Cross, but was turned down because she was too young. After a spell as a teacher, she worked for Blackwell’s, the publishers, in Oxford, where she fell in love with Eric Whelpton, a handsome soldier who have been invalided out of the Army.
After the war ended, Whelpton started teaching in France. Sayers chased him across the Channel, and took a job as his assistant. When he teased her about her enthusiasm for crime fiction, she told him some friends from Oxford were planning to make a fortune by writing detective stories. The group included Douglas Cole, his wife Margaret, and Michael Sadleir, later a successful publisher. They thought they could create a market, and had it in mind to set up a writing syndicate together. Sayers urged Whelpton to join them, but he was not interested. Worse, he did not reciprocate her devotion.
Whelpton became involved with a married woman, and a chastened Sayers returned to London to lick her wounds. Her morale received a much-needed boost when – in the same post-war mood that saw women given the vote (provided they were thirty years old), the first female MP returned to office, and the first woman called to the Bar – Oxford University allowed women to graduate formally. Sayers was among the first group of female students from Oxford to be invested with both a B.A. and, because five years had passed since she had taken her finals, an M.A.
Equal rights for women remained, however, a distant dream. Working men worried about women taking their jobs, and trade union pressure pushed women towards the career cul-de-sac of domestic service. Even highly educated women found their horizons narrowing. Their choice was often between a career coupled with a life of celibacy, or redundancy and marriage.
With so many young men killed in combat, marriage was often not an option. The problem of the ‘surplus woman’ was widely debated by the chattering classes. One successful Golden Age suspense novel (written by a single woman) even saw a deranged serial killer decide to solve that problem by ridding the world of unmarried females. For Sayers, the answer lay in building an independent and fulfilling career, preferably as a writer. After being turned down for a series of jobs, she returned to teaching as a stopgap. Meanwhile, she tried her hand at a detective story.
She began with the mystery of ‘a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez’. After the victim – a sympathetically presented Jew – underwent a sex change, this became the opening of Whose Body? In Sayers’ original version, Lord Peter Wimsey deduces that a body in a bath is not that of Sir Reuben Levy, a financier, because it is not circumcised. The publishers thought this too coarse for the delicate sensibilities of readers, and required her to change the physical evidence so as to suggest that the corpse belonged to a manual worker, rather than a rich man.
Originally, Wimsey featured as a minor character in an unpublished story. This was probably intended for the Sexton Blake series, produced by a writing syndicate. Sayers also toyed with the idea of introducing Wimsey in a play (‘a detective fantasia’ called The Mousehole) that she did not finish. When she embarked on a novel, she decided this son of a duke would be her detective.
Her intentions were satiric rather than snobbish. A detective who was not a professional police officer, she reasoned, needed to be rich and to have plenty of leisure time to devote to solving mysteries. She conceived Wimsey as a caricature of the gifted amateur sleuth, and found it amusing to soak herself in the lifestyle of someone for whom money was no object. When Wimsey first comes into the story, ‘his long amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.’
Sayers endowed Wimsey with criminology, bibliophily, music and cricket as favourite recreations. He is a Balliol man, equipped with a magnifying glass disguised as a monocle, a habit of literary quotation and an engaging, if often frivolous, demeanour. His valet and former batman, the imperturbable Mervyn Bunter, became devoted to him when they fought together during the war. Conveniently, his sister, Lady Mary, is to marry Detective Chief Inspector Charles Parker of Scotland Yard. Like many amateur sleuths, Wimsey benefits from keeping close to the police. The dialogue is flippant, but Wimsey’s worldview is darkened by his wartime experiences. He suffered shell-shock and had a nervous breakdown. When Parker is bothered by the idea of a corpse being shaved and manicured, Wimsey retorts, ‘Worse things happen in war.’
A distinctive amateur sleuth, a lively style and unorthodox storyline compensated for the fact that it is easy to guess whodunit. Sayers was always more interested in describing the culprit’s methods of carrying out and concealing the crime. In a nod to E. C. Bentley’s ground-breaking whodunit Trent’s Last Case, she had the killer refer to ‘that well-thought-out work of Mr. Bentley’s’. Later, it became a regular in-joke for Detection Club members to reference each other in their books.
Having fun with Wimsey offered relief from the depressing reality of life on a tight budget. The rent for her flat was seventy pounds a year, and she struggled to make ends meet. As she told her parents, in one of her innumerable frank and entertaining letters, writing about Wimsey ‘prevents me from wanting too badly the kind of life I do want, and see no chance of getting …’ If the novel did not sell, she intended to abandon her literary ambitions, and take up a permanent job as a teacher. But it was not what she wanted. When an American publisher offered to take Whose Body? she was overjoyed. Soon a British publisher accepted it as well.
While Sayers was working on her first novel, she began a relationship with someone very different from Whelpton, the writer John Cournos. Russian-born, Cournos came from a Jewish background, and his first language was Yiddish. His family emigrated to the United States when he was ten, but he moved to England and established a reputation as a novelist, poet and journalist. Cournos was disdainful about Sayers’ aristocratic detective, but she cheered up when Philip Guedella, a Jewish historian, asserted in the Daily News that ‘the detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds’.
Dorothy L. Sayers and the mysterious Robert Eustace – photographed to publicise The Documents in the Case (by permission of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL).
Dorothy L. Sayers (by permission of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society).
Cournos believed in free love, but Sayers, a High Anglican, was wary about sex outside marriage. Times were changing, and Marie Stopes, author of Married Love, had recently set up the country’s first clinic dispensing contraceptive products and advice – a crucial step towards making birth control socially acceptable. Sayers, however, had not yet overcome her objection to contraception as she did later with the Beast, Bill White. She did not want her relationship with Cournos to have the ‘taint of the rubber shop’.
This mismatch of expectations killed off their affair. She presented a fictionalized version of her emotional battle with Cournos eight years later, when she published Strong Poison. Harriet Vane, a detective novelist and Oxford graduate, is accused of murdering her selfish former lover Philip Boyes. She tells Wimsey that Boyes demanded her devotion, but ‘I didn’t like having matrimony offered as a bad-conduct prize’.
Cournos retaliated with a more intimate and brutal account of their relationship in The Devil is an English Gentleman. Stella, based on Sayers, resists Richard’s overtures, thinking: ‘If I give myself to him, he’ll forsake me.’ Meanwhile Richard ‘waited for the generous gesture, for a token of abandonment on her part; it did not come’. Cournos, who eventually emigrated to the USA, continued to publish books until the early Sixties. His destiny was to be remembered for his doomed romance with Sayers rather than for his own literary efforts.
Sayers started working for Benson’s shortly before Whose Body? was accepted. The job taught her how to use publicity to promote her writing, and the value of branding (before it was known as branding). Not from cussedness, but because she knew the value of a distinctive brand, she insisted on being known as Dorothy L. Sayers, not simply Dorothy Sayers. When her publisher, Ernest