Fresh off my recent victories with Dame Agatha’s work (woohoo!), I decided to give her contemporaries a try. First up: Dorothy L. Sayers, a founder and early president of the Detection Club, to which Christie also belonged, and which set up the whole “fair play” rules for detective fiction in the first place.
Sayers’ best-known mysteries are the Lord Peter Wimsey series. I tried reading the first book Whose Body? over a decade ago, and found it too boring to finish, but I decided to give it a go again this year, and see if perhaps pitting my wits against her sleuth made the story more compelling.
And… it did. It still took me over three months to finish the book — an especially long time considering it’s only 197 pages long. I’m afraid that as great a writer as Sayers is — and there are some sections in the book that are just *chef’s kiss* stylistically — I’m never going to devour her mysteries like I do Christie’s. And I’m not sure why either. Her writing is a bit like Agatha Christie meets PG Wodehouse, and those are two of my favourite authors, but for some reason, I struggled with Sayers’ writing.
Regardless, Whose Body? has an incredible hook for a mystery: a man discovers a dead body in his bathtub. The body of the dead man is naked, except for a pair of pince nez (a kind of eyeglasses) on his face. He bears a remarkable resemblance to Reuben Levy, a wealthy Jewish financier who went missing the night before, yet there are enough differences that the body clearly is not the financier’s. Detectives check the local hospital, and there are no bodies missing from their morgue. Whose body is it, and where is Reuben Levy?
Did I Solve It? (No Spoilers)
Well, yes, but I don’t think it’s as big a cause for celebration as solving an Agatha Christie mystery is. Unlike Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey is pretty open about his thought processes, so the killer’s identity was easy to figure out.
The couple of red herrings that came up were revealed as such fairly quickly, often with Wimsey pointing out how they didn’t fit the physical evidence. Now, with an Agatha Christie book, that wouldn’t necessarily mean the characters are definitely innocent, so I continued to keep them on my suspect list.
But then emerged a suspect who knew Levy, had a motive for getting him out of the way, and had a connection to the man in the tub. At first I thought it couldn’t be this person; they were too obvious a suspect, especially given that the relevant information was revealed only about halfway through the book. But then I flipped back to earlier chapters to see earlier scenes with them, and what I found only confirmed they had the opportunity to carry out the crimes.
And sure enough, it wasn’t long before Lord Peter confirmed my suspicions. I suppose I can feel proud that technically, Lord Peter took an extra chapter or two after I figured it out to reach the same conclusion. But again, I don’t think Sayers was being particularly sneaky about her reveal to the reader, so I think I figured it out precisely when the author intended me to.
My Verdict on Dorothy L. Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey
She’s an incredibly skilled writer. There’s a wonderful passage late in the book:
When lovers embrace, there seems no sound in the world but their own breathing. So the two men breathed face to face. (page 174)
It’s so masterfully written; you can practically feel the charge in the air as Lord Peter Wimsey makes eye contact with the murderer.
Through Lord Peter’s dialogue, Sayers also shares some gems about detective fiction:
“That’s just what happened, as a matter of fact,” said Lord Peter. “You see Lady Swaffham, if ever you want to commit a murder, the thing you’ve got to do is to prevent people from associatin’ their ideas. Most people don’t associate anythin’ — their ideas just roll about like so may dry peas on a tray, makin’ a lot of noise and goin’ nowhere, but once you begin lettin’ ’em string their peas into a necklace, it’s goin’ to be strong enough to hang you, what?”
“Dear me! said Mrs. Tommy Frayle, with a little scream, “what a blessing it is none of my friends have any ideas at all!”
“Y’see,” said Lord Peter, balancing a piece of duck on his fork and frowning, “it’s only in Sherlock Holmes and stories like that, that people think things out logically. Or’nar’ly, if somebody tells you somethin’ out of the way, you just say, ‘By Jove!’ or ‘how sad!’ an’ leave it at that, an’ half the time you forget about it, ‘unless somethin’ turns up afterwards to drive it home.” (page 117)
It’s a brilliant piece of writing. Light, funny, and with nice comic touches like the part about Lord Peter frowning at the duck on his fork (I love how she phrased that!). It’s also sharp and incisive commentary about some of the conventions of detective fiction and how unnatural it is to have the important clues and evidence laid out so neatly for the reader.
As someone trying to solve this mystery with Lord Peter, it’s also a sly invitation to look more closely at information I may have easily overlooked earlier on, because they may be important. And indeed, when I re-read sections from earlier in the book to confirm details about my suspect, I had to applaud Sayers for how masterfully she sprinkled relevant details into the narrative. There’s good reason I didn’t suspect this person until Sayers meant to reveal them as suspicious, and kudos to the author for that. She also later mentions a highly telling clue that I missed altogether, so that was a nice new bit for me to realize after the fact.
Ultimately, despite my admiration for her writing skill, I don’t think I’ll continue with Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Her style just isn’t a page turner for me, and the mystery element isn’t enough of a puzzle that I’ll want to keep trying to solve them. Still, I’m glad I read this. Her approach is so different from Agatha Christie’s that this gives me a better idea of what golden age detective fiction was like, and this book in particular gave me a better appreciation for how a mystery like The Honjin Murders is structured.
***SPOILERS BELOW***
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