Next up in my Sayers re-read was the first short story collection, Lord Peter Views the Body (reprinted as the first twelve stories in Lord Peter [*]). I realized, reading this, that my backbrain doesn’t consider these stories canon. Obviously they are, but I think my backbrain sets them aside for two reasons. First, I don’t recall that there’s any reference to the events of these stories later on, and at the least people ought to comment on the spectacular and improbable events of “The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba.” (Maybe they do and I’ve forgotten. I will be looking for that when I get back to the re-read.) Second, with the exception of “The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran,” which is chronologically the earliest canon story and shows Peter’s shell-shock in a different form, there’s very little character development or movement in the stories. I’m not sure that this lack makes the stories bad, considering the constraints of the form, but it does make them less interesting to me.
[*] My edition of this omnibus has a smarmy introduction by James Sandoe which gives me hives. You won’t miss anything if you skip it.
I do quite like the first story, because I’ve liked clubs whose members tell tales since I first encountered the idea (probably in Arthur C. Clarke, possibly in Stephen King’s Different Seasons). (I’m going to pretend that the technological bits aren’t dubious, as claimed by the online Annotated Wimsey.) Some of the stories are interesting because of their underlying cultural assumptions: the story whose crucial clue is in untranslated French, for instance, or the story that is basically an excuse for a British-style crossword. I’m guessing that Sayers thought she was playing fair with her intended audience, which was pretty clearly not me. The longest story, “The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention,” is dreary and tedious in a way that reminds me of one of the later novels, the name of which I have blocked from my memory—possibly The Five Red Herrings, the Scottish dialects of which are given a trial run in “The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach.” Oh, I suppose I should mention “The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head,” which does actually illuminate Peter’s character through his dealings with his nephew, St. George.
Hmm. I should dig up the Montague Egg stories and see what I think of those: is my relatively low opinion of this collection a matter of comparing the stories to the novels, or is just that mystery short stories (as opposed to the crime short stories of Westlake) don’t work for me? At any rate, I wouldn’t recommend that someone new to Sayers start here (I’m going to reserve my opinion on where I think someone should start until I finish my re-read).