The Career of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey: Masculinity, Myth and Modernity
by Susan Rowland

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It is possible to divide the detecting career of Lord Peter Wimsey into three phases. These are respectively: an exploration of masculinity, in works such as the opening Whose Body? (1923), Clouds of Witness (1926) and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), through the mythical layering of the detective in Unnatural Death (1927) and Murder Must Advertise (1933), to his use in reconfiguring modernity in The Nine Tailors (1934), Gaudy Night (1935) and Busman's Honeymoon (1937). Of course each phase is not so easily separated from the others. Indeed all three co-exist in each novel, merely the emphasis changes over time. When, at the end of Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter breaks down in his wife's, Harriet Vane's, arms, it is possible to see this climactic moment as the completion of the revision of masculinity that has always been Sayers's project. In addition, the scene acts as the most sustained treatment of the tensions within the detective (whose social role conceals the mythical form of both saviour and slayer). Thirdly, it works as a comment on the contradictions of the modern legal system. The final moment of breakdown in Sayers's last completed novel recalls a similar episode of Wimsey's recurring wartime trauma in Whose Body? Such agonised depths in the detective answer the tough exchange between him and the law in that same novel. Charles Parker, whose middle-class devotion to duty within a mundane life is explicitly contrasted to Wimsey's luxury, bowls it straight to the gifted amateur: 'Look here, Peter... suppose you get this playing-fields-of-Eton complex out of your system once and for all... You want to look dignified and consistent - what's that got to do with it? You want to hunt down the murderer for the sport of the thing and then shake hands with him and say, "Well played - hard luck - you shall have your revenge tomorrow!"... You want to be a sportsman. You can't be a sportsman. You're a responsible person.'

As Gill Plain has shown so eloquently in Women's Fiction of the Second World War (Edinburgh University Press, 1996), Wimsey's vulnerability is a response to the shattering of masculine norms in the horror of WW1 trenches. Explicitly a victim of shellshock, Wimsey begins his detecting career uneasily poised between upper-class insouciance and nervous collapse. Parker's moral criticism disposes of the silly-ass-about-town mask as one suitable for a modern male identity. So the early novels often set Wimsey against a double, as a way of testing out varieties of masculine performance. Tellingly, and comically, the sharpest challenge in Whose Body? comes from class. After Parker demolishes class difference as a safe refuge for the battered male self, Wimsey ceases his patronage of nervy Mr Thipps, a mild-mannered architect who has had the misfortune to find a dead body in his bath. When the redoubtable mother of the unlikely suspect insists that Wimsey is so like her dear attentive son, it is both comedy and poignant truth. Wimsey, also shown devoted to his mother, likewise cracks under the strain. In Clouds of Witness, Wimsey's double is from the other end of his social range, his brother, Gerald, Duke of Denver. Suggestively, the doubling occurs when the Duke is accused of murder and is guilty of adultery. When vainly trying to persuade Gerald to account for his whereabouts on the night in question, the two brothers confront each other in a momentary destabilisation of divisions between detective and chief suspect: 'It was as though each saw himself in a distorting mirror'. While writing Clouds of Witness, Sayers denied aspirations 'to be the new Emily Bronte'. This could suggest a conscious criticism of Bronte's Gothic masculinity at the back of her mind. The Duke's mistress has a husband driven by blind, jealous violence. It is a highly critical version of Heathcliff's more complicated ferocity. However, neither Peter nor the Duke offers better demonstrations of a masculine social persona. The Duke has embarked on a feudal affair with a farmer's wife. His behaviour exposes her to murderous violence and him to becoming a casualty of the law. His affair makes it look like he has shot his sister's fiancé. Wimsey, on the other hand, promises the woman, a vital witness, that he will protect her from her husband's revenge. This he fails to do, and it is only chance that allows the woman to go free. If Clouds of Witness dug deeper into the aristocratic persona, then The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club critically examines the other mode from Whose Body?, the hero broken by war. When the ancient General Fentiman is discovered dead at the Club, suspicion falls on Wimsey's friend and double in the military sense, grandson George Fentiman. Shellshocked George is barely able to hold down a job and his behaviour is putting at risk his marriage. So when his wealthy relative is found to have been killed, the question is whether his neuroses have blurred the distinction between death on the battlefield and in a gentleman's club. Again, Wimsey's other self is spared the ultimate guilt. Suggestively, it is the phlegmatic soldier who has transgressed, rather than the neurotic one.

By bringing the masculine types into the field of suspicion, the novels start to go deeper into the role of the detective. Sayers's herself wrote an analysis of detective fiction that took it back into romance and even to the kinds of crimes recorded in classical literature. However, in particular she saw the detective as the direct descendant of the medieval knight errant, devoted to the quest for truth and protecting the weak. So, of course, with a far more jaundiced eye, did Raymond Chandler with his 'lady in the lake'. Yet the detective is a modern hero with a dark shadow, his interference can bring death as well as rescue. On one level, in an era of capital punishment, the successful detective is a killer: he delivers the guilty one to the executioners. On another level, the detective is always a potential criminal. In discovering the truth, he is forced by the very nature of his role to uncover desires and deviant behaviour that he himself shares. It is a structural advantage of the detective protagonist as lone investigator that he (or she) will succeed because they have a form of intimacy (whether social, psychological, educational, sexual or by virtue of gender) with the perpetrator. So the detective hero of fiction is necessarily also a potential double for the murderer. The Sayers novels understand this well, with Wimsey's constant memories of sending men to their deaths in war reiterated by his sending felons for execution. Of course, there is a desire to have it both ways by having some 'murders' prove to be no such thing. Although the male aristocrat's desires nearly kill the Duke's mistress in Clouds, at least no one gets hanged. Similarly, Gaudy Night avoids the gallows because attempted murder is its worst crime. However, Murder Must Advertise has Wimsey 'play the game' by allowing a 'gentleman' killer choose his own death while the novel simultaneously exposes the perils of modern society, hooked on advertising.

Wimsey's death-dealing detecting role is highlighted throughout the story. A somewhat suggestively named Death Bredon enters Pym's Advertising Agency as a new copywriter and starts asking awkward questions about the mysterious death of his predecessor, Victor Dean, who tumbled down an iron staircase. The trail leads to the drug-fuelled Bright Young Things led by the disastrous Dian de Momerie, and back to find drug trafficking at the heart of the advertising agency. Chief Inspector Parker enlists police resources to aid Peter in tracking both drugs and murder. Yet while Parker concludes jubilantly by rounding up the drug gang, Peter ends in a sombre mood. He has sent the sympathetic killer out to his death in a perverse act of class solidarity in order to protect the murderer's dependants. However, Wimsey's career as an advertising copywriter reveals far more widespread perils for the modern world. In a suggestive paralleling of advertising and the drug trade (the advertising agency is literally selling cocaine), modern society is revealed to be addicted to the adrenaline rush of unfulfilled desire. What the detective here discovers is that the only way of reconstituting both self and society is to work with the destabilising media to reconstruct subjectivity as a series of social masks or fictions. Wimsey's tripartite persona consists of a pompous aristocrat who tells a drug baron of the evil propensities of his second mask, Death Bredon; these two are haunted by a spectral, death-dealing harlequin. Finally, Wimsey reinvents Britain through advertising and capitalist consumption. Wimsey's final triumphant advertising campaign of 'Whiffling Round Britain' is a more comprehensive precursor of today's 'air miles'. By collecting cigarette coupons, the consumer can exchange them for travel, hotels, excursions in what is literally a re-mapping Britain as a playground for leisure consumption. National identity is re-imagined as a matter of consumer tourism. It will take three later novels to try to suggest a more sacramental vision of social reintegration.

Both The Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night measure modern England against the idea of paradise. For the latter novel, it resides in the wise sermons of parish vicar, Mr Venables, as his kindly, slightly comic persona acquires moral stature through the investigation of the origins of a battered body found in the wrong grave. In a final flood of biblical proportions, the rural village is cleansed, leaving a vision of the church as a ministering presence as people and animals gather there for shelter. The church, unwitting instrument of death through its ancient bells, becomes a physical mediation between sublime religious ideals and their possible embodiment on earth. In Gaudy Night, the dream of paradise is of an Oxford college as a community of single-sex scholars free of fleshly temptations. An escalating series of pranks is Harriet Vane's way back to her old women's college. There she discovers no paradise of escape from the world, only the dream of constantly striving for one through work that carries with it integrity, both in itself and in its social connections. For Sayers, such work amounts to a religious sacrament. It is Harriet's discovery that Wimsey shares this sense of sacramental endeavour that, more than anything, unites them. They are now prepared to fuse their shared sense of justice in marriage. Busman's Honeymoon is an exploration of how love in marriage needs to go along with work, both at the marriage and in their occupations, in order to lead a life that promotes the welfare of the world. At one level a comic story of rural types - the mild mannered elderly vicar, the twittery spinster, the forthright chimney sweep - at another level it is an attempt to heal modern England by bringing the urbane Wimseys back to their country origins as rejuvenating powers. Their house, newly purchased from an owner found bludgeoned in the cellar, is emblematic of decay. The Wimseys will restore it and become patrons of village causes. Harriet is able to say 'I have married England' and Peter tells her 'I have come home'. Together they represent a psychic reformation of Englishness, continuous with country house nostalgia, but crucially, permitting both novelist Harriet and detective Peter to operate with integrity. Busman's Honeymoon ends with the off-stage execution of the murderer as the occasion for Wimsey's breakdown. The final moments of Peter and Harriet's embrace signal healing potential for the land itself. Sayers takes Wimsey from an exploration of masculinity's nightmares in the aftermath of WW1, to a mythical reincarnation of the knight errant doing good deeds, to a sense that the quest can be fulfilled, the wasteland of modernity can be restored, not once and for all, but in the continued processes of sacramental work. Writing detective stories is part of remaking the world.

by Susan Rowland