I'm consistency personified this month... After back-to-back Richard Osmans, I'm now doing a second Dorothy L. Sayers, mere minutes after Whose Body?

Published in 1930, Strong Poison is No. 6 in the Lord Peter Wimsey series (if you count the book of short stories), and the first to include Harriet Vane, who herself writes detective fiction, and will eventually become, many volumes later, Wimsey's wife.

I thought it was a great read. This detective-fiction aficionado marks it as "unquestionably one of Sayers's best", and also quotes a very approbatory review by Evelyn Waugh in The Graphic (undated): "Miss Dorothy Sayers gets better and better. Her new 'Lord Peter' detective novel is by far the best she has written. Not only is the plot perfectly convincing and ingeniously contrived, but the whole structure and technique of the book, as a novel, raises it far out of the ruck of ordinary shockers.'"

We open with a court scene: "There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood..." Vane is on trial for the murder (by poison) of her former lover, writer Philip Boyes. The jury feels able neither to convict nor to exonerate, so a retrial is scheduled. Watching the proceedings, Wimsey is convinced the prosecution has got it wrong, and Vane is innocent. He has a few weeks before the next trial to assemble some new evidence, prove he's right, and get her out. Which he is even more keen to do since -- somewhat arbitrarily -- he has fallen in love with her.

It's not exactly a spoiler to say that he's right. She didn't do it. Of course, we all know that, because we know about the subsequent books that included her as a character. But at the time, the reader wouldn't have known, and Sayers very effectively plays up the difficulty of building a waterproof case, which makes the story quite suspenseful.

We know the identity of the murderer fairly early (and have probabaly guessed even earlier). So the big reveal at the end is all about the "how" question. I won't give the game away, but it's the best arsenic story I've read since R. Austin Freeman's As a Thief in the Night.


Duke's Denver (home of Wimsey's elder brother and their mother, the Dowager Duchess) lies half-way between Peterborough and Wells Next the Sea. This is Peterborough, 2022

What I liked most about it, though, was its very feminist slant.

First, there's the character of Vane. She was reluctant to live with Boyes outside wedlock (still a big deal in those days), but was eventually persuaded to do so. It was when he THEN suggested marriage, as though she'd passed a kind of test and was being rewarded, that she bade him farewell. (Also, judging by her friends' comments, he sounds like a bit of a jerk.)

We're specifically told that Vane is not particularly good-looking, but she's obviously intelligent and courageous. The doubty Dowager Duchess says she has "a really remarkable face", and admires her writing enormously: "I have been reading one of her books, really quite good and so well-written, and I didn't guess the murderer till page 200, rather clever, because I usually do it about page 15."

(She adds, in one of her characteristically informative but rambling observations: "I don't suppose detective writers detect much in real life, do they, except Edgar Wallace of course, who always seems to be everywhere and dear Conan Doyle and the black man what was his name and of course the Slater person, such a scandal, though now I come to think of it that was in Scotland where they have such very odd laws about everything particularly getting married." Edgar Wallace was apparently known for being flamboyant and unignorably everywhere, thus irritating "the very middle class detective writing 'aristocracy' of the Golden Age of crime fiction"; Conan Doyle's "black man", I assume, is George Edalji, as immortalized in Julian Barnes's Arthur & George. And Oscar Slater, I read from these handy annotations, was the victim of a miscarriage of justice in 1909. And though -- in another digression -- annotations are not, of course, necessary for our enjoyment of the story, they do make you realize what a lot of social and literary references Sayers nonchalently packs in.)

Where were we? Vane. During one of Wimsey's fact-finding interviews, she remarks: "Philip wasn't the sort of man to make a friend of a woman. He wanted devotion." Wimsey, more enlightened, feels friendship must be important: "I'd like somebody I could talk sensibly to, who would make life interesting." He has already (rashly) asked her to marry him, and she has already (sensibly) refused. To bolster that refusal, she persists in reminding him that she has had a previous lover, but he replies (endearingly): "So have I... In fact, several. It's the sort of thing that might happen to anybody."

The whole Vane-Boyes episode has roots in Sayers's own rather negative experience with John Cournos, and while many of the details are different, Strong Poison is reckoned to be her most overtly biographical piece of writing. How wonderful to get your revenge on a disappointing beau by wiping him out in a novel...



Second in the Strong Females category is the redoubtable Miss Climpson. The air-headed Freddy Arbuthnot is a bit dismissive: "Funny old soul, isn't she? Stepped out of a magazine of the 'nineties." But she's a force of nature. She happens to have served on the jury in the Vane case, and emphatically believes the accused to be innocent, but her bigger claim to fame is her role in heading up an investigative bureau funded by Lord Peter. It employs women "of the class unkindly known as 'superfluous'". These are the city's "spinsters", widows, and desertees, and there must have been plenty of those after the demographic disaster of WWI. Their task is to follow up adverts that set out to exploit women (we often feel our age has the monopoly on such enterprises, but obviously not). Miss Climpson and her team hunt the miscreants down, and deliver them up to Scotland Yard.

But her piece de resistance is the bravura undercover performance she pulls off in a little village where a wealthy old lady is being looked after by a nurse who needs to be befriended. Here begins a hilarious round of tea-shops and manipulated seances (the nurse is a great spiritualist, and Miss Climpson has enough knowledge to pull off a good impersonation of a spirit-channel): "'She's only a beginner,' said Miss Climpson to herself. 'She's reading a text-book.... And she is quite uncritical.... Surely she knows that that woman was exposed long ago.... People like her shouldn't be allowed out alone -- they're living incitements to fraud...'" The popularity of spiritualism can again be explained by the mass bereavement that resulted from WWI. According to Steven J. Sutcliffe: "In the late 1920s and early 1930s there were around one quarter of a million practising Spiritualists and some two thousand Spiritualist societies in the UK in addition to flourishing microcultures of platform mediumship and 'home circles'." Even 20 years later, the issue of fake spiritualist mediums was still a sufficient problem to necessitate the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951.

Miss Climpson appreciates the somewhat greater degree of freedom women then had. Reporting on her arrival in the village, she observes: "In the old days, an unmarried woman arriving alone at midnight with a suitcase would hardly have been considered respectable -- what a wonderful difference one finds today! I am grateful to have lived to see such changes, because whatever old-fashioned people may say about the greater decorum and modesty of women in Queen Victoria's time, those who can remember the old conditions know how difficult and humiliating they were!"

Thirdly, there's Miss Murchison, also from Miss Climpson's outfit. She's infiltrated into a lawyer's office, and does some magnificent sleuthing work, including learning from a reformed crim how to pick locks.

Of course, Sayers is very clear that there's still a LONG way to go, and we have many examples of incorrigible supporters of the patriarchy. It's clear from the judge's summing-up at the opening of the book, for instance, that Vane's morals are on trial in that court scenario alongide her alleged murder plan. And among the many conservative opinions, we can cite this one, expressed by a senior legal clerk: "In my opinion -- I'm an old-fashioned man -- the ladies were most adorable when they adorned and inspired and did not take an active part in affairs."


Wells Next the Sea, 2020

There's also a lot that's quite funny in this book. There's a sly little reference to Guinness, for example: "At 11 o'clock Boyes had a Guinness, observing that, according to the advertisements it was 'Good for you'." Sayers worked for S.H. Benson's advertising agency from 1922 to 1931. Her remit included copy for Colman's Mustard and Guinness, and she's credited with the slogan "Guinness is good for you".

The judge, ancient and set in his ways, unexpectedly turns out to be a bit of a foody: "Both Mr Urquart and his cousin were very particular about eating an omelette the moment it came from the pan -- and a very good rule it is, and I advise you all to treat omelettes in the same way and never to allow them to stand, or they will get tough."

And, as if all that were not enough, there's a lovely send-up of the avant-garde art world of the era.

All in all, good value. Very enjoyable.