Tag: Dorothy L Sayers

The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L Sayers and Robert Eustace

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I was very excited when I found out about The Documents in the Case, published in 1930. I have read and enjoyed several of Dorothy L Sayers’ other books, but I did not realise she had written this, the only one not to feature Lord Peter Wimsey. It is a crime novel written in epistolary form, based to a certain extent on the real-life Edith Thompson case. I was hoping it would be another Trent’s Last Case or Malice Aforethought but despite being a compelling read, I was left with a slight feeling of disappointment at the end.

The beginning is the most interesting part, where we gradually learn about the slightly odd Harrison household. It’s rather reminiscent of Patrick Hamilton’s boarding house tales. Margaret Harrison is the much younger second wife of George Harrison, who has a grown-up son, Paul, working abroad. John Munting, a writer, and Harwood Lathom, a painter, rent the flat upstairs and since the hallways adjoin, come into contact with the Harrisons. Agatha Milsom is a sort of paid companion to Mrs Harrison. Mr Harrison is keen on his hobbies of painting and the study of wild mushrooms. It is his sudden death, supposedly from eating the wrong kind of mushroom, that is the case of the title.         

One picture of the Harrisons’ marriage emerges through Agatha Milsom’s letters to her sister. Another view comes from Munting’s letters to his fiancé. Mr Harrison seems quite a different character in his own letters to his son Paul. Miss Milsom thinks that Harrison is an unfeeling brute and his wife is a victim, but she inadvertently reveals that Margaret Harrison is a rather self-dramatising character, perhaps as much the cause of the rows as Mr Harrison. Munting has quite a low opinion of Mrs Harrison and is sure that the marital discord is her fault. Is Harrison the bullying husband that Agatha Milsom takes him to be, or simply older and rather set in his ways with fixed ideas of how a wife should behave? If Margaret Harrison is based to a certain extent on Edith Thompson, I got the feeling that Sayers did not altogether approve of her.

Agatha Milsom, the spinster companion who is mentally troubled and obsessed with sex is the most interesting character, but she disappears from the narrative too early on, after having played a crucial role in how events unfold. The later part of the book features the statements of John Munting and Paul Harrison. These are much longer than the letters and it begins to feel more like a conventional novel.

Munting’s letters to his fiancé, Elizabeth Drake, who is also a writer, convey something of the intellectual climate of the late 1920s, when old certainties had been shattered by the first world war and the ideas of Freud and Einstein were becoming known. His obsession with how life came into being is rather irritating, though. How are we supposed to take all this? It does rather neatly set up the discussion among the scientists at the end that leads to the solution. This chapter is very irritating, but more of that later.

Paul Harrison does not believe his father’s death was an accident and becomes the main investigator into what really happened. It’s very well worked out how he has gathered all the documents together. He also says that Munting’s letters to his wife were the work of a writer with one eye on future publication, giving us a clue as to how to read them. Some of Munting’s comments about publishers probably come from Sayers’ own experience, rather like the advertising agency background she used in Murder Must Advertise.

I was slightly irritated by Sir Gilbert Pugh only being named as the Director of Public Prosecutions right at the end of the book. Since it begins with Paul Harrison sending the bundle of documents to him, it would make the whole story much clearer if Pugh’s role was identified at the beginning.

It’s also slightly frustrating that once the poison is proved to be artificial, that is the rather abrupt end of the novel. Yet Paul Harrison spent a great deal of time trying and failing to work out exactly how the poison was administered and we never learn that.

The book was written as a collaboration between Dorothy L Sayers and Robert Eustace. He was a doctor who had worked with other crime writers before, so I assume the science came from him. I suspect that the science versus religion debate might have appealed to the religious Sayers and her desire to write something that would be seen as more than a detective story. The penultimate chapter, in which the scientists discuss the method of proving whether a substance occurred naturally or was artificially synthesised is far too long and tedious in the extreme.

The novel as a whole reads like a cross between a golden-age detective story and a “highbrow” novel of the 1920s, by an author such as Aldous Huxley, whose Point Counter Point gets a mention. It is full of references to writers of the time. John Munting is rather dismissive about A High Wind in Jamaica, and Agatha Milsom is a bit puzzled by the work of D H Lawrence.

Sayers even refers to one of her own novels, because the pathologist Sir James Lubbock says he is working on an arsenic case, presumably that of Harriet Vane in Strong Poison, published around the same time as The Documents in the Case.

Have his Carcase by Dorothy L Sayers

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This is one of the later novels by Sayers featuring her aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, and was published in 1932. Detective novelist Harriet Vane is on a walking holiday in the west country when she discovers a dead body lying on a large rock on the beach. The corpse’s throat has been cut. She takes photographs and recovers some of the man’s possessions, but this remote spot is some distance from the nearest village. By the time the police have been summoned, the body has been washed out to sea.

Lord Peter arrives from London, where he has read about the case in the papers, and he and Harriet investigate the mystery together. They are able to find out the dead man’s identity and piece together the details of his life as a professional hotel dancer in the coastal resort of Wilvercombe. It appears that he had no reason to commit suicide; there is someone who had a reason for wanting him dead and so the case becomes a murder mystery. The two men encountered by Harriet on the shore, a hiker and a camper, become suspects and when the fatal razor is found it becomes a key piece of the puzzle.

There is something very appealing about stories of a man and woman investigating a crime together and this one brings to mind other detective duos such as Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence, Francis Durbridge’s Paul Temple and Steve, or Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles.

I listened to a very good 1981 dramatization of this on BBC Radio 4 extra. Wimsey is played by Ian Carmichael and Harriet by Maria Aitken. In some ways, this has dated less than a TV adaptation from the same era might have done. On radio, there is none of that contrast between filmed exteriors and interior scenes shot on videotape that used to be the sign of a BBC TV drama series, for example.

Nonetheless, I don’t think a radio version made nowadays would come out quite like this. Ian Carmichael gives Wimsey a no-holds-barred, upper-class, huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ accent and Maria Aitken gives Harriet a clipped, rather Noel Coward way of speaking. This is all to the good as it suits the characters and the story perfectly.

Ian Carmichael had played Wimsey on television in the 1970s and perfectly captures the feeling that his mannerisms are all an act. In the earlier stories one felt this was a defence against his memories of the great war. Here, as he confesses at one point, it is to hide his true feelings about Harriet. He is in love with her, but she wants to retain her independence and repeatedly turns down his proposals of marriage. This is all complicated by the fact that they only met when Harriet was on trial for the murder of her lover. Wimsey solved the case, found the real killer and secured her acquittal. She hates feeling obliged to be grateful to him.

The relationship between Harriet and Lord Peter extends over four novels in the series, but it isn’t really necessary to know that to enjoy Have his Carcase as a standalone mystery. Yes, there is the slight irritation of the constant deference shown by everyone to Wimsey, the constant “my lording” by all and sundry. You just have to accept that as a sign that the book was published in a different era.

The part that really matters, the well-constructed mystery, retains its freshness. It isn’t easy to guess the outcome, even today, and the solution is highly ingenious. It’s basically an “impossible crime” mystery with a small circle of suspects, but something about the seaside setting gives it a very different feel to a mystery set in a country house. This is clearly the North Devon coast, with Wilvercombe standing in for Ilfracombe. Both the setting and the various characters are rendered with greater realism than was usual for this sort of story in 1932.

Then there is Wimsey himself. Under the “silly ass” act, he is a very shrewd individual indeed with a great knowledge of people. He is a little like a serious version of Bertie Wooster. Ian Carmichael really did make the role his own, both on radio and television. After all, he had already played Wooster by the time he came to play Wimsey.