Scotland Yard. Like many amateur sleuths, Wimsey benefits from keeping close to the police. The dialogue is flippant, but Wimsey’s worldview is darkened by his wartime experiences. He suffered shell-shock and had a nervous breakdown. When Parker is bothered by the idea of a corpse being shaved and manicured, Wimsey retorts, ‘Worse things happen in war.’
A distinctive amateur sleuth, a lively style and unorthodox storyline compensated for the fact that it is easy to guess whodunit. Sayers was always more interested in describing the culprit’s methods of carrying out and concealing the crime. In a nod to E. C. Bentley’s ground-breaking whodunit Trent’s Last Case, she had the killer refer to ‘that well-thought-out work of Mr. Bentley’s’. Later, it became a regular in-joke for Detection Club members to reference each other in their books.
Having fun with Wimsey offered relief from the depressing reality of life on a tight budget. The rent for her flat was seventy pounds a year, and she struggled to make ends meet. As she told her parents, in one of her innumerable frank and entertaining letters, writing about Wimsey ‘prevents me from wanting too badly the kind of life I do want, and see no chance of getting …’ If the novel did not sell, she intended to abandon her literary ambitions, and take up a permanent job as a teacher. But it was not what she wanted. When an American publisher offered to take Whose Body? she was overjoyed. Soon a British publisher accepted it as well.
While Sayers was working on her first novel, she began a relationship with someone very different from Whelpton, the writer John Cournos. Russian-born, Cournos came from a Jewish background, and his first language was Yiddish. His family emigrated to the United States when he was ten, but he moved to England and established a reputation as a novelist, poet and journalist. Cournos was disdainful about Sayers’ aristocratic detective, but she cheered up when Philip Guedella, a Jewish historian, asserted in the Daily News that ‘the detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds’.
Dorothy L. Sayers and the mysterious Robert Eustace – photographed to publicise The Documents in the Case (by permission of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL).
Dorothy L. Sayers (by permission of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society).
Cournos believed in free love, but Sayers, a High Anglican, was wary about sex outside marriage. Times were changing, and Marie Stopes, author of Married Love, had recently set up the country’s first clinic dispensing contraceptive products and advice – a crucial step towards making birth control socially acceptable. Sayers, however, had not yet overcome her objection to contraception as she did later with the Beast, Bill White. She did not want her relationship with Cournos to have the ‘taint of the rubber shop’.
This mismatch of expectations killed off their affair. She presented a fictionalized version of her emotional battle with Cournos eight years later, when she published Strong Poison. Harriet Vane, a detective novelist and Oxford graduate, is accused of murdering her selfish former lover Philip Boyes. She tells Wimsey that Boyes demanded her devotion, but ‘I didn’t like having matrimony offered as a bad-conduct prize’.
Cournos retaliated with a more intimate and brutal account of their relationship in The Devil is an English Gentleman. Stella, based on Sayers, resists Richard’s overtures, thinking: ‘If I give myself to him, he’ll forsake me.’ Meanwhile Richard ‘waited for the generous gesture, for a token of abandonment on her part; it did not come’. Cournos, who eventually emigrated to the USA, continued to publish books until the early Sixties. His destiny was to be remembered for his doomed romance with Sayers rather than for his own literary efforts.
Sayers started working for Benson’s shortly before Whose Body? was accepted. The job taught her how to use publicity to promote her writing, and the value of branding (before it was known as branding). Not from cussedness, but because she knew the value of a distinctive brand, she insisted on being known as Dorothy L. Sayers, not simply Dorothy Sayers. When her publisher, Ernest Benn, missed out her middle initial on the spine of one book a few years later, she was incandescent. After all, she said, people did not talk about E. Bentley, or G. Chesterton or G. Shaw.
Bill White was earthier than Cournos, and part of his appeal was that he did not share his predecessor’s lofty disdain for crossword puzzles and vulgar limericks. Thanks to him, Sayers experienced at last the sexual pleasure she craved. But once again, a man let her down. It was becoming a pattern in her life.
Sayers had never intended her affair with Bill White to be more than ‘an episode’. On returning to Benson’s, she worked furiously during the day, and then on her new book in the evenings. But the pretence of business as usual took a toll on her health. Her hair fell out, a visible symptom of severe emotional strain, and when it grew again, she decided her ‘little rat’s-tail plaits’ were hideous, and had her hair cut short and started wearing a silver wig.
She kept in touch with Cournos, but was deeply wounded when, having said he was not the marrying kind, he married Helen Kestner Satterthwaite, an American who wrote detective stories under the pen name of Sybil Norton. Biting back despair, Sayers wrote him a letter of congratulation, confiding that she had ‘gone over the rocks’, and that the result was John Anthony. Cournos’s reaction was anger that she had given herself to someone else, after refusing him. ‘Why not me?’ he demanded.
Sayers’ reply amounted to a scream of pain. ‘I have been so bitterly punished by God already, need you really dance on the body?’ The correspondence continued, as she agonized over what had gone wrong between them. One line explains a great deal about the way she led the rest of her life: ‘I am so terrified of emotion, now.’
That terror of emotion never left her. Sayers was devoted to her child, but in her own mind, she had committed ‘a bitter sin’. These were dark days, and she told Cournos, ‘It frightens me to be so unhappy.’ Although she had hoped things would improve, each day seemed worse than the last, and her work was suffering. She dared not even resort to suicide, ‘because what would poor Anthony do then?’ In Cournos’s novel, Stella threatens to kill herself, and Sayers did more than talk about self-harm in her correspondence: suicide forms a significant plot element in each of the first five Wimsey novels.
Yet there were lighter interludes. Cournos sent her an article by Chesterton about writing detective fiction, and she responded with a four-page critique. Game-playing mattered more to detective novelists at this point than the study of psychology, and she argued that characters in the detective story did not need to be drawn in depth. Clouds of Witness was most notable for a trial scene in the House of Lords where Peter Wimsey’s elder brother is accused of murder, a plot element she hoped would attract American readers.
Her next novel, Unnatural Death, displayed more interest in character, although the lesbianism of the heiress Mary Whittaker is implied rather than explicit. Thrifty as good novelists are, Sayers used a snippet of information from Bill White about an air-lock in a motorcycle feed pipe to provide a clue to the mystery. In a far from cosy passage, she describes how the arms of a corpse had been nibbled by rats. Years later, she explained to George Orwell (who had spoken of Wimsey’s ‘morbid interest’ in corpses) that in a detective novel, ‘where the writer has exerted himself to be extra gruesome, look out for the clue’. The frisson induced by the image of hungry rats was a ruse to distract readers from the possibility that the arm had been pricked by a hypodermic.
Wimsey is assisted by Miss Climpson and her undercover employment agency for single women. Climpson’s irrepressible verve was
