Dorothy L. Sayers

I’ve already written a piece on my love of Agatha Christie novels, so I felt that this might make an appropriate companion piece.

I’ve been breaking my heart this weekend—again, fool that I am—over Busman’s Honeymoon, which never ceases to strike me as a tragedy, even with the later short stories about Lord Peter and Harriet’s married life, collected in Striding Folly.

It always seems a shame to me, after the events of Strong Poison, the underlying tension of Have His Carcase, and the partly frustrated yet oddly celebratory mood of Gaudy Night, that we should come to this: a honeymoon couple uncertain about whether the marriage can survive the exigencies of the very interests that brought the two of them together.

But then, I say that as a Sayers fan. I’ve always felt that the quality of her writing—but then, you have to stop there, don’t you? Because to say that “the quality of her writing is far higher than that of the average crime novel” leads into a morass of assumptions about what popular fiction is, where it fits on an entirely arbitrary scale of perceived literary value, and whether we can judge it against “proper novels.”

Take Julian Symons, for example. I understand him to be a leading exponent of British crime writing—according to the Wikipedia article to which I’ve just linked—but I’ve never read any of his books.

But, to go back to the Wikipedia article again, take this quote on Symons, which is apparently from the introduction to The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:

He turned to crime writing in a light–hearted way before the war and soon afterwards established himself as a leading exponent of it, though his use of irony to show the violence behind the respectable masks of society place many of his books on the level of the orthodox novel.

Many of his books are on a level with the “orthodox novel,” eh? Because they’re ironic?

Fair enough.

But why that entirely arbitrary dichotomy between “crime fiction” and “orthodox fiction”? Yes, I know I used the term “popular” to describe Conan Doyle as a writer in this post, but I stand by it. Compared to say, Thomas Hardy, he was a “popular writer”; I’ve never heard that people in their thousands were in a state of hysteria and high distress when Hardy killed off Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

But then, why bring Julian Symons into this debate at all?

Because Symons didn’t like Sayers.

When he published Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel—A History (Penguin, 1974), he made a point of emphasising that “[it] is from a point of view very short of idolatry that they [Sayers’s novels] are discussed here” (112). And by “very short” he doesn’t mean that he’s close to the idolatry end of the scale.

But why? What on earth does Symons have against Sayers?

He starts by outlining the ways in which she is to be lauded:

• she has a “clear and incisive” intellect and was widely read in crime fiction (112).
• she was the first writer to include five Poe stories in the canon of early crime fiction, rather than the usual three (113).
• similarly, she recognised Sheridan Le Fanu’s contribution to the development of the genre (113).
• “it is impossible not to admire the careful craftsmanship with which they [her stories] have been made” (113).
• she took great pains over the accuracy of her stories (113).

So why doesn’t he like her? Apparently—and there’s no padding here, no attempt to soften the verbiage—because “she was pompous and boring” (113).

Well, all right then. There’s not much I can say to that, is there? Especially since Symons emphasises that this is “the same evidence that admirers would cite in her favour” (113)—the style of her writing, as opposed the craftsmanship of her plotting.

And, oddly, it’s often the craftsmanship of her plots with which I take exception. I mentioned in a previous post that I tend not to re-read Have His Carcase, because it’s blatantly obvious to me that one of the primary characters was a haemophiliac, which knowledge spoils the slow development of the plot for me, and has since the first time I read the novel.

Similarly, the novel that Symons singles out, The Nine Tailors, is something of a dull murder mystery, because the nature of the victim, the cause of his death, and the identity of the perpetrator are quite obvious from relatively early on.

But, really, does one read The Nine Tailors solely for the murder mystery? Doesn’t much, perhaps the majority, of the joy that one obtains from that novel come from the evocation of a curiously English form of campanology: change ringing.

Consider, for example, the nine deep tolls that mark the passing of a man of the parish. Consider the twelve tolls at New Year’s midnight for the dead year.

And consider this:

The bells gave tongue: Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul, rioting and exulting high up in the dark tower, wide mouths rising and falling, brazen tongues clamouring, huge wheels turning to the dance of the leaping ropes. [. . .] Out over the flat, white wastes of fen, over the spear-straight, steel-dark dykes and the wind-bent, groaning poplar trees, bursting from the snow-choked louvres of the belfry, whirled away southward and westward in gusty blasts of clamour to the sleeping counties went the music of the bells — little Gaude, silver Sabaoth, strong John and Jericho, glad Jubilee, sweet Dimity, with great Tailor Paul bawling and striding like a giant in the midst of them. (34)

Really, what does the ready identity of the murderer mean, compared to that passage?

Or, on a smaller note, consider Harriet Vane’s memories of her undergraduate days in Oxford in Gaudy Night, when she recalls climbing Magdalen Tower with a friend and feeling “it swing beneath them with the swing of the reeling bells” (3).

What does it matter if, as Symons says, Lord Peter Wimsey is unbearably affected—I myself struggle at times with both his and Harriet’s automatic assumption that servants, excluding Bunter, need to be treated in a certain way—when the author can produce lines that read like something out of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem?

But, then, I am a fan, so according to Symons I have no choice but to eulogise Sayers’s writing style. From Symons’s approach to her novels, it seems that an appreciation for her prose prefigures an inability to critically appraise her work.

Perhaps that’s so—but I don’t think so.

I think, rather, that some of us don’t necessarily see “detective fiction” and “orthodox novels” as sharply divided categories in a “never the twain shall meet” sense.

Some of us just enjoy the prose, even while muttering “haemophiliac” under our breath.