Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors is almost infinitely re-readable and got me through some tough times over the last few weeks. It is an unusual combination of precision and otherworldliness that results in remarkably human characters, gorgeous prose, and haunting descriptions. Like Murder Must Advertise, it’s Peter very much out of his usual habitat, but even more so: not in a city, not among witty feverishly-intellectual striving copywriters, but in a small town where life is slower (but not simpler). The Nine Tailors is notable to me for its humanity, the roundedness of its characters; which are set against impersonal forces like the weather and the bells of the title.
Practically everything else that I can think to say about this theme and structure is a spoiler, so I’ll just pass on to a few small things I noted on this re-read. First, a minor criticism: though it’s taken me I-don’t-know-how-many readings to notice, Potty Peake doesn’t quite—I nearly wrote “ring true to me.” I’m not sure his speech patterns are psychologically plausible, and wonder if he’s based on observation or is a rare descent into stereotype.
(However, I will forgive far more than Potty for the exchange of telegrams late in the book, which manage to be beautifully characteristic without a single instance of punctuation.)
For all that Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey are both called Mary Sues, there’s only one time that I’ve heard the author speaking through a character, when Peter is talking to fifteen-year-old Hilary Thorpe after an unidentified corpse has been found in her mother’s grave:
“You see, I’m wondering just exactly how the—the——”
“How they got the body there? Yes, I thought you’d be wondering that. I’ve been wondering, to. Uncle doesn’t think it’s nice of me to wonder anything of the sort. But it really makes things easier to do a little wondering, I mean, if you’re once interested in a thing it makes it seem less real. That’s not the right word, though.”
“Less personal?”
“Yes; that’s what I mean. You begin to imagine how it all happened, and gradually it gets to feel more like something you’ve made up.”
“H’m!” said Wimsey. “If that’s the way your mind works, you’ll be a writer one day.”
“Do you think so? How funny! That’s what I want to be. But why?”
“Because you have the creative imagination, which works outwards, till finally you will be able to stand outside your own experience and see it as something you have made, existing independently of yourself. You’re lucky.”
“Do you really think so?” Hilary looked excited.
“Yes—but your luck will come more at the end of life than at the beginning, because the other sort of people won’t understand the way your mind works. They will start by thinking you dreamy and romantic, and then they’ll be surprised to discover that you are really hard and heartless. They’ll be quite wrong both times—but they won’t ever know it, and you won’t know it at first, and it’ll worry you.”
“But that’s just what the girls say at school. How did you know? . . . Though they’re all idiots—mostly, that is.”
“Most people are,” said Wimsey, gravely, “but it isn’t kind to tell them so. I expect you do tell them so. Have a heart; they can’t help it.”
(I can’t help but think of Hilary as a stand-in for the daughter Peter and Harriet never had—and why not, I ask? But I’m getting ahead of myself.)
What is it about Peter and improbable things with water? I mean, the swim he takes at a certain point is very symbolic and all, but when I’m reading slowly and actually visualizing things, I just can’t believe it.
Finally, I should note that Chad read this at my urging a while ago, and found one part of the mystery so obvious that it ruined his enjoyment of the book. I am unable to comment on this, because as previously noted, I don’t try and work mystery solutions out while I’m reading, and I no longer remember how I felt when I first read this book. Even if I had found it obvious, I might have been willing to forgive it for the sake of the book’s structure, but I’ll never know.
I haven’t re-read this in ages, but like you find Sayers infinitely re-readable.
I’d query your sense that Peter out of town is Peter out of his natural element, though. Peter is landed aristocracy, which means that though he lives in town, actually his element is the land, the family estates. Doesn’t Harriet realise something of the sort in Busman’s Honeymoon? (Or am I thinking of Peter in Oxford, in Gaudy Night?) It is simply one of Peter’s many perfections that he seems entirely in his element wherever we see him – which is mainly in town, because as a single man he lives in town. Once he marries, he wants a real house, and it’s in the country.
I may be misremembering and making some of this up, for which I apologise: but I think there’s a genuine sense (and this is probably typical of Sayers’ class, period, outlook) that the country is real, and that town is a thin veneer laid over it.
What I was trying to get at is the _unsophistication_ of Peter in this book; driving his car into a ditch, the decorous/silly handbell rehearsal scene, like that. You may be right about the landed gentry–though I thought I remembered the house in the country being Harriet’s idea–but the role of man-about-town is very reduced here.
Please do comment about the obvious (which I think I know) part of the mystery. I just finished reading it for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed the book and look forward to a reread.
E: The method of death. Was it for you, too? (Please use spoiler-protection if necessary, such as ROT13.
Glad to hear you liked it.