A Very British Murder (29 page)

After a long, slow struggle, Cournos finally talked Sayers into sleeping with him, much against her religious principles. Disaster followed. ‘I dare say I wanted too much,’ she wrote, bitterly, after he had deserted her: ‘I could not be content with less than your love and your children and our happy acknowledgement of each other to the world … you went out of your way to insist you would give me none of them.’

After the split with Cournos, she consoled herself with a very different character. Easy-going, fond of dancing and cars, Bill White was merely a stand-in. She slept with him, too, almost casually this time, and became pregnant. But White was no more cut out for fatherhood than Cournos had been, and Dorothy was left on her own. The first royalties from
Whose Body?
came in handy for doctors’ bills. She took just eight weeks off from the office and – fearful of telling her parents – travelled to Hampshire to give birth in a private nursing home.

Once her son was born, Dorothy arranged for him to be looked after by a cousin. It seems that no one else suspected what had happened. Flush with funds to spend on food, Dorothy had been putting on weight, which disguised the pregnancy. Her parents would never know their grandchild, because Sayers’ moral standards did not allow her to brazen things out. Above all, Sayers was a principled, conventional member of the Church of England, and this would cause her, for the rest of her life, publically to deny her son.

In fiction, too, P. D. James rightly points out that Dorothy was conventional, ‘an innovator of style and intention not of form’. She stuck to the rules of the Golden Age in her novels: a limited circle of suspects, a frequently implausible method of murder and a neat denouement at the end. The ever more bizarre and complex methods of the killing in Sayers’ novels were in fact part of their attraction. ‘Those were not the days of the swift bash to the skull followed by sixty thousand words of psychological insight,’ James adds. ‘The murder methods she devised are, in fact, over ingenious and at least two are doubtfully practicable. A healthy man is unlikely
to be killed by noise alone, a lethal injection of air would surely require a suspiciously large hypodermic syringe.’

However, Sayers did move away from convention through the development of the character of Lord Peter Wimsey, and particularly through the relationship he formed with the plucky and vulnerable Harriet Vane.

Vane, Sayers’ fictional alter ego, was another writer of detective stories. Like Sayers, Harriet was independent and bold and yet had been wounded by men. When she first appears in
Strong Poison
, it is in the dock. In an echo of Sayers’ relationship with Cournos, Harriet had agreed to live, unmarried, with a man. She too paid a high price for it, being accused of his murder.

Harriet’s salvation from the gallows comes in the form of the brainy and wealthy Wimsey, who, while clearing her name, falls in love with her. After a suitably prolonged period of disputations and misunderstandings, Harriet ends up united with him in wedded bliss and material splendour. Sayers’ tragedy was that there was no such happy ending for her.

Gaudy Night
is the book in which Harriet finally realizes that her lover will never attempt to subdue or stifle her, and that she can relax into this relationship. The sparkling fairy on top of the tree of Sayers’ work,
Gaudy Night
is a beautiful love story and a serious exploration of whether it was possible, in the 1930s, for women to combine work and marriage. The reader who has accompanied Harriet and Peter through hundreds of pages in which Harriet refuses to surrender her hard-won independence and pride will cheer when they finally kiss, in New College Lane, rather shyly and foolishly speaking to each other in Latin. It’s a heart-warming if exasperating
end (what took them so long?) to a very curious love story, in which the head plays as great a part as the heart. Typically of Sayers, she argues that the intellect brings her two lovers together. As she put it in her own words, she had at last found a plot in
Gaudy Night
that exhibited ‘intellectual integrity as the one great permanent value in an emotionally unstable world’. This was the book in which she found herself saying ‘the things that, in a confused way, I had been wanting to say all my life’.
^fn1

SAYERS DID EVENTUALLY
get married, to Captain Oswald Fleming, a divorced journalist. James Brabazon, Dorothy’s biographer, who knew her, wasn’t able entirely to pin down the nature of the relationship with her husband:

Conventional comic images of the tiny henpecked husband alternated with more melodramatic versions of the mad monster chained in the attic. Slightly closer to the truth was the theory of the unpresentable alcoholic. But what seemed quite clear was that this was by no means what we in those days regarded as a normal marriage.

Fleming was kept at home in the house Sayers bought in the Essex village of Witham. He was not introduced to her friends, and was
apparently unable, through ill health, to earn a living himself. All he seemed to have in common with Lord Peter was his inability to recover from his experiences in the First World War.

As the years went by, Sayers dropped detective fiction, having apparently felt that she had exhausted its possibilities. She wrote increasingly for the radio and the stage, and became a noted translator of Dante’s
The Divine Comedy
. Her ever-present Christian beliefs also inspired her to retell Bible stories simply, for a new generation, in the new medium of radio. Their success reinvigorated the faith of many of her fellow churchgoers, and the Church of England was so pleased that she was offered an honorary doctorate in Divinity. But Sayers turned it down, perhaps fearing that her private life would not withstand scrutiny.

It seems possible that, had she continued husbandless, or if she had married a more understanding man, Sayers may have eventually felt able to have her son come to live with her. But it never quite happened. Decades later, she was still using the presence of her Aunt Mabel, a surviving and possibly censorious relative, to argue that the time was still not ripe.

Sayers’ son knew her as ‘cousin Dorothy’, and received regular money and visits, but never any public recognition of their relationship. He eventually discovered the mystery for himself, when he sought out his birth certificate to apply for a passport: it seems that seeing Sayers named as his mother was not a surprise. It seems rather shocking that Sayers, literate to a fault in her work and in public, was so emotionally illiterate that this was the way she felt forced to introduce herself, as a mother, to her child.

But when Sayers threw herself behind a cause – as she often did, having a stable-full of pet hobbyhorses which she liked to exercise
– she had a voice and authority that could achieve considerable change. Whether she was exhorting the Church of England to make itself more accessible, or universities to give degrees to women, she would use her heavy guns: rhetoric, passion and humour. Here she is in 1938 answering the question ‘Are Women Human?’

When the pioneers of university training for women demanded that women should be admitted to the universities, the cry went up at once: ‘Why should women want to know about Aristotle?’ The answer is NOT that all women would be the better for knowing about Aristotle … but simply: ‘What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that many women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him – but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him.

In its quicksilver cleverness, its comedy and its belief in the importance of intellect, it is the unmistakable voice of Dorothy L. Sayers.

^fn1
To hear
Gaudy Night
written off as the critic Julian Symons does in
Bloody Murder
(1972) is not unusual, but it remains infuriating. When I read the page where he states that ‘
Gaudy Night
is essentially a “woman’s novel” full of the most tedious pseudo-serious chat between the characters that goes on for page after page’, I threw Mr Symons’s book on the floor, and stamped upon it.

‘Should you fail to honour [this oath], may your publishers cheat you, may total strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints and your sales continually diminish.’

From the ‘Ritual’ performed at the entry of new members to the Detection Club

IN THE LATE
1920s, many of the Golden Age’s crime novelists became members of a group called the Detection Club. Starting out simply as an informal gathering of friends who liked to have dinner together, by 1930 the Club’s members were well enough organized to write a joint letter to the
Times Literary Supplement
, and they went on to publish three collaborative novels together, with chapters each written by a different author, to raise Club funds. In 1932 a proper Constitution with rules was devised and printed in a little booklet. Club premises were established in Gerrard Street, and a magazine shows a picture of members enjoying themselves there. (Dorothy L. Sayers, in one of them, is smiling broadly, and downing half a pint of beer.)

The entrance requirements for the Club, taken from the 1932 Constitution, were:

That he or she has written at least two detective-novels of admitted merit … it being understood that the term ‘detective novel’ does not include adventure stories or ‘thrillers’ or stories in which the detection is not a main interest, and that it is a demerit in a detective-novel if the author does not ‘play fair’ by the reader.

More than a dining society but less than a trade union, the Detection Club showed how the output of the Golden Age had coalesced into a genre both recognizable and definable. Its members included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, Baroness Orczy and A. A. Milne (in addition to creating
Winnie the Pooh
, Milne wrote an excellent detective novel,
The Red House Mystery
).

As Sayers said of the Club: ‘If there is any serious aim behind the avowedly frivolous organisation … it is to keep the detective story up to the highest standards that its nature permits, and to free it from the bad legacy of sensationalism, clap-trap and jargon with which it was unhappily burdened in the past.’

Monsignor Ronald Knox, another member, conceived the interwar detective story as a kind of game with rules, rather like tennis, which was to be played out between ‘the author of the one part and the reader of the other part’.

He laid out the regulations of this game in a (tongue-in-cheek) set of Ten Commandments, and advised that they should be followed as strictly as the rules of cricket:

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

[Agatha Christie broke this rule, with tremendous effect, in
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, by making her narrator the perpetrator. But some readers were quite genuinely affronted and aggrieved by what they saw as a betrayal of trust on her part as an author. It’s a reaction that’s difficult to understand without getting back into the mindset that took the Ten Commandments terribly seriously.]

2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

[Knox added that even one secret passage was on the edges of acceptability: when employing one himself, he was careful to plant a clue, pointing out ‘beforehand that the house had belonged to Catholics in penal times’.]

4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.

5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.

6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

[That’s Maria Marten’s stepmother’s dream ruled out: the old conventions of melodrama were by now completely superseded.]