and its Enemies that a woman’s personal fulfilment depends on her inborn maternal instinct. Haldane is remembered as a feminist, but Sayers’ fiction was more sympathetic to single women, and her attitude towards them more progressive. Unnatural Death focused, as Sayers’ stories often did, more on the means by which death was caused than on whodunit; the culprit is obvious. The murder method involved injecting an air bubble into a vein. An ingenious idea, even if its feasibility was open to question.
She earned money by writing short stories, drawing on her own know-how for material. ‘The Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will’ included a crossword puzzle clue, a nod to the fashionable craze which was also one of her own favourite pastimes. Motorcycling was an unlikely passion. She bought a ‘Ner-a-Car’ motorcycle, complete with sidecar, and rode it ‘in light skirmishing trim … with two packed saddle-bags and a coat tied on with string.’ ‘The Fantastic Horror of the Cat in the Bag’ features a race with a motorbike rejoicing in the improbable but factually accurate name of the Scott Flying-Squirrel.
The weirder realms of advertising presented her with the germ of ‘The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers’, which is perhaps the best Wimsey short story. Sayers’ inspiration came from an American firm of morticians whose advertisements demanded: ‘Why lay your loved ones in the cold earth? Let us electroplate them for you in gold and silver.’
In April 1926, Sayers summoned up the nerve to drop a bombshell on her parents. She wrote a letter telling them, after a lengthy preamble including thanks for the present of an Easter egg, that she was ‘getting married on Tuesday (weather permitting) to a man named Fleming, who is at the moment Motoring Correspondent to the News of the World’. Hoping to soften the shock, she added, ‘I think you will rather like him.’ To her relief, they did.
The new man in her life, Oswald Arthur Fleming, was a divorced journalist twelve years her senior. She had only known him for a few months. A Scot hailing from the Orkneys, he liked to be known as ‘Mac’, though he wrote under the name Atherton Fleming. John Anthony, who knew Sayers as ‘Cousin Dorothy’, remained in Ivy Shrimpton’s care after the death of Ivy’s mother, and did not join the couple in their London flat.
Mac Fleming was a hard-living, hard-drinking newspaperman, keen on motor racing, and chronically hard up. He had two children by his first wife, but provided them with no financial support. He had written a book called How to See the Battlefields, based on his time as a war correspondent for the Daily Chronicle. For a time, he worked in advertising, which may explain how he and Sayers met.
She took to married life with gusto. She accompanied him to race meetings at Brooklands, and bought a motorcycle to ride herself, clad in goggles, gauntlets, and leather helmet. Motor racing was the latest craze, and leading drivers like Malcolm Campbell, Henry Segrave and J. G. Parry-Thomas – all of whom held the world land speed record in quick succession – were household names.
Racing offered thrills in abundance, but danger was ever present. The long, flat beach at Pendine Sands in Carmarthenshire was vaunted as ‘the finest natural speedway imaginable’, but while trying to regain the record, Parry-Thomas crashed his car. He was severely burned, and his head was ripped away from his neck by the drive chain. Mac, a friend of the dead man, was given the wretched task of reporting the horrific crash.
A less personally distressing project saw the News of the World pay for both Mac and Sayers to travel to France. Their task was to solve the murder of the English-born nurse May Daniels. Nurse Daniels had disappeared from a quayside waiting room when about to return to England after crossing the Channel with a friend for a day trip. Months later, her decomposed body, bearing signs of strangulation, was found by the roadside near Boulogne, and her gold wristwatch was missing. Clues (or red herrings) found near the body included a discarded hypodermic syringe, and an umbrella, while Nurse Daniels’ friend said she had spoken about a meeting with ‘Egyptian princes’.
Rumours spread that the dead woman was pregnant by a prominent member of the British establishment, and that the real purpose of her trip was to have an abortion performed by a mysterious Egyptian called Suliman. Questions were asked in Parliament about a baffling lack of cooperation between the British and French authorities, and the Press scented a cover-up. Mac and Sayers faced competition from other journalists, including former Chief Inspector Gough, hired as a ‘special investigator’ by the Daily Mail, and Netley Lucas, a conman turned crime correspondent for the Sunday News. None matched the brilliance of Lord Peter Wimsey, although Netley Lucas’ lifestyle was equally colourful: he later applied his talents to twin careers as a literary agent and a publisher before being sentenced to eighteen months with hard labour for fraud and plagiarism.
The Daniels puzzle remained unsolved. Despite this setback to her embryonic career as an amateur detective, Sayers became entranced by real-life mysteries, and introduced aspects of the Nurse Daniels case into Unnatural Death. After the excitement of the trip to France, Sayers fantasized about moving abroad, but this would have meant an even greater separation from John Anthony, and was out of the question. She hated the way that the Defence of the Realm Act – unaffectionately known as ‘Dora’ – curtailed individual liberties. In her eyes, the curbs on alcohol consumption, and restricted licensing hours, coupled with high levels of income tax, meant England was ‘no country for free men’.
She threw herself into work at Benson’s with renewed vigour. Colman’s of Norwich was a key client, and Sayers wrote The Recipe Book of the Mustard Club to promote Colman’s Mustard. Typically, she littered the text with quotations, and devised a frivolously elaborate history of the club, claiming it was founded by Aesculapius, god of medicine, and that Nebuchadnezzar was an early member. At first, the club was purely imaginary, featuring characters such as Lord Bacon of Cookham, and the club secretary Miss Di Gester, but the campaign was such a huge success that a real club was created. At its height, it boasted half a million members.
Sayers’ creative flair was ideally suited to marketing. She is credited with coining the phrase ‘it pays to advertise’, and collaborated on the most memorable advertisement of the time, part of a long campaign on behalf of Guinness stout. An artist called John Gilroy joined Benson’s in 1925, and he and Sayers became friends as well as colleagues. After a visit to the circus, Gilroy dreamed up the idea of using birds and animals to advertise Guinness. He sketched a pelican with a glass of Guinness on his beak, and Sayers suggested replacing that bird with a toucan. She wrote the lines:
If he can say as you can
Guinness is good for you,
How good to be a Toucan:
Just think what Toucan do.
To this day, there is a healthy market for Guinness toucan collectibles. Gilroy, a young man from Whitley Bay who had started out as a cartoonist, combined his advertising work with portrait painting, and Sayers was one of the first people to sit for him, sporting her silver wig. Gilroy was alive to her earthy physicality, and unexpected sex appeal, and rhapsodized about her: ‘terrific size – lovely fat fingers – lovely snub nose – lovely curly lips – a baby’s face in a way’.
Sayers was ready to spread her creative wings. She began to translate the Chanson de Roland into rhymed couplets, as well as a medieval poem, Tristan in Brittany. In addition, she dipped in and out of a projected book about Wilkie Collins. She never finished it, but her study of Collins’ methods influenced her own literary style. Her main focus remained on writing detective fiction. Spurred by the desire to support herself and her family, she became intensely productive. In 1928 alone she published three books, including a Wimsey novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. The novel was reviewed by Dashiell Hammett, shortly before the former Pinkerton’s
