WHODUNIT?

In 1860, with the publication of a book called The Woman in White, a minor Victorian novelist named Wilkie Collins wrecked the English novel.

It is, of course, unfair to blame the amiable Collins for all that went wrong with fiction once authors started writing mysteries. But with the 1998 publication of Thrones, Dominations, a new Lord Peter Wimsey story completed by Jill Paton Walsh from notes left by Dorothy L. Sayers at her death in 1957, we can find one small measure of the price we paid for the rise of the mystery novel.

Finishing a dead author’s unfinished novel is one of the trickiest of literary feats; perhaps it is better to say that it is impossible: Both Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray left incomplete manuscripts, and none of the many attempts to finish them has been convincing. Thrones, Dominations, however, is something beyond unconvincing; it is an exceedingly bad book whose cynical attempt to cash in on Sayers’s name is possible only in a world in which mysteries constitute the largest single block of books sold. And what little echo of the original author the novel does manage to evoke serves mostly to remind us of the extent to which — from the first Lord Peter novel, Whose Body? (1923), to the last, Busman’s Honeymoon (1937) — Sayers’s genuine if somewhat eccentric literary talent squandered itself in writing minor classics of a minor and uncongenial form of art.

A close friend of Dickens, Wilkie Collins was a lawyer who found fiction more enjoyable and remunerative than the law. And in his novels — from the widely read The Woman in White to No Name, Annadale, and his most enduring book, The Moonstone in 1868 — Collins merely did what one writer or another in his day was bound to do: He seized upon the various undeveloped suggestions that had been building in English literature for seventy years and created the modern mystery novel.

The setting for this new genre owed something to such prison and crime stories as William Godwin’s 1794 The Adventures of Caleb Williams, while the drama of the mystery novel derived at least in part from Horace Walpole’s 1764 The Castle of Otranto and the whole swarm of its Gothic imitators that Jane Austen so roundly mocked in her 1818 Northanger Abbey. And the figure of the detective — suggested by the publication in Paris of Eugene Francois Vidocq’s 1828 Memoires — was brought into fiction by Edgar Allan Poe’s detective tales of the early 1840s, from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to “The Purloined Letter.”

But Collins was the first to achieve great popular success in England (as Emile Gaboriau did at the same time in France) by pointing these elements exclusively toward the solution of a puzzle — a game in which the hero and the reader race to see who will discover the solution first. His fiction contains most of the typical interests of Victorian literature: a concern with social class; a fascination with eccentricity (in The Moonstone, the key narrating character of the butler, constantly repairing to a well-thumbed copy of Robinson Crusoe for inspiration, is nearly unbearable by twentieth-century standards); and a knowledge that every novel must at some point include a love story. To all this, however, he added something never seen before. Weighing his tales down with a tedious machinery of letters, diaries, and confessions — and correcting The Woman in White for its second edition when a reviewer pointed out that a crucial date was at least a week off he introduced into fiction the idea of evidence, the notion that readers must concern themselves above all with the parade of facts in which the author is both concealing and revealing the truth of his story.

The effect on English literature was entirely bad. There entered into art with the late Victorian mystery novel a new carefulness — not of language or of story, but of sheer evidence. Even great writers were affected: Much as Shakespeare could give blithely contradictory hints about Hamlet’s age, so Dickens could remain unconcerned with perfect consistency from the early and sloppily constructed crime story of Oliver Twist in 1838 to the much more tightly controlled Bleak House in 1853; by 1870, however, in Edwin Drood, the mystery novel left unfinished at his death, Dickens was compelled by Collins’s success to spend a great deal of time keeping straight the facts of the puzzle he had created.

It is worth noting that not since Dickens has an author in English simultaneously achieved enormous popularity and critical recognition. Once Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes in the 1887 A Study in Scarlet and formalized the character of the detective, the pulp writers were given a new genre in which they could flourish and draw off from the audience for major novels a large segment of the reading public.

A great deal of experimenting remained to be done — from E. C. Bentley’s demonstration of how to integrate a love story into a mystery with Trent’s Last Case in 1913 to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett’s demonstration of how to integrate violence in the hard-boiled American fiction of the 1930s and ’40s, with Agatha Christie’s over ninety novels following the 1920 The Mysterious Affair at Styles establishing the sub-genre of the cozy, British fireside mystery. Innumerable other authors did their part to define the form in the first decades of the twentieth century: G. K. Chesterton in England and Melville Davisson Post in America created the religious mystery; Cyril Hare composed the first major lawyer puzzle; Freeman Crofts invented the detective procedural; John Dickson Carr, with various pseudonyms, perfected the locked-room mystery; under the name “Michael Innes,” J. I. M. Stewart developed the academic tale; and Dorothy L. Sayers — well, in eleven novels and three volumes of short stories, she dabbled in nearly all the emerging sub-genres of the mystery novel, staking out for herself the aristocratic world in which only a man like Lord Peter Wimsey, son of the Duke of Denver, could move.

By everyone’s account, it was all enormous fun for the authors at the time, and it remains enormous fun to read today. But the idea of the puzzle and the reign of evidence is oppressive and enduring. A trip to the public library — with its endless shelves of new mysteries that readers check out by the yard – – is all that’s necessary to convince one that the hackwork done in the genre has made apparently ineradicable the division between the low-brow pulp that is actually consumed by American readers and the high-brow work that is praised by American reviewers.

The new Thrones, Dominations tells the story of the mystery writer Harriet Vane’s early married days to Lord Peter Wimsey, as she endeavors to set up house, come to an understanding with her husband’s longtime valet Bunter, manage her aristocratic inlaws — and help her husband solve a murder. The beautiful and lethargic Rosamund, wife of the wealthy and intensely jealous theater promoter Laurence Harwell, has been found strangled in a country cottage, and everybody who has a motive also seems to have been somewhere else. But bit by bit — in breaks between carrying out delicate diplomatic missions involving Edward VIII’s love affair with Mrs. Simpson and 1936 abdication — Lord Peter breaks down their alibis. Unfortunately, he breaks down everyone’s alibi, and moves from having no suspects to having too many. Finally, thanks to a key detail in a portrait of Rosamund and his own work gathering information on the London sewer system for Harriet’s next novel, Lord Peter solves the mystery and traps the murderer.

Whatever the extent of the notes Sayers left, it was not sufficient to guide Thrones, Dominations to any good effect. In part, the failure of the book comes from the new author’s misunderstanding of the way Sayers used her characters. Lord Peter is too active, his brother is too kind, and his mother is too present to leave believable her character of vagueness masking sharp intelligence. Harriet is a sort of 1990s feminist forced into 1930s clothing. She is oddly coy (at one point requesting that her husband join her in “an anglo-saxon verb”) while also far more sexually explicit than Sayers would ever have allowed. In greater part, however, the novel fails simply by its inability to do what Sayers did best: mobilize detail for both symbolic and practical use in her mysteries. The domestic detail in the new novel is endless and for the most part pointless; reams of information about painting appear without much use; and precise facts about 1930s airplanes are carefully presented without any use at all.

It was all so much more tasteful in the original novels, and followed much more strictly the demands that Sayers made in her own famous description of the detective novel. When, at age thirty, she made her 1923 debut with Whose Body?, the mystery of a corpse wearing nothing but a pair of gold pince-nez appearing suddenly in the bathtub of the flustered and respectable Mr. Thipps made for a fine story (though the solution is revealed a little early). But the character of Lord Peter Wimsey was thin, borrowed mostly from stock caricatures of the aristocratic eccentric — just as the serious Bunter obviously owed a great deal to P. G. Wodehouse’s comic manservant Jeeves (at one point in Strong Poison, when Bunter declares that he endeavors to give satisfaction, Lord Peter tells him not to talk as though he were Bertie Wooster’s valet).

The success of Whose Body? and its sequels proved of great financial importance to Sayers, who in 1926 married a charming wastrel named Mac Fleming whom she was forced to support — after giving birth in 1924 to an illegitimate son (by a different man) whom she immediately turned over to a relative and never publicly acknowledged. In the 1926 Clouds of Witness, Lord Peter saves his brother the Duke from a murder charge tried before the House of Lords; in the 1927 Unnatural Death he solves a delicate mystery involving a change in the British laws of inheritance; and in the 1928 The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, he moves ironically between the stuffy world of the gentlemen’s clubs and the decadent world of London’s artistic bohemians.

Through this run of early books, Lord Peter developed a genuine and unique character — but at great cost, for even while he provided Sayers with the money and acclaim she needed, he absorbed all the novelistic energy she might have put to greater use. And by 1930, she had made him so wonderful that she herself began to love him — writing Strong Poison, in which he inexplicably falls in love with a mystery writer and Sayers’s stand-in named Harriet Vane who, while doing research to write a mystery about arsenic poisoning, finds herself accused of killing her former lover with arsenic. In the 1932 Have His Carcase (nearly the longest and easily the worst of the novels), Lord Peter pursues her to the seaside where together they solve a murder, and in the 1935 Gaudy Night he pursues her on to Oxford — of which Sayers had been one of the first female graduates — and at last, in their masters’ robes, she agrees (in Latin) to marry him and they kiss.

Except for a pair of short stories, a few ironic letters in Lord Peter’s name to the London Spectator during World War II, and Jill Paton Walsh’s ill-advised attempt to continue the saga, the 1937 Busman’s Honeymoon concluded their tale with a corpse found on their honeymoon.

Gaudy Night is perhaps the best of these books, but Sayers never found the kind of unity of mystery and love story that Bentley, for instance, had managed in Trent’s Last Case. And proof that Lord Peter’s romance was a wrong turn is found in the fact that Sayers’s three best mysteries were interspersed among the Harriet novels — while leaving Harriet out. In the 1931 The Five Red Herrings Sayers sent Lord Peter to Scotland to solve an intricate railroad-timetable mystery; in the 1933 Murder Must Advertise she sent him undercover into the advertising agency in which she had worked in her twenties; and in the 1934 The Nine Tailors she created her one true masterpiece — a classic mystery story of bellringing, murder, and flooding in England’s Fen Country.

Like Harriet Vane, the daughter of a clergyman, Sayers returned to High Anglicanism as an adult, joining such figures as Helen Waddell and Evelyn Underhill in what was a uniquely British congeries of eccentric, religious, literary women. In the last twenty years of her life, inspired by T. S. Eliot’s revival of Christian drama with the 1935 Murder in the Cathedral, she began to write Passion Plays for the BBC — culminating with The Man Born to Be King, which became a national triumph when it aired during World War II. So, too, her collections of apologetics found a wide audience during the 1940s.

It is worth noticing, however, that she was celebrated for her Christian views primarily because she was already famous for writing bestselling mysteries. When she published in 1929 a translation of the romance of Tristan and Isolde, it received little attention. When she began publishing in the late 1940s her rhymed translations of Dante, they were widely reviewed. So many of the things that Dorothy L. Sayers did, from her early poetry to her unfinished critical study of Wilkie Collins, read like fragments — fragments of a major literary talent that got sidetracked and used up in the mystery novel’s deadly little literary project.

J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Dorothy L.