The Documents in the Case

??????? The Documents in the Case

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The only one of Sayers' twelve major crime novels not to feature Lord Peter Wimsey, her most famous detective character, written in collaboration with Robert Eustace. This is an epistolary novel, told primarily in the form of letters between some of the characters. This collection of documents — hence the novel's title — is explained as a dossier of evidence collected by the victim's son as part of his campaign to obtain justice for his father.

Dorothy L. Sayers

The Documents in the Case

Contents

Introduction by Elizabeth George

Introduction

Section One — Synthesis

Section One — Synthesis cont'd

Section Two — Analysis

Section Two — Analysis con'td

INTRODUCTION by Elizabeth George

I came to the wonderful detective novels of Dorothy L. Sayers in a way that would probably make that distinguished novelist spin in her grave. Years ago, actor Ian Carmichael starred in the film productions of a good chunk of them, which I eventually saw on my public television station in Huntington Beach, California. I recall the host of the show reciting the impressive, salient details of Sayers’ life and career — early female graduate of Oxford, translator of Dante, among other things — and I was much impressed. But I was even more impressed with her delightful sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, and I soon sought out her novels.

Because I had never been — and still am not today — a great reader of detective fiction, I had not heard of this marvellous character. I quickly became swept up in everything about him: from his foppish use of language to his family relations. In very short order, I found myself thoroughly attached to Wimsey, to his calm and omnipresent manservant Bunter, to the Dowager Duchess of Denver (was ever there a more deliciously alliterative title?), to the stuffy Duke and the unbearable Duchess of Denver, to Viscount St George, to Charles Parker, to Lady Mary. . In Dorothy L. Sayers’ novels, I found the sort of main character I loved when I turned to fiction: someone with a ‘real’ life, someone who wasn’t just a hero who conveniently had no relations to mess up the workings of the novelist’s plot.

Dorothy L. Sayers, as I discovered, had much to teach me both as a reader and as a future novelist. While many detective novelists from the Golden Age of mystery kept their plots pared down to the requisite crime, suspects, clues, and red herrings, Sayers did not limit herself to so limited a canvas in her work. She saw the crime and its ensuing investigation as merely the framework for a much larger story, the skeleton — if you will — upon which she could hang the muscles, organs, blood vessels and physical features of a much larger tale. She wrote what I like to call the tapestry novel, a book in which the setting is realised (from Oxford, to the dramatic coast of Devon, to the flat bleakness of the Fens), in which throughout both the plot and the subplots the characters serve functions surpassing that of mere actors on the stage of the criminal investigation, in which themes are explored, in which life and literary symbols are used, in which allusions to other literature abound. Sayers, in short, did what I call ‘taking no prisoners’ in her approach to the detective novel. She did not write down to her readers; rather, she assumed that her readers would rise to her expectations of them.

I found in her novels a richness that I had not previously seen in detective fiction. I became absorbed in the careful application of detail that characterised her plots: whether she was educating me about bell ringing in The Nine Tailors, about the unusual uses of arsenic in Strong Poison, about the beauties of architectural Oxford in Gaudy Night. She wrote about everything from cryptology to vinology, making unforgettable that madcap period between wars that marked the death of an overt class system and heralded the beginning of an insidious one.

What continues to be remarkable about Sayers’ work, however, is her willingness to explore the human condition. The passions felt by characters created eighty years ago are as real today as they were then. The motives behind people’s behavior are no more complex now than they were in 1923 when Lord Peter Wimsey took his first public bow. Times have changed, rendering Sayers’ England in so many ways unrecognisable to today’s reader. But one of the true pleasures inherent to picking up a Sayers novel now is to see how the times in which we live alter our perceptions of the world around us, while doing nothing at all to alter the core of our humanity.

When I first began my own career as a crime novelist, I told people that I would rest content if my name was ever mentioned positively in the same sentence as that of Dorothy L. Sayers. I’m pleased to say that that occurred with the publication of my first novel. If I ever come close to offering the reader the details and delights that Sayers offered in her Wimsey novels, I shall consider myself a success indeed.

The reissuing of a Sayers novel is an event, to be sure. As successive generations of readers welcome her into their lives, they embark upon an unforgettable journey with an even more unforgettable companion. In time of dire and immediate trouble, one might well call upon a Sherlock Holmes for a quick solution to one’s trials. But for the balm that reassures one about surviving the vicissitudes of life, one could do no better than to anchor onto a Lord Peter Wimsey.

Elizabeth GeorgeHuntington Beach, CaliforniaMay 27, 2003

INTRODUCTION

Paul Harrison to Sir Gilbert Pugh [Letter covering the attached documents.]

Redgauntlet Hotel, Bloomsbury, W.C.18th March, 1930

Dear Sir,

I am obliged by your letter of yesterday’s date, and hasten to send you, as requested, the complete dossier of documents. When you have read them, I shall be happy to call upon you at any time convenient to yourself, and give you any further information that may be within my power.

All the points I specially wished to make are, I think, fully covered by my previous letter. But since that letter has now served its original purpose of arousing your interest in the matter, I feel that it would be better forgotten, as far as possible. I would rather you came to the present documents with an entirely open mind. To me, who have been working over them for the last six or seven months, they seem to point clearly to one and only one conclusion, but I suppose it is possible that both Sir James Lubbock and I may be mistaken. You will judge for yourself. I only most earnestly beg of you to give the case your most careful consideration. You will realise that it is of vital importance to me to have the matter fully investigated.

You will, I fear, find some of the letters and statements very diffuse and full of irrelevancies. I thought it best to send the originals, complete and untouched, exactly as they stand. Many of the incidental details, though unimportant in themselves, throw useful sidelights on the situation, and will, I think, help a stranger like yourself to understand exactly what took place in my late father’s household.

I have arranged the papers, as nearly as possible, in chronological order. My own statement (Number 49) explains fully how the various documents came into my hands.

Trusting to hear further from you in due course,I am, dear sir,

Yours faithfully, Paul Harrison

1

Synthesis

1. Agatha Milsom to Olive Farebrother
   

15, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater 9th September, 1928

My dear Olive,

Thank you very much for your letter and kind inquiries after my health. I like my new doctor very much indeed. I think he understands me a great deal better than Dr Coombs, and he has put me on quite a different treatment. He says I am just going through a ‘difficult phase’ at present, and that if only I can hold on and not let things get on top of me for the next year or two I shall come out of it quite all right. But I am not to have a rest-cure! It seems Dr Coombs was all wrong about that — of course he didn’t exactly say she was wrong, it wouldn’t be professional, but I could see that he thought it! Dr Trevor says that rest-cures only ‘turn you in upon yourself’, and that makes things worse. He says I must get right away from myself and my feelings, so as to ‘sublimate’ all these repressed urges and turn them into some other sort of energy. He says it was quite all right to start with to have my dreams and subconscious betrayals analysed, so as to know exactly what was the matter with me, but that now the time has come when I must learn to throw all these bottled-up desires outwards, and give them something to do. He explained it all most clearly. I said, ‘I suppose it is sex, doctor, isn’t it?’ (Of course, one gets quite used to asking things perfectly frankly, and one doesn’t mind it a bit.) And he said, well, largely; and, of course, that was a thing most people suffered from one way and another, and in these days one couldn’t always take the obvious and direct way out of a condition of sex-repression, because it would often be socially and economically inconvenient. I said that with two million extra women in this country it didn’t seem possible, certainly, for everybody to get married, and he smiled and said: ‘My dear Miss Milsom, half my patients come to me because they are not married — and the other half because they are!’ We had quite a laugh about it. He is very nice and rather good-looking, but he doesn’t seem to think it necessary for all his patients to fall in love with him, like that odd man I went to see in Wimpole Street, who suffered so dreadfully from halitosis.

Well, anyway, he asked me what I was interested in, and I said I’d always had an idea I should like to write. He said that was an awfully good idea, and I ought to encourage it by trying my hand at a little sketch or article every day, or by just putting down my observations of people and things as I saw them. I’m sure I get subjects enough in this house, as far as matrimony goes, anyhow. Indeed, my dear, from what I see of men, I’m very glad there are other ways out of my troubles than what Dr Trevor calls the direct way!! Do you mind, please, not throwing my letters away — just stick them in one of the drawers in my old desk when you’ve finished with them, because I think I might use some of the funny little incidents that happen here to work up into a novel some time. One puts these things down when they are fresh in one’s mind, and then one forgets about them.

Well, we are jogging along here in our usual placid way — with the usual little outbreaks, of course, when a meal goes wrong, as they will sometimes, with all my care. Mr Harrison is such an expert, you know, that it is very hard for a person with only one pair of hands to keep everything up to his high standard. And, fond though I am, and always shall be, of dear Mrs Harrison, I do sometimes wish that she was just a little more practical. If anything at all is left to her to do, she is so apt to lose herself in a book or a daydream and forget all about it. She always says she ought to have been born to ten thousand a year — but who of us could not say that? I always feel myself that I was really meant to ‘sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam’ — you remember the games we used to play about being princesses in the Arabian Nights, with a train of a hundred black slaves, carrying alabaster bowls filled with rubies — but alas! life is life and we have to make the best of it. And I do sometimes feel it a little unfair that so much should come upon my shoulders. Women do want romance in their lives, and there is so little of it about. Of course, as you know, I do feel for Mrs Harrison — her husband is such a dry sort of man and so lacking in sympathy. I do what I can, but that is not the same thing and it is very worrying. I must learn to detach myself. Dr Trevor says it is very important to cultivate detachment.

When I was shopping this morning I met Mr Bell, who told me the top maisonette was let at last — to two young men! I said I hoped they wouldn’t be noisy (though anything would be a relief after that awful woman with her children), and he said they seemed quiet, gentlemanly young fellows. One of them he thinks must be some kind of artist, because they were so interested in the top back room which has a big window with a north light — you know, the one Mr Harrison always covets so much. Though, of course, it is not nearly so convenient a house as ours in other ways.

I have started on Tom’s stockings. They are going to be very smart. I have worked out an original design for the turnover — a sort of swirly pattern in fawn, brown and black, taken from the coat of the kitchen cat — tabby, you know. Mr Perry saw it the other day when he called. He thinks I have quite a talent for that kind of thing.

Give my love to Ronnie and Joan. I hope you are taking care of yourself.Your loving sister, Aggie

1. The Same to the Same
   

15, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater 13th September, 1928

Dear Olive,

I really think it is very unkind of you to suggest that I like Dr Trevor simply because he is a man. I am the last person to imagine that a woman doctor is necessarily inferior. Quite the contrary. Other things being equal I much prefer a woman, but if the man happens to be right and the woman wrong, it would be absurd not to admit it. I do feel that Dr Trevor’s treatment is doing me good, and I am not the least little bit prejudiced by the sex question one way or another. I daresay Tom has been airing his opinions, but that does not impress me at all. Men never ever get out of their heads that the whole world centres round their high-mightinesses. I’m not blaming Tom, but all men are self-centred. They can’t help it. Dr Trevor says that it is a necessary part of their psychological make-up; they have to be self-regarding, just as women have to be other-regarding — on account of the children and so on. But I do beg you will not take Tom’s pronouncements for Gospel where I am concerned.

I read such a clever article the other day by Storm Jameson, in which she said that all women, in the depths of their hearts, resented men. Now I do think that is so true. It is so maddening, the calm assumption of superiority that a man puts on when he is talking to a woman. We had quite a little dispute the other evening — about Einstein, of all people! Mrs Harrison started to talk about an interesting account of him in the Sunday paper, but Mr Harrison only grunted and went on reading something tedious about the Government. However, she went on asking him questions till he simply had to answer, and then he said, quite snubbingly, that he considered the man was a charlatan who was pulling people’s legs with his theories. I said I didn’t think all these professors would believe in him and have him down to lecture and so on if it was just that. So he said, ‘Just you ask my old friend, Professor Alcock, if you won’t believe me.’ Mrs Harrison said she couldn’t ask Professor Alcock, because she had never seen him, and why didn’t Mr Harrison sometimes bring somebody interesting to the house? That seemed to annoy him, though I thought it was very much to the point, but, being only a paid subordinate, I said meekly that we were all entitled to our own opinions. So he smiled sarcastically and said that perhaps some of us were better qualified to judge than others, and that the Sunday Press was not always the best guide to knowledge. ‘But you read the papers,’ said Mrs Harrison. ‘When I’m given the chance,’ said he.