acid, I opened a bottle of these tablets and removed 10 of them, substituting a single tablet, containing 10 gs. of a new barbituric acid compound which, giving a similar chemical reaction to veronal, is ten times more powerful in hypnotic effect. The result of this would be that, on taking this tablet, as she was in due course bound to do, my wife would consume a dose of 10 gs. of the new compound equal to 100 gs. of the ordinary tablets, or twice the minimum fatal dose. The fatal tablet was prepared for me, in anticipation of these events, by the Gesellschaft Schmidt of Berlin, during my visit to Germany last May, of course in ignorance of the purpose for which it was required. My reason for committing this crime was that I had misappropriated certain trust monies belonging to the Ingleborough estate, and desired to replace them from the estate to which I was entitled under my late wife’s will.
I make this confession, being troubled in my conscience.
Adrian Belford
17th December 193—
With shaking hands Belford thrust letter and enclosure into the fire.
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) needs little introduction. Though she wrote comparatively few novels and short stories, they form an impressively consistent and enjoyable body of work, second only perhaps to that by Agatha Christie.
Without Sayers, Sherlockian scholarship would not be the flourishing pseudo-academic field it is today. And the Detection Club—founded by her contemporary Anthony Berkeley—would have languished as nothing more than a dining society for crime writers without the many collaborative books and radio serials that Sayers initiated as one of the Club’s most active members and as its President. Without Sayers’ reviews and penetrating insights into the art and artifice of the detective story, the genre would surely not have developed internationally as a field of academic study. And without the protean aristocrat Lord Peter Wimsey there would almost certainly be no Campion, no Dalgliesh and no Lynley, to name but a few of the detectives whose character and approach bear some mark of Sayers’ sleuth.
Sayers also wrote widely in many genres and, for some of her admirers, her crime stories and her studies of the genre are merely a distraction from even greater achievements: her analyses of Christian doctrine and her translations of Dante. For the majority, however, the reverse is certainly true.
There is the Wimsey canon—twenty-one short stories and eleven novels, several of which were memorably televised, first with Ian Carmichael (Lord Peter Wimsey, 1972–1975), and subsequently with Edward Petherbridge (A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery, 1987). There are also the delightful stories of Montague Egg, a travelling wine salesman, and various non-series stories, the foremost being the extraordinary ‘Blood Sacrifice’. As with the best of her contemporaries, Sayers draws on tropes of the genre—the impossible crime, the invisible weapon and so on—to create puzzles that remain as entertainingly baffling today as when they were first published, in some cases nearly a century ago. And as with Charles Dickens, her work is peppered with memorable characters, not the least of whom is the detective novelist Harriet Vane, in many ways a self-portrait of Sayers.
‘Smith and Smith, Removals: I. The House of the Poplars’ by Dorothy L. Sayers is a previously unpublished manuscript held by the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL, USA, which has the largest and most comprehensive collection of published and unpublished resources by and about Sayers worldwide. The original manuscript is twenty-eight handwritten pages with revisions by Sayers; the Wade Center manuscript number is DLS/MS-187. It was the first of two stories written by Sayers in the 1920s featuring the removals firm of Smith and Smith. The other, ‘The Leopard Lady’, was collected in In the Teeth of the Evidence (1939) and filmed with Boris Karloff for the American television series Lights Out in 1950.
Christopher Bush
It can be an absorbing undertaking, when the means are available, to trace to their original sources events which have proved momentous and to discover how trivial were the small beginnings that set them in motion. Even the hydrogen bomb can be traced directly back to a murder in Sarajevo. All our lives are shot through with the most incredible of coincidences. You happen to change the direction of a walk and you meet someone who changes the direction of your life.
The Hampstead Murder was a case in point. A man in Scotland wrote a letter to The Times and, by chance, The Times found it interesting enough to print. Because of that letter, which had nothing whatever to do with murder, a woman was strangled in a London suburb. You may not recall that murder. It created no excitement and never got into the headlines. The woman was found with a noose around her neck, and the killing could have been accomplished in a matter of seconds. As murders go, it was exceptionally swift and abrupt.
Considering its ownership there was nothing unusual about the room where she was found. It smelled faintly of pot-pourri, and its charming furniture included some delightful period pieces. Its china and pictures had quality, its carpet was Chinese and its chairs were Chesterfield-soft and seductive.
Then there was the woman, in a charming afternoon frock, with a face like a surprised Madonna and hair like an aureola. She was wearing about a thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery, which would unquestionably have proved tempting, in short, to a burglar. There was no blood, no signs of a struggle. No vulgarity, but everything quiet and restrained, except for that deadly circle around her neck. Even the murderer was only a part of that general background—a quiet man, writing peacefully at a Queen Anne bureau.
Later, of course, there was to be the comparative vulgarity of a trial, even if it ended in a matter of minutes with the knowledge that the murderer was hopelessly insane. And the reason of it all—let me repeat—was a letter that was written to The Times.
To get to that letter we must leave the charm of that drawing-room in Hampstead and come nearer town to Porter Street, Mornington Crescent. In Victorian times the Crescent had dignity and aloofness. Porter Street still retained something of that dignity even if its Georgian houses had become offices and flats. It was in one of these flats that Lutley Prentisse was working on a certain June morning.
It would be more true to say that he should have been working. In front of his swivel chair were table and typewriter but he sat there with the tips of his fingers together and his brow wrinkled in thought. You would have needed no particular shrewdness to have guessed that he was a writer.
But he was a writer with a difference. His name was far from well-known. He had three novels to his credit, two having as their theme extramarital intrigue and the other concerned with one of those coteries to be found on the French Riviera. The last only had sold quite well—a matter of gratification to its author purely from pride of workmanship. Money is always useful, but his private income was about two thousand a year after taxes, and the handsome royalties he received from his publisher made no great difference.
The fact of the matter was that he had drifted into writing almost without knowing it, and primarily to escape from boredom. The first two years after his marriage had been a routine of which he had tired—Switzerland in mid-winter, the Riviera in Spring, golf in England in the summer and weekends at various house parties, with a week or two at Deauville or Le Touquet in early autumn. After that town—the club, theatres and the multitudinous rush and jigsaw fitting-in from morning till night.
All that was the life that suited Dorothy Prentisse so well.
