Dorothy L. Sayers isn't a name as familiar as Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie in the contemporary mind, but like Dame Agatha she was a member of the famous "Detection Club" - that group of authors who collectively created the "Golden Age" of detective stories. Sayers was also one of the earliest female graduates from Oxford University, as well as having translated Dante's Divine Comedy to English.
Whose Body? is the first of her crime novels, and the introduction to Lord Peter Wimsey, her main character. Rather famously, and probably a bit scandalously for the time (1923), Lord Peter begins the novel with the exclamation "Oh damn!", as he is mid-way to an auction and has realised he's forgotten the catalogue of the rare books on offer. Yes, we're clearly in the realms of the upper class here - Sayers herself described Lord Peter as a combination of Fred Astaire and Bertie Wooster, which seems like a fair summary of the man.
The significance of an upper-class "gentleman detective" is related to the question of what's often referred to as the "professional amateur" in crime fiction. While it's at least vaguely plausible that a policeman or private detective will have a series of adventures worthy of chronicling, it's much less likely that a "civilian" will just happen to be on the scene of murder after murder, at least not without arousing the suspicion of the police. Much as I've always enjoyed Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, I do wonder how she was able to thwart as many would-be murderers as she did.
Hence the concept of the "gentleman detective". Lord Peter is the younger son of the Dowager Duchess of Denver and belongs squarely to that class of well-educated British people who, at least until the end of the Second World War, really didn't need to work for money. His older brother is the Duke of Denver and sits in the House of Lords when not running the estate at Duke's Denver, leaving Lord Peter to lounge about, collect old books, dine at clubs and solve crimes, in roughly that order. While some of the policemen he deals with seem to resent this last activity, Sayers helpfully gives him a friend on the force - Inspector Charles Parker - who is more than content to be "interfered with".
The set-up here is quite memorable. The Dowager Duchess informs Lord Peter that an architect doing some work at Duke's Denver has found a naked body in his bath. Naked, that is, with the exception of a pair of pince-nez glasses. Lord Peter can hardly resist the puzzles - both of the corpse's identity and that of the killer - and seems to relish the task even more when the official investigation sees the young architect arrested.
Sadly, this is where a lot of the interest disappears. Sayers' plot is heavily reliant on coincidence - Parker, in particular, seems to have an amazing ability to be in precisely the right place to identify telling details which begin to link his seemingly-unrelated investigation with Lord Peter's - and characters are frequently introduced with no logic behind their appearances. While this was, as mentioned earlier, Sayers' first Lord Peter story, it doesn't get around the fact that stronger characterisation is needed throughout. The connection between Parker and Lord Peter makes no sense for about half the novel, and Lord Peter's residual shell-shock from the war (later to become a significant feature of the character) is introduced in a way which makes it appear to be an attempt at catching a suspect out, rather than a "real" ailment.
A lot of this, I feel, is due to the very short length of the novel. My copy is a scant 140 pages, which really makes it more of a novella or an overgrown short story than a full-blown novel. Never let it be said that I don't like my crime fiction to have a rollicking plot, but sacrificing characterisation in order to do it really isn't the way forwards.
All in all, this really isn't my thing. Sayers is an accomplished author - her contribution to the multi-author The Floating Admiral is just as good as her better-known contemporaries - but Lord Peter just falls flat here.
Skip this one. One star.
No comments:
Post a Comment