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 ***
Literary Treats 