 |
 |
1.6 You've Done for Yourself, Dot: A Case History
In 1929,
in her magisterial introduction to the Omnibus of Crime (1929),
Dorothy L. Sayers states bluntly, "The less love in a detective-story,
the better."
Only seven years later, Sayers published Gaudy Night, a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novel in which there is no murder (remember Van Dine's rule number 7) and the climax of the novel comes after the solution of the crime, when Harriet Vane accepts Lord Peter Wimsey's marriage proposal (in Latin, no less!).
In an essay
about how she came to write Gaudy Night (1936),
Sayers
explains her disagreement with Van Dine and, incidentally, although she
doesn't admit it here, with her own previous stance regarding the psychological
and literary scope of the mystery novel:
[Some detective writers] also took the occasion to preach at every opportunity that if the detective story was to live and develop it must get back to where it began at the hands of [Wilkie] Collins and [Sheridan] Le Fanu, and become once more a novel of manners instead of a pure crossword puzzle. My own voice was raised very loudly to proclaim this doctrine, because I still meant my books to develop along those lines at all costs, and it does no harm to let one's theory act as herald to one's practice. Some people did not agree with us. Mr. Willard Huntington Wright (Van Dine) still believes, for example, that every vestige of humanity should be ruthlessly expunged from the detective novel; but I am sure he is wrong and we are right. It is not only that the reader gets tired after a time of literature without bowels; in the end the writer gets tired of it too, and that is fatal. (Haycroft, Gaudy Night, 209)
Sayers deliberately and self-consciously developed Wimsey almost beyond recognition over the course of his career, from a vacuous aristocrat playing at detection to a sensitive artist undertaking a vocation. The impetus for this steady revision was the author's recognition of her creation's inadequacy:
I plugged confidently on, putting my puppet [Wimsey] through all his tricks and exhibiting him in a number of elegant attitudes. But I had not properly realized -- and this shows how far I was from understanding what it was I was trying to do with the detective novel -- that any character that remains static except for a repertory of tricks and attitudes is bound to become a monstrous weariness to his maker in the course of 9 or 10 volumes. . . . If the story was to go on, Peter had got to become a complete human being. . . . (Sayers, "Gaudy Night," The Art of the Mystery Story, 1946, 1974, 210-211)
In other words, Pinocchio, the "puppet," needed to turn into a real little boy.
The novel in which Sayers turns Wimsey into something more than detectival whimsy is Gaudy Night, a book in which his wife-to-be, Harriet Vane, herself a professional author of murder mysteries, investigates a problem at her alma mater, a fictional college similar to Sayers' own alma mater. As Harriet investigates the problem at the college, she is writing one of her detective novels and becoming dissatisfied with the quality of her own work. The parallels between author and character should be obvious, I hope, and the self-referential nature of the plot is typical of sophisticated literary novels, which often comment on other novels and the artistic ambitions of their authors. At one point, the newly vulnerable, well-rounded Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane discuss the book she's working on. He suggests one of the problems she's having is the lack of psychological motivations for one of her characters, Wilfrid.
"But if I give Wilfrid all those violent and lifelike feelings, he'll throw the whole book out of balance."
"You would have to abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change."
"I'm afraid to do that, Peter. It might get to near the bone."
"It might be the wisest thing you could do."
"Write it out and get rid of it?"
"Yes."
"I'll think about it. It would hurt like hell."
"What would that matter, if it made a good book?"
What happened
to Sayers' detective novels with increased complexities of character?
The first thing that goes in Gaudy Night is murder. Sayers' next
Wimsey novel is Busman's Honeymoon (1937),
which she describes as a "sentimental comedy" with only a "ha'porth of
detection in it." Busman's Honeymoon, not coincidentally, is the
last mystery novel that Sayers wrote; it seems that the evolution of her
characters killed the impulse in her to write classical mystery fiction.
Apparently, in spite of her stirring proclamations of heretical aspirations,
she did not believe herself that the mystery novel could also be a "good
book," which she understood as a kind of nineteenth-century novel of manners.
The epitaph for Sayers as a mystery novelist might very well be the grim response to Gaudy Night from one of her American fans who -- "with regrettable familiarity" -- warned her: "You have done for yourself this time, Dot" (Sayers, "Gaudy Night," The Art of the Mystery Story, 218). She would answer him, I think, with Peter's question: "What does it matter, if I made a good book?"
Classical Mysteries and Their Relation to "Good" Literature
Other mystery novelists, having learned from Sayers' revision of her own rules, might answer that mysteries and good books are not mutually exclusive.
The constraints of a literary genre are often the means by which an author's inspiration is given form, meaning, and beauty, and the means by which readers most easily and fully appreciate the idiosyncratic genius of an author. Hillary Waugh, a mystery novelist, sees an analogy between the conventions of a mystery novel and the highly restrictive meter and rhyme scheme of the sonnet.
The mystery novel is a game between author and reader, the goal of which is Find the Villain, and Foul Play is not allowed. The reader is entitled to expect that everything in the mystery relates to the objective. This, then, lays a heavy stricture upon the mystery writer. He may express himself as much as he wants, but he may only do so within the framework of the mystery form -- meaning it must have a bearing on the plot. It must relate to Find the Villain. To work under such a limitation requires artistry and skill. That is what makes the mystery such a demanding art form. The mystery, to the novel, is what the sonnet is to poetry. (Hillary Waugh, Introduction, How to Write Mysteries, 1989)
Waugh celebrates the "heavy stricture" laid upon the mystery writer; he sees those conventional constraints as being essential to the beauty and pleasure of the form, just as the brevity and restricted rhyme scheme of the sonnet are essential to an appreciation of its beauty. His comparison of the sonnet, a form of rarified literary art, with the merely popular genre of mystery fiction reminds us that all of literature may be fairly compared to a game bound by a set of strict rules.
Sayers ultimately decided that the mystery genre was less like the sonnet than it was like the limerick, but her ambivalence has been overruled by her successors. Some sixty years after the publication of Gaudy Night, P. D. James explained why she chose to write mystery novels:
I was setting out at last on the path of becoming a writer, which I had longed for all my life, and I thought writing a detective story would be a wonderful apprenticeship for a "serious" novelist, because a detective story is very easy to write badly but difficult to write well. There is so much you have to fit into eighty- or ninety-thousand words -- not just creating a puzzle, but an atmosphere, a setting, characters. . . . Then, when the first one worked, I continued, and I came to believe that it is perfectly possible to remain within the constraints and conventions of the genre and be a serious writer, saying something true about men and women and their relationships and the society in which they live. (P. D. James, Paris Review, Summer 1995, 59)
That James
can say this without embarrassment is due, at least in part, to the work
of Dorothy L. Sayers, even though Sayers herself would never be able to
agree wholeheartedly.
 |
 |
 |
