Lord Peter’s Early Years

I didn’t plan to revisit Dorothy L. Sayers this summer. But in a fit of summertime sadness, I got the whole series on audiobook to cheer myself up. I’ve read the whole series through once, and reread a few of the books on a select basis. This was my first time with the audiobooks. I sampled a few narrators and going with Ian Carmichael was a done deal the instant I heard him:  he’s really, really good at Lord Peter’s patter and prattling. I never liked the look of him as Wimsey in the show from the 70s (too old, too round), but he has the manner down wonderfully. These aren’t books to listen to on increased speed:  Carmichael already talks a mile a minute when in his Peter mode. I haven’t watched any of the screen adaptations of Sayers, but Carmichael seems to understand the character and have a very clear vision for him. It’s a wonderful performance, so good that it even made one of my least-loved of the series, Five Red Herrings, not only intelligible but actually enjoyable. (Not having to read phonetically written accents is a benefit of audiobooks that I forgot to mention in my post about them!)

Setting aside my strong positive feelings about the format, it’s odd to revisit Wimsey. I was a teenager when I first read Sayers, and now I’m about the same age as the characters. When I first read the books, I had absolutely no context for the character. I’d read maybe a third of Christie and all of Sherlock Holmes, but no other mystery writers contemporaneous to Sayers. Now, I almost feel as if I have too much context to meet these books with the same open-hearted love that they first inspired in me. Oh, I still love them, especially for Harriet Vane, but it's tempered. 

There’s knowledge of history and genre and biography rattling around as I listen to these books, but also knowledge of fandom. I saw someone on tumblr point out that Sayers’ relationship with Peter is very fannish:  he’s her blue-eyed boy, her blorbo, her disgusting slice of maggoty cheese. And once I knew the concept, it was unavoidable to consider Harriet as self-insert, a Mary Sue: she is a mystery writer who Our Hero just so happens to fall madly in love-at-first sight with?? And though I think the books are too well written to be dismissed for these elements, there’s no doubt that there is truth in them, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of Sayers’ feelings towards her characters on the books, especially as I round the bend of the turning point on Peter’s character. Even though I feel some critical way about Sayers and her relationship to her characters, characterization is one of the biggest draws to me as a reader, and character growth over a series is something I value. I think, but I’m not sure, that characters whose authors feel strongly about in one way or another are typically better than neutral characters. I’d rather a character that the author hates, or one that the author loves too much, than a neutral and dull detective! 

But I’m getting off track. Early Sayers! Young Peter! While most people fans celebrate the later, more literary novels, I do actually like both early Sayers and young Peter quite a lot. Lord Peter Wimsey is immediately more interesting to me than contemporary detectives because he is fragile. Young Peter is a World War I veteran and he suffers from shell-shock, now recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder, and this immediately charges all his relationships with interest in these early books. His cliche butler, Bunter, is elevated and differentiated as the caretaker of someone struggling with occasionally serious mental illness, and Bunter’s steadfast loyalty is easily explained by a trauma-bond from the trenches. In the second book, Clouds of Witness, we’re taken to Peter’s family to face a criminal charge against his duke of a brother. Peter is unabashedly his mother’s favorite child, not just because he’s most similar to her, but because she seems to treasure him as only a parent can a child who was almost lost. He hardly knows his little sister, their very different experiences in the war serving as a wedge between them. Peter’s detecting is a vulgarity amongst his class, but it’s tolerated because it is understood as a remedy for his madness, and while he’s a person of power by default of birth, in these early books, Peter is also othered from his class by how widely known his struggles with PTSD are. He’s desperate for escape and solace, and it makes him relentless and dogged in pursuit of puzzles and cases. But Peter is also furious about seeking truth, about seeing things as they are and not as romance and tradition and honor dictate they be, and that is surely an aspect of his character tied to the great disillusionment of WWI. 

If it’s not obvious, far and away my favorite of the early Sayers books (and maybe one of my favorites in the whole series) is The Unpleasantness at the Bellonna Club. The setting of a gentlemen’s club for veterans on Remembrance Day is brilliant. Seeing Peter amongst other men who are coping (or very much not) with similar wounds is fascinating. It's also interesting to see Peter's wellness contrasted:  unlike so many others in the Bellonna, his body is intact, and compared to poor, shattered George Fentiman, his psyche is comparatively whole. I also happen to think the mystery is unusually good for Sayers (I love a forensic angle!), but the setting and cast of characters in this book are elevating and illuminating. There is something so heartrending and fascinating seeing Lord Peter be moved from the setting of the aristocracy (where he painfully doesn’t fit anymore) to this haunted house of haunted men, a place where he does fit, where he immediately understands the other men in ways he could not seem to comprehend his own brother. It’s great! It’s so good! In this book, Sayers’ love for her own character works so well. 

Sadly for me, but happily for the imaginary character of Peter, Sayers’ rather dropped the PTSD after this book. Perhaps she’d simply felt she’d explored it as much as was fruitful. Perhaps expunging the unpleasantness allowed Peter to heal in a profound way off page. I think there may actually be an argument for the latter, to an extent. But also, it isn’t too much longer until Harriet is introduced and Peter Wimsey begins his transformation into romantic hero as well as amateur detective. 

I took a break from my summer of Sayers to read mostly police procedurals this fall. I slowed down, in part, because of a dreadful hypothesis: I expect that I’ll dislike Lord Peter more and more as the series concludes and he trends towards being more authoritative in his aristocracy and more romantic in his heroism. I hope to be wrong when I do finish the rest of the books.