The Golden Age of Murder. Martin Edwards
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about E. Bentley, or G. Chesterton or G. Shaw.
Bill White was earthier than Cournos, and part of his appeal was that he did not share his predecessor’s lofty disdain for crossword puzzles and vulgar limericks. Thanks to him, Sayers experienced at last the sexual pleasure she craved. But once again, a man let her down. It was becoming a pattern in her life.
Sayers had never intended her affair with Bill White to be more than ‘an episode’. On returning to Benson’s, she worked furiously during the day, and then on her new book in the evenings. But the pretence of business as usual took a toll on her health. Her hair fell out, a visible symptom of severe emotional strain, and when it grew again, she decided her ‘little rat’s-tail plaits’ were hideous, and had her hair cut short and started wearing a silver wig.
She kept in touch with Cournos, but was deeply wounded when, having said he was not the marrying kind, he married Helen Kestner Satterthwaite, an American who wrote detective stories under the pen name of Sybil Norton. Biting back despair, Sayers wrote him a letter of congratulation, confiding that she had ‘gone over the rocks’, and that the result was John Anthony. Cournos’s reaction was anger that she had given herself to someone else, after refusing him. ‘Why not me?’ he demanded.
Sayers’ reply amounted to a scream of pain. ‘I have been so bitterly punished by God already, need you really dance on the body?’ The correspondence continued, as she agonized over what had gone wrong between them. One line explains a great deal about the way she led the rest of her life: ‘I am so terrified of emotion, now.’
That terror of emotion never left her. Sayers was devoted to her child, but in her own mind, she had committed ‘a bitter sin’. These were dark days, and she told Cournos, ‘It frightens me to be so unhappy.’ Although she had hoped things would improve, each day seemed worse than the last, and her work was suffering. She dared not even resort to suicide, ‘because what would poor Anthony do then?’ In Cournos’s novel, Stella threatens to kill herself, and Sayers did more than talk about self-harm in her correspondence: suicide forms a significant plot element in each of the first five Wimsey novels.
Yet there were lighter interludes. Cournos sent her an article by Chesterton about writing detective fiction, and she responded with a four-page critique. Game-playing mattered more to detective novelists at this point than the study of psychology, and she argued that characters in the detective story did not need to be drawn in depth. Clouds of Witness was most notable for a trial scene in the House of Lords where Peter Wimsey’s elder brother is accused of murder, a plot element she hoped would attract American readers.
Her next novel, Unnatural Death, displayed more interest in character, although the lesbianism of the heiress Mary Whittaker is implied rather than explicit. Thrifty as good novelists are, Sayers used a snippet of information from Bill White about an air-lock in a motorcycle feed pipe to provide a clue to the mystery. In a far from cosy passage, she describes how the arms of a corpse had been nibbled by rats. Years later, she explained to George Orwell (who had spoken of Wimsey’s ‘morbid interest’ in corpses) that in a detective novel, ‘where the writer has exerted himself to be extra gruesome, look out for the clue’. The frisson induced by the image of hungry rats was a ruse to distract readers from the possibility that the arm had been pricked by a hypodermic.
Wimsey is assisted by Miss Climpson and her undercover employment agency for single women. Climpson’s irrepressible verve was Sayers’ riposte to the likes of Charlotte Haldane, wife of the Marxist geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, who argued in Motherhood and its Enemies that a woman’s personal fulfilment depends on her inborn maternal instinct. Haldane is remembered as a feminist, but Sayers’ fiction was more sympathetic to single women, and her attitude towards them more progressive. Unnatural Death focused, as Sayers’ stories often did, more on the means by which death was caused than on whodunit; the culprit is obvious. The murder method involved injecting an air bubble into a vein. An ingenious idea, even if its feasibility was open to question.
She earned money by writing short stories, drawing on her own know-how for material. ‘The Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will’ included a crossword puzzle clue, a nod to the fashionable craze which was also one of her own favourite pastimes. Motorcycling was an unlikely passion. She bought a ‘Ner-a-Car’ motorcycle, complete with sidecar, and rode it ‘in light skirmishing trim … with two packed saddle-bags and a coat tied on with string.’ ‘The Fantastic Horror of the Cat in the Bag’ features a race with a motorbike rejoicing in the improbable but factually accurate name of the Scott Flying-Squirrel.
The weirder realms of advertising presented her with the germ of ‘The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers’, which is perhaps the best Wimsey short story. Sayers’ inspiration came from an American firm of morticians whose advertisements demanded: ‘Why lay your loved ones in the cold earth? Let us electroplate them for you in gold and silver.’
In April 1926, Sayers summoned up the nerve to drop a bombshell on her parents. She wrote a letter telling them, after a lengthy preamble including thanks for the present of an Easter egg, that she was ‘getting married on Tuesday (weather permitting) to a man named Fleming, who is at the moment Motoring Correspondent to the News of the World’. Hoping to soften the shock, she added, ‘I think you will rather like him.’ To her relief, they did.
The new man in her life, Oswald Arthur Fleming, was a divorced journalist twelve years her senior. She had only known him for a few months. A Scot hailing from the Orkneys, he liked to be known as ‘Mac’, though he wrote under the name Atherton Fleming. John Anthony, who knew Sayers as ‘Cousin Dorothy’, remained in Ivy Shrimpton’s care after the death of Ivy’s mother, and did not join the couple in their London flat.
Mac Fleming was a hard-living, hard-drinking newspaperman, keen on motor racing, and chronically hard up. He had two children by his first wife, but provided them with no financial support. He had written a book called How to See the Battlefields, based on his time as a war correspondent for the Daily Chronicle. For a time, he worked in advertising, which may explain how he and Sayers met.
She took to married life with gusto. She accompanied him to race meetings at Brooklands, and bought a motorcycle to ride herself, clad in goggles, gauntlets, and leather helmet. Motor racing was the latest craze, and leading drivers like Malcolm Campbell, Henry Segrave and J. G. Parry-Thomas – all of whom held the world land speed record in quick succession – were household names.
Racing offered thrills in abundance, but danger was ever present. The long, flat beach at Pendine Sands in Carmarthenshire was vaunted as ‘the finest natural speedway imaginable’, but while trying to regain the record, Parry-Thomas crashed his car. He was severely burned, and his head was ripped away from his neck by the drive chain. Mac, a friend of the dead man, was given the wretched task of reporting the horrific crash.
A less personally distressing project saw the News of the World pay for both Mac and Sayers to travel to France. Their task was to solve the murder of the English-born nurse May Daniels. Nurse Daniels had disappeared from a quayside waiting room when about to return to England after crossing the Channel with a friend for a day trip. Months later, her decomposed body, bearing signs of strangulation, was found by the roadside near Boulogne, and her gold wristwatch was missing. Clues (or red herrings) found near the body included a discarded hypodermic syringe, and an umbrella, while Nurse Daniels’ friend said she had spoken about a meeting with ‘Egyptian princes’.
Rumours spread that the dead woman was pregnant by a prominent member of the British establishment, and that the real purpose of her trip was to have an abortion performed by a mysterious Egyptian called Suliman. Questions were asked in Parliament about a baffling lack of cooperation between the British and French authorities, and the Press scented a cover-up. Mac and Sayers faced competition from other journalists, including former Chief Inspector Gough, hired as a ‘special investigator’ by the Daily Mail, and Netley Lucas, a conman turned crime correspondent for the Sunday News. None matched the brilliance of Lord Peter Wimsey, although Netley Lucas’ lifestyle was equally colourful: he later applied his talents to twin careers as a literary agent and a publisher before being sentenced