Dorohy L. Sayers
Clouds of Witness
HarperTorch, 1995.
ISBN: 0061043532

It's been a very long time since I read any of Dorothy Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey books. Clouds of Witness is the second in terms of chronology; properly speaking, it should be preceded by Whose Body?. All of the Whimsey novels and short stories are set between the end of World War I, and the start of World War II. They involve the solving of mysteries, usually a murder, by British aristocrat and amateur sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. Sayers in an interview once described Wimsey as a cross between Fred Astaire and Bertie Wooster, from P. G. Wodehouse's novels.

In this case, the mystery is a murder, specifically, the murder of Lady Mary Wimsey's fiance, with the suspect in custody, the Wimsey's older sibling Gerald Wimsey, the Duke of Denver. The Duke was discovered by his sister, leaning over the gun-shot corpse of her dead fiance.

Of course we know Gerald didn't do it, but the unraveling of the clues to discover who did is a great deal of fun. I'd forgotten just how much Sayers was similar to Austen in the way both writers while ostensibly engaging in acts of genre fiction, are simultaneously offering us a comedy of manners. Much as Austen relentlessly exposes the foibles of aristocratic and would-be aristocratic social climbers, so Sayers ruthlessly explores the good and the bad of life among the landed gentry in post World War I Britain. For instance, take this thumbnail sketch of the marriage of the Pettigrew-Robinsons, from the point of view of Mrs. Pettigrew-Robinson on being questioned regarding the night of the murder:

She had been annoyed by all the disturbance in the house that evening, as it had prevented her from getting off. In fact, she had dropped off about 10.30, and Mr. Pettigrew-Robinson had had to wake her an hour after to tell her about the footsteps. What with one thing and another she only got a couple of hours' good sleep.

We know far more about their marriage than we really want to, based upon that brief description.

Sayers has been chastised by literary critics, lured to her fiction by her scholarly translations for the Penguin Classics editions of the Chanson de Roland, and Dante's Divine Comedy, for being hopelessly plebian in having the audacity to write popular fiction; they're idiots. Don't pay any attention to them; in part they're jealous. Much of their spleen is spent on pointing out that Sayers was, a woman, behaving outrageously in successfully writing in a "male" genre in, in the case of Clouds of Witness, 1926.