First published in 1930, The Documents in the Case is the only Dorothy L. Sayers novel not to feature Lord Peter Wimsey. Perhaps as a result of that, it's much less-known than the leading Wimsey novels.
Documents is also an unusual beast of a thing overall, being an epistolary novel. For those unfamiliar with the term, this is a novel made up of correspondence - in this case, a large number of letters, a telegram or two and some written statements and newspaper clippings. The form was quite popular in gothic literature, and in fact no less a novel than Bram Stoker's Dracula was written that way. The question I asked myself before opening Documents is whether or not the form would work for a murder mystery.
The documents in question are said to have been assembled by the son of the deceased in an attempt to bring his father's killer to justice. None of this is particularly revolutionary information, but it does cause the strange effect of knowing ahead of time who is going to die as we read the novel. This isn't unique, of course - titles such as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Lord Edgeware Dies and Mrs McGinty's Dead are all well-known Agatha Christie novels and they make the identity of the victim even more explicit - but this particular death occurs just under half-way through the novel, which is slightly more unusual as crime fiction tends to place the crime a couple of chapters in at the latest.
As a result, we're treated to some very well-rounded characters. Mr and Mrs Harrison live in Bayswater, and the maisonette above theirs is let to Mr Lathom (an artist) and Mr Munting (a writer). The Harrisons have a "lady-help" called Agatha Milsom, and Mr Harrison has a thirty-year-old son from his first marriage. A minor part is played by the woman Mr Munting eventually marries. By reading their correspondence, we are given the interesting quirk of seeing them all through each other's eyes - certain events are misconstrued by one or the other character, and it occasionally requires a number of letters before we arrive at what appears to be the "real" truth behind a given incident. It's a commonplace in Golden Age novels that everyone forms their own impressions of key events and relationships, but actually having to build the "truth" from these impressions rather than being given it by an omnipresent narrator is an interesting quirk.
What is also very impressive here is the differentiation of the different narrative voices. I wasn't entirely convinced by Agatha Milsom's voice, but the two younger men are clearly their own people with distinct personalities and writing styles, as are both of the Harrisons. Considering how difficult it can be to sustain a difference in voice between two characters in a regular novel, this is quite an achievement.
Unfortunately, Documents seems to have made the opposite error from the one which the earlier Sayers novel did. Where Whose Body? sacrificed a lot of characterisation for plot, Documents has a plot which hardly moves for pages and pages while we get these well-rounded characters (and their author, frankly) showing off.
One key plot incident involves a misunderstanding between two characters on the stairs. Most of this is cleared up within roughly five pages, but it later emerges that not everyone knew what was going on. Where most novelists would be content to elide this ("He told her what had really happened", for example), Sayers insists on having all the major players in the incident explain things again. Considering that one of these characters already had access to correspondence explaining it all, that seems completely uncalled-for.
At the inquest, one character's evidence is repeated - at least in part - twice. I'm not sure if this was how inquests would have been conducted at the time, but again it just drags any tension out beyond a reasonable limit.
Additionally, there is a lot of correspondence in which Munting goes on about philosophical matters. All well and good, but this (and some interminable discussions of chemistry) are inserted into the final scenes as the murderer's identity is confirmed. So slow-moving are these, in fact, that I had to re-read them a couple of times to make sure I knew that the killer was indeed the killer. I'm honestly tempted to say that I didn't care by that time.
All in all, this is a murder mystery which wants to be a lot more. Sayers clearly improved her craft considerably in between her debut and this, but by trying to do far too much with the form, she wound up missing the mark considerably.
Skip this one. One star.
No comments:
Post a Comment