Hammett’s writing, tastes, politics, and life experiences were a world away from Sayers’, but he felt her novel only missed being ‘a pretty good detective story’ because of a lack of pace: ‘Its developments come just a little too late to knock the reader off his chair.’
She had written enough short stories to publish a collection, Lord Peter Views the Body, under the new imprint of Victor Gollancz. A left-wing firebrand, Gollancz had rejected his orthodox Jewish upbringing and become a highly successful businessman with an unrivalled flair for marketing. As managing director of Sayers’ publishers, he revolutionized the advertising of fiction, with two-column splashes in the broadsheets which made his books seem important and exciting.
When he left Ernest Benn to set up on his own, Gollancz built a list of talented detective novelists, promoting newcomers like Milward Kennedy and Gladys Mitchell. But Sayers was much more bankable, and he begged her to join him. She admired Gollancz’s intelligence and drive, and trusted his judgement – it was Gollancz who recommended her to a new literary agent, David Higham. Author and publisher had starkly contrasting political and religious views, but they enjoyed each other’s company, and their mutual respect and loyalty was lifelong.
Since her next novel was under contract to Benn, Gollancz started with the short stories, and came up with a simple but striking yellow and black dust jacket. Gollancz, who was as desperate as his authors for his titles to be noticed (oddly, this is not a trait which all writers associate with their publishers), honed this technique to perfection in the next few years. The bold, yellow jackets, with typography in varying sizes and typefaces, were as recognizable as advertising posters – and Gollancz duly hired Edward McKnight Kauffer, an American modernist whose posters for the London Underground were much admired, to produce eye-catching abstract artwork for works of detective fiction.
Gollancz claimed to have invented the term ‘omnibus volume’; long before the era of the fat airport thriller, he was convinced that readers liked bulky books, which yielded good profits. He had an idea for a huge anthology of mystery stories, and persuaded Sayers to edit it. With his encouragement, she researched the history of the detective story in the course of compiling a weighty gathering of genre fiction. She was probably influenced by Wright and Wrong – that is, by comparable projects undertaken in the United States by Willard Huntington Wright (better known as detective novelist S. S. Van Dine) and in Britain by E. M. Wrong. Her lengthy essay introducing the first series of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror showed the breadth of her reading and her critical insight.
As Sayers’ reputation blossomed, the intense happiness of the early days of marriage faded. Pressure of work, and personal circumstances, took their toll. During the war, Mac had been gassed, two of his brothers had died and another was badly injured. His previous wife reckoned that this sequence of personal disasters transformed his personality, and not in a good way. Now Mac was afflicted by a series of health problems, and owed money to the taxman. When he had to give up his job and go freelance, his morale – and temper – suffered. Once again Sayers found herself let down by a man. Her reaction was to feast on comfort food and to drink more than was good for her.
Despairing of her ‘rapidly fattening frame’, she had her hair cut in an Eton crop, a severe, boyish style that had recently supplanted the ‘bob’. Her choice of clothes became even more outlandish, and on one occasion she turned up to a public function in a man’s rugby shirt. Her plain appearance and fondness for masculine dress led some people to assume she was a lesbian. But with detective novelists, as with detective novels, it is a mistake to judge a book by its cover.
After her father died in September 1928, Sayers and Mac bought a house in Witham, Essex. Today, her statue stands across the road from her home in Newland Street. Sayers’ mother died ten months after her father, and the double bereavement was a crushing blow. A contract with an American publisher enabled her to resign from Benson’s, but she took on responsibility for caring for an elderly aunt, as well as supporting John Anthony. Money remained tight. Mac Fleming’s health worsened, and as her increasing fame provoked his jealousy, he became depressive and difficult. He had promised to adopt John Anthony, but kept putting off any action. So the boy stayed with Ivy, and when Ivy suggested moving nearer to Witham, Sayers discouraged her. She had her hands full with Mac.
When Anthony Berkeley invited her to dine with fellow detective novelists, he offered her much more than simply the opportunity to socialize with people who played the same literary game. For Sayers, the Detection Club came to mean an opportunity to escape for a few hours, just as the stories the Club members wrote were enjoyed by people in search of escapism.
Sayers was becoming interested in real-life murders, absorbing herself in the fears and passions of victims, suspects and culprits alike. She and her colleagues in the Detection Club understood that these cases posed puzzles of their own – and itched to solve them. These puzzles differed from the contrived complexities of the typical detective story. They concerned guilt and innocence, the mysteries of human motivation, and the frighteningly unpredictable workings of justice. And the crime that made the greatest impression on the Detection Club was the brutal stabbing that led to the equally shocking execution of Edith Thompson.
Notes to Chapter 2
My account of Sayers’ life and work owes much to information supplied by the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, Sayers’ reviews of detective fiction, and the biographies and collections of letters mentioned in the Select Bibliography, in particular Barbara Reynolds’ Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, together with material held in the Sayers Archive at the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois.
One successful Golden Age suspense novel (written by a single woman) even saw a deranged serial killer decide to solve that problem by ridding the world of unmarried females.
To identify the book in question would be too much of a spoiler, but the author was Ethel Lina White (1876–1944), a specialist in ‘women in jeopardy’ novels, and best known for The Wheel Spins (1936), filmed by Hitchcock as The Lady Vanishes. Raymond Chandler co-wrote the screenplay for The Unseen, also based on a White novel, Midnight House (1942).
the Sexton Blake series
Blake was another private eye with rooms in Baker Street; he was originally created by Harry Blyth in 1893. The many later, often pseudonymous, writers of Blake stories (Margery Allingham may have been among them) included the science fiction and fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock (born 1939) whose first Blake story, Caribbean Crisis (1962), a locked room mystery with a corpse in a bathysphere, is now a sought-after rarity. Blake was brought to the television screen in the Sixties, with Laurence Payne (1919–2009) in the title role; Payne later wrote crime novels, starting with The Nose on My Face (1961), a whodunit filmed as Girl in the Headlines.
Philip Guedella, a Jewish historian
Guedella (1889–1954) was a barrister and popular writer who stood five times as a Liberal candidate for Parliament without success. His epigrams include ‘Even reviewers read a Preface’, while his remark about detective stories is quoted in Antony Shaffer’s play Sleuth.
The Daniels puzzle remained unsolved.
Three years later, a workman called Prudhomme was interrogated by police after his wife accused him of stealing a gold watch, which was discovered at his home. But the watch proved not to be May Daniels’, and justice went no further than seeing the French police charge Prudhomme with the theft of a bicycle, and his wife with stealing vegetables.
a projected book about Wilkie Collins
The surviving fragment
