat alive. Is academic integrity really worth ruining a man’s life, and the lives of his family?

Conceptually, legally, and morally, the answer is yes. But it does feel a rather cold response.