It's been a while since I've been able to read a detective novel without taking the time to get through it: years ago, I devoured them, now it takes me longer. It's usually a common occurrence at my age: more than the plot, you spend time looking at how the book was written, you focus on the style. But in my case, the slowness was due to another factor: that it was a Sayers novel. I'm not entirely convinced by what Edmund Wilson said, writing about Nine Tailors in an article of January 20, 1945, titled Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd:
.."The writer that my correspondents were most nearly unanimous in putting at the top was Miss Dorothy L. Sayers, who was pressed upon me by eighteen people, and the book of hers that eight of them were sure I could not fail to enjoy was a story called The Nine Tailors. Well, I set out to read The Nine Tailors in the hope of tasting some novel excitement, and I declare that it seems to me one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field"....
but there's a grain of
truth in that, even if I consider that novel one of Sayers's masterpieces: her
novels are too redundant, there's too much dialogue, whereas in other writers'
works, there's less. In other words, there's too much atmosphere.
For all this, Dorothy Sayers ultimately remains divisive, and the limit is herself. There are audiences who like her for the atmosphere, and those who like Whose Body? It's delightful (the dialogue is fantastic, but precisely because it often comes off as out of context, it can feel too alienating and therefore distracting and unnecessary), and the one who hates it because it's too verbose in addressing the problem. I would have liked to know Wilson's opinion on the matter.
Whose Body?, from 1923. It's the debut of Lord Peter Wimsey, scion of the most exclusive aristocracy: second son of Duke Mortimer Winsey and Honoria Lucasta Delagardie, Peter has an older brother, Lord Gerald, and a sister, Lady Mary. He fought in the First World War with the rank of Major, suffering a nervous breakdown from a grenade explosion. Upon his return, he settled into an apartment with his wartime orderly, who became his faithful butler, Bunter. He also assisted him in his investigations and was a photography expert, so much so that he had converted one room into a highly respected photographic laboratory. His friend and sidekick in the various investigations he faces is his faithful Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard. All these characters appear in this, his first novel.
Alfred Thipps is a small-time architect who is repairing the roof of a church and is known to Lord Peter's mother. It is she who informs him that the astonished Thipps has found a body in his bathroom tub: a completely naked man, wearing only a pair of pince-nez. It would have been the news of the day, if that very morning the valets had not reported the disappearance of Sir Reuben Levy, a financier of Jewish origins very well known in the City, who had left his home, in the middle of the night, completely naked.
One immediately wonders if the body in the bathtub isn't Levy's: there's a resemblance, but while the police examination doesn't tend to rule it out, Wimsey's examination rules it out a priori. Although it appears to belong to a man in good health, Wimsey notes calluses on the feet and a very basic pedicure, revealing the man to be a frequent walker, something inconsistent with Levy, a man accustomed to riding in a carriage; and teeth rotted and yellowed by tobacco, inconsistent with someone accustomed to going to the dentist. Furthermore, before being left naked in the tub, he had been shaved, but not thoroughly enough to avoid leaving hairy remnants, which Wimsey finds. There's a contradiction: while there are these details that would suggest a person of very modest and unkempt means (even the ears are clogged with earwax), the face appears freshly shaved, and the hair smells of lotion. In other words, that corpse is part of a set-up. But the sure proof that it's someone else's is provided by the observation of something that is here, but should not be there if it were Levy's corpse: the circumcision of the foreskin, which, however, is left to the reader's discretion. In fact, Parker says at a certain point in the very first edition: "Sir Reuben is a pious Jew of pious parents, and the chap in the bath obviously isn't."
From here unfolds an entire investigation that Wimsey is called upon by his mother to conduct, to exonerate poor Thipps of the murder charge, brought into question by Sugg, a police inspector who doesn't know how to look beyond his own nose. Indeed, before accusing Thipps of murder, Sugg considered the nameless body to be that of a homeless man, perhaps one of the cadavers supplied to St. Luke's Hospital for dissection, where the famous surgeon Sir Julius Freke, a friend of the Levys, operates. But it was the surgeon himself, who rushed to the site of the discovery, who did not recognize it as any of the cadavers supplied to his hospital. The dead man died from a violent blow to the fourth or fifth vertebra. It is not known whether he was murdered or died by accident, but if it was not Thipps who left him there, and then why, and why, if it had really been him, would he have set in motion a mechanism capable of incriminating him, who on earth managed to leave him there? And how did he do it? Did he enter through the front door, dragging him to the bathroom, or did he leave him there by climbing over the roof? Is it possible that someone climbed up to the bathroom on the first floor of the Thipps house, carrying a body, and deposited it in the bathtub? Near the building are a series of houses and various courtyards, including the massive St. Luke's Hospital. A hypothesis no less bizarre than the one that the undertaker carried a naked corpse himself, smuggling it through the front door and dragging it up the stairs to the bathroom. And yet, that body ended up in that bathroom!
Lord Peter deals with that body to determine its identity, but at the same time investigates Sir Reuben's disappearance, because those two cases, though very different, have one common denominator: Sir Reuben left his home, leaving all his clothes at home, and therefore presumably leaving naked, and that unknown body in the bathtub—that one, too, is naked. On this very weak trail, a 360° investigation is started which focuses on failed marriages, on Peruvian shares bought by an unknown buyer (not Sir Levy but) Mr. Milligan (one of his financier competitors), on Mr. Crimplesham, a well-known lawyer, owner of the pince-nez found on the body in the bathtub, and on the mysterious series of prints left by a rubber glove used by a mysterious visitor who entered Sir Reuben's house on the night of his disappearance, who was wearing his same clothes, and who slept in his bed, and those left by the person who deposited the mysterious body in Thipps' bathtub, which seem to come from the same glove: in other words, a mysterious individual would have taken a body to an apartment that was not his, and made a man disappear from another, then wearing his clothes and returning to the house of this man wearing the clothes of the other, because perhaps the servants, the cook, the falsely identified himself as Reuben, thus suggesting that Reuben had been murdered (although he left behind a mysterious red hair). From these mysterious footprints and a mysterious red hair, an investigation will begin that will lead to an unexpected twist and the capture of a diabolical murderer and criminally insane.
The novel is fascinating, I must say, and sumptuously written; the dialogues are the most enjoyable part of the novel and can be said to be the foundation of the plot, because the truth of the reconstruction radiates from the dialogues. Dialogue + descriptions = atmosphere. So there is a lot of atmosphere in this novel. Almost too much. And what is striking is that alongside things that undoubtedly have value in the investigation, there are so many that have none. It almost makes me say that Dorothy Sayers, by padding the plot, making a London aristocrat, with his quirks and obsessions, act and behave in such a charmingly snobbish manner, did so deliberately, because in this way, amidst a sea of nonsense and cryptic clues, she hides what will later lead to the solution of the mystery.
What's missing from this novel, however, is the shock of discovering the murderer in a frantic finale, because the murderer is discovered almost thirty pages before the end: it's a novel from the 1920s, it's worth emphasizing, not the 1930s; it's a novel in which adventure still has its place, in which deduction is at its peak (and certainly derives from Sherlock Holmes: the fingerprints, the hair, the mud stains, the human form sunken into Sir Reuben's bed, a different height from his and measured by Wimsey) but psychological introspection is minimal, in which, as in other cases, the crime ends before the end of the novel and then follows only the reconstruction of the events that led to it, at the hands of Wimsey but also on the basis of the confession of his own murderer (in some ways it recalls the epilogue of Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear or John Rhode's The Murders in Praed Street). It's a novel in which locations are of utmost importance, precisely because comparing them reveals clues that point in a single direction.
Just as the novel's underlying idea was later changed (initially, it wasn't a male corpse found naked in a tub, but a fat female one), a whole series of anti-Semitic references and allusions were removed from the first edition (critics have often debated the nature of Sayers's anti-Semitism, perhaps just her way of portraying Jews within English society at the time), which are noticeable in this translation. In addition to Parker's statement cited above, the term Jew or Jews appears several times, if not in a derogatory sense, at least in a rather curious one, for example: in the third chapter:
Of course we're all Jews nowadays, and they wouldn't have minded so much if he'd pretended to be something else, like that Mr. Simons we met at Mrs. Porchester's, who always tells everybody that he got his nose in Italy at the Renaissance, and claims to be descended somehow or other from La Bella Simonetta—so foolish, you know, dear—as if anybody believed it; and I'm sure some Jews are very good people
"I agree with you, Mr. Graves—his lordship and me have never held with being narrow-minded—why, yes, my dear, of course it's a footmark, this is the washstand linoleum. A good Jew can be a good man, that's what I've always said. And regular hours and considered habits have a great deal to recommend them. Very simple in his tastes, now, Sir Reuben, isn't he? for such a rich man, I mean."
Parker's same statement, which hints at something that could be related to a Jewish subject, is replaced in a later edition with another expression that makes no reference to the Jewish race: "But as a matter of fact, the man in the bath is no more Sir Reuben Levy than Adolf Beck, poor devil, was John Smith." All this, presumably to avoid being accused of anti-Semitism.
Something else can also be said about Wimsey's character.
First, his attitude toward criminal investigation. It's a way of approaching that many British authors have used with their characters, almost always in their debut novels or at least in their first productions: I remember that Carr also has Bencolin say the same thing. Lord Peter Wimsey, conversing with Parker, expresses his way of managing a criminal investigation and his way of approaching criminals.
At the beginning of his detective adventure, Lord Peter is still an amateur, improvising as a detective to escape boredom and find a cure for his nervous breakdowns caused by traumatic stress from the bombing. Here, however, what is a game for him is not for others. Essentially, the duel, which he initially considers a sport, is not for the murderer. The murderer has done everything he can to avoid linking the two events—the discovery of the unknown corpse and the disappearance of Reuben Levy—and the two situations, which are closely intertwined, will reveal the diabolical plan for a perfect assassination, or one that was supposed to be perfect, but which fails because the murderer deposits the unknown corpse in the home of someone he doesn't know is close to Lord Peter Wimsey. A meticulously calculated plan fails. And if you like, it's a diabolical plan, but one that Thomas De Quicey would certainly have called artistic, its motive none other than a failed marriage: the murderer wanted to marry Levy's wife, and so for years, day after day, he plots revenge, which finally comes true one day. And since for Lord Peter, at least in this, his first great work, the investigation has been an escape, a game, a duel, he confronts the murderer in a one-on-one encounter, in which both know each other knows, yet they disguise the encounter as a trigger for something else. There are several moments throughout the novel in which the two come into contact, and there's one in which he is contacted by Parker (who, however, is unaware of the murderer's presence): in these cases too, the murderer is playing a deadly game with them. And the moment he refuses to do what the other wants him to do, everything ends, the encounter ends, and the other is arrested before he can kill himself. However, he leaves behind a very convenient confession, one that frames him forever, and which, if it hadn't been there, he, the perpetrator, would have gotten away with it.
Essentially, however, the murderer also saw his duel as a sporting challenge, and just as an athlete would accept defeat in a sport with a handshake and a hug, so he extends his hand, the confession. Which will get him hanged. In this, the novel recognizes itself as a work of the 1920s.
“D’you like your job?”
The detective considered the question, and replied:
“Yes—yes, I do. I know it to be useful, and I am fitted to it. I do it quite well—not with inspiration, perhaps, but sufficiently well to take a pride in it. It is full of variety and it forces one to keep up to the mark and not get slack. And there’s a future to it. Yes, I like it. Why?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Peter. “It’s a hobby to me, you see. I took it up when the bottom of things was rather knocked out for me, because it was so damned exciting, and the worst of it is, I enjoy it—up to a point. If it was all on paper I’d enjoy every bit of it. I love the beginning of a job—when one doesn’t know any of the people and it’s just exciting and amusing. But if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don’t seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin’ in, since I don’t have to make my livin’ by it. And I feel as if I oughtn’t ever to find it amusin’. But I do.” ....
...“Then why let your vainglorious conceit in your own power of estimating character stand in the way of unmasking the singularly cold-blooded murder of an innocent and lovable man?”
“I know—but I don’t feel I’m playing the game somehow.”
“Look here, Peter,” said the other with some earnestness, “suppose you get this playing-fields-of-Eton complex out of your system once and for all. There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that something unpleasant has happened to Sir Reuben Levy. Call it murder, to strengthen the argument. If Sir Reuben has been murdered, is it a game? and is it fair to treat it as a game?”
“That’s what I’m ashamed of, really,” said Lord Peter. “It is a game to me, to begin with, and I go on cheerfully, and then I suddenly see that somebody is going to be hurt, and I want to get out of it.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said the detective, “but that’s because you’re thinking about your attitude. You want to be consistent, you want to look pretty, you want to swagger debonairly through a comedy of puppets or else to stalk magnificently through a tragedy of human sorrows and things. But that’s childish. If you’ve any duty to society in the way of finding out the truth about murders, you must do it in any attitude that comes handy. You want to be elegant and detached? That’s all right, if you find the truth out that way, but it hasn’t any value in itself, you know. You want to look dignified and consistent—what’s that got to do with it? You want to hunt down a 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!’ Well, you can’t do it like that. Life’s not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You can’t be a sportsman. You’re a responsible person.”
“I don’t think you ought to read so much theology,” said Lord Peter. “It has a brutalizing influence.”(chapter VII).
With his treatment of people and situations, somewhere between the snobbish and the unconventional, Wimsey is remarkably close, I would say, to another fictional character, created around the same time, a snobbish enough: Philo Vance. However, Philo Vance, with his encyclopedic knowledge, is the son of Nietzsche and the myth of the superman, and as such, he despises the common people. While Wimsey is a Lord, despite being highly cultured and well-connected, and despite appearing to be an aristocrat opposed to the common people, he frequently criticizes snobbery: noteworthy is the comparison with his older brother, when he asks for a car, for example. Or when, having to appear before the Duchess Dowager, he wants to go in the clothes he's wearing, while Bunter convinces him (or forces him) to change, because of a microscopic stain of grease on the fabric of his trousers, caused by a splash of milk, which might scandalize his mother. In other words, he's a Lord who sometimes doesn't quite behave like a Lord, a nonconformist Lord.
And the ending is truly over the top! However, the pathos of capture, present in all the great novels of the 1930s, is missing, and this is a serious handicap, which takes away much of the satisfaction of reading.
Pietro De Palma
