Published in 1935, this is another by Dorothy L. Sayers. It features not only debonair sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey (it's either the 10th or the 12th in the series, depending on whether you count the short stories), but also (for the third time) Harriet Vane, the love interest he acquired in Strong Poison (she was accused of murder, you remember, but totally exonerated on account of our hero's intervention).

I have actually read Gaudy Night before (approximately 45 years ago), but I remember nothing... I revisited it because a) it continues my Sayers series; b) it's set in Oxford (and Val McDermid lists it as one of her top 10 Oxford novels, albeit somewhat grudgingly); and c) it came up as a Five Books recommendation under the Best Classic Crime heading.


The worst possible cover. Completely tone-deaf

To start with, a quick plot review:

A "gaudy" is a celebratory dinner given by an Oxford college for former members. Vane, because of her recent notoriety, is a little reluctant to attend the one being hosted by her alma mater (which is Shrewsbury, a fictional college modelled on Somerville, where Sayers actually studied). But she accepts the invitation, and has an interesting time. She's a little disturbed, however, by a couple of instances of rather nasty poison-penmanship that emerge during and after her stay. These are not isolated manifestations, it turns out, and she is invited back to Shrewsbury a second time to help get to the bottom of things. This might seem unlikely, given that her only qualification for the task in hand is that she writes crime novels. But what the college desperately wants to avoid is publicity -- the whole business of women's higher education is on too rocky a footing, it seems, to easily deal with policemen and journalists rampaging around its territory -- so an insider with a bit of gumption and a handy cover-story seems to fit the bill. (And, indeed, Vane reacts to the request like this: "Here was a pretty thing! Just the kind of thing to do the worst possible damage to University women -- not only in Oxford, but everywhere.")

So she obliges, and does her best. She makes some progress in terms of mitigating some of the ill effects of the miscreant's actions, and eliminating a few academics from the suspect list (which is helpful, because initially everyone is possibly guilty: "The trouble of not knowing was that you dimly suspected everybody...")

But the nuisance is still at large, and is becoming bolder and crueller.


The "cover" of my e-version. Slightly better...

Eventually -- but not until we're about 60 per cent of the way through -- Vane drafts Wimsey in to help. We've seen very little of him up to that point. He's still very keen on her, and proposes to her annually, only to be rejected (her relationship with him is still screwed up by the fact that she owes him her life, and in any case she's a woman who cherishes her independence, and very much fears giving it up to marriage). But he has also not exactly been available for consultation, having been sent off round Europe to do Important Things for the Foreign Office.

But he comes, lending a fresh eye, and the resources of the minions who work for his Miss Climpson. The poison-pen-cum-poltergeist is duly identified (I actually guessed, and I don't think that's because I remembered), and is discreetly offered medical treatment...

And Miss Vane finally says yes to Lord Peter...


Much more elegant...

Gaudy Night is apparently famous for dividing critics.

Let's dispose of the negatives first. There's plenty of Sayers's trademark snobbery. And everyone is terribly erudite. Expect people to be able to quote poetry, and to pick up on others' quotations. Expect Latin and Greek quotations, and very little help in dealing with them. Did/do academics talk in this way? Not in my experience, to be honest. I guess these days we're all too busy trying to seem ordinary. But sometimes you do wonder if it's not just a bit pretentious... Sayers is definitely not one to hide her intellectual light under a bushel.

There are also a TON of characters. They're all Miss This and Miss That (why that's harder to remember than given names, I'm not sure, but it IS). Sometimes they're also referred to by their role titles (the Warden, the Dean, the Bursar), which confuses matters still further. I found myself downloading a list of characters, which is never a good sign...

It's also a mystery with no murder (an actual killing would have made a police visitation inevitable, and Sayers wanted to keep the plot in-house). Not that this is a negative for me, as there are plenty of gripping episodes, and the pace is maintained -- despite the academic interludes -- pretty well throughout.

My bottom line is that I like Gaudy Night. There's an entertaining puzzle to solve, but more than that, it's very much a book of ideas. For example:

-- Nostalgia for academia

"That one melancholy lament for eternal loss: 'Once, I was a scholar.'"... I remember this. Once you're out of academia, laboriously and mundanely ploughing your professional furrow, you long to be back in the cloisters. If, perchance, you do go back, you discover it's all really different now...


Oxford, 2024. Books in the Taylorian

-- The role of women

And, in particular, the role of marriage... Because being a female academic, it seems, meant being a single female academic. Harriet observes one academic marriage where the partners collaborate (and the grandparents look after the kids). But most of her other fellow-students have lost it somehow. There's Mrs Stokes, now "cut off from them, by sickness, by marriage, by -- it was no use to blink the truth -- by a kind of mental stagnation that had nothing to do with either illness or marriage. 'I suppose,' thought Harriet, 'she had one of those small, summery brains, that flower early and run to seed.'" Ouch. You don't want to be caught with one of those... Then there's Mrs Bendick, who marries a farmer, and wears herself out with agricultural labour. No time for intellectual pursuits in that lifestyle. But it's rough to have to choose, as most do. Career or marriage? Marriage or career? And this necessity can lead to a situation where, as one of the dons complains, "Everybody in this place has an inferiority complex about married women and children." In this context, Wimsey really gains points with his statement to the woman he loves: "I object to being tactfully managed by somebody who ought to be my equal. If I want tactful dependents, I can hire them. And fire them if they get too tactful. I don’t mean Bunter. He braces me by a continual cold shower of silent criticism. I don’t protect him; he protects me, and preserves an independent judgment." We cheer quietly. As he says elsewhere, what the world needs is counterpoint, not harmony.

-- The question of women's education

"Is it still a question?" Wimsey replies, in response to the Warden. He goes on: "I hope you are not going to ask me whether I approve of women's doing this and that... You should not imply that I have any right to approve or disapprove." We cheer again. But many of the women in the story remember "the difficult period when [Shrewsbury College] fought for Women's Degrees". Even now, the Warden sometimes needs to "soothe with tact the wounded breasts of crusty and affronted male dons". Another Shrewsbury don rails against the casual way the current students treat their gowns, in light of "how our devoted generation sweated to get the right to these garments". The women students also find themselves held to different standards: If a man gets drunk and breaks rules, he'll be given some kind of reprimand; a woman doing the same is liable to be sent down. More broadly, the role of women is still up for grabs in the society of the day. The press refers patronizingly to "undergraduettes", and describes the Warden of Shrewsbury as the "Lady Head". ("Women, of course, were always news," Harriet muses. Unfortunately, they still are.) Meanwhile, a number of characters express the view that women's place is in the home. The whole, multi-voiced discussion works very well. Indeed, Sarah Crown describes Gaudy Night as "the most honest, rigorous and robustly feminist interrogation of love and work that I’ve come across".

-- The question of academic integrity

The plot revolves around this point, and everyone agrees it is a Good Thing. In areas where there have been breaches of integrity, however, there is also a need to leaven penalities with mercy and humanity.



The discussion of all these ideas is grounded in some fascinating social and political commentary on the mid-1930s:

As will always be the case, there are lots of complaints about modern-day students. "What with young men and motor-cars and parties, their lives are so much fuller than they were before the War," says one character. There's a constant battle around the question of where students might sunbathe, and what they should be wearing while doing so. ("The Dean was forced to issue a ukase in the matter of the bathing-dresses which flapped and fluttered, flag-fashion, from every coign of vantage... 'By the way, Dean, couldn’t you put up a notice about sitting on the grass in the New Quad? I have had to chase two parties off. We cannot have the place looking like Margate Beach.'") And the post-war generation, it is alleged by their seniors, no longer feel that restrictions and responsibility need play much of a role in their lives. "You can't exercise the old kind of discipline in these days," complains the Dean, "it's too bitterly resented." Before the war, the staff maintain, everyone was more civic-minded, attending meetings, and showing keenness to participate. "Now, they won’t be bothered. Half the old institutions like the College debates and the Third-Year Play, are dead or moribund."

Students do, however, like detective fiction, and are keen to meet Harriet Vane: "They appeared to have read a good deal of this kind of literature, though very little of anything else. A School of Detective Fiction would, Harriet thought, have a fair chance of producing a goodly crop of Firsts. The fashion for psychological analysis had, she decided, rather gone out since her day; she was instinctively aware that a yearning for action and the concrete was taking its place. The pre-War solemnity and the post-War exhaustion were both gone; the desire now was for an energetic doing of something definite, though the definitions differed."


The text comprises plenty of action on the river...

More generally, there is a feeling of social change in the air. Lord Peter, for example, inviting Harriet to visit Denver, the ancestral home, comments: "I don't want to go all Galsworthy about it... But I was born there, and I shall be sorry if I live to see the land sold for ribbon-building and the Hall turned over to a Hollywood Colour-Talkie king... Our kind of show is dead and done for. What the hell good does it do anybody these days?"

And the political currents of the day are very perceptible. Even the educated seem to veer dangerously towards the ideas of eugenics. And solid, reliable Padgett, who fought with Wimsey during WWI, proclaims: "Wot this country wants.. is a ’Itler."

Wimsey is away putting out fires in Europe. As he says: "I thought -- at one point we all thought -- something might be going to happen. All the old filthy uproar. I got as far as saying to Bunter one night: 'It’s coming; it’s here; back to the Army again, sergeant...'"

He, too, feels as though Oxford is "where the real things are done". I guess it's harder these days to feel that about academia, monetized and commodified as it is. But he's spot on in his political assessment, and his views have only gained in relevance: "How I loathe haste and violence and all that ghastly, slippery cleverness. Unsound, unscholarly, insincere -- nothing but propaganda and special pleading and 'what do we get out of this?'..."

Another enjoyable aspect of the book is that's a veritable paeon to Oxford, with some wonderful description. Examples:

-- "The moon was up, painting the buildings with cold washes of black and silver whose austerity rebuked the yellow gleam of lighted windows... Each after each, from all the towers of Oxford, clocks struck the quarter-chime, in a fumbling cascade of friendly disagreement."

-- And again: "There, eastward, within a stone’s throw, stood the twin towers of All Souls’, fantastic, unreal as a house of cards, clear-cut in the sunshine, the drenched oval in the quad beneath brilliant as an emerald in the bezel of a ring."



Interesting, too, is the character development discernible in Wimsey over the course of the book. The person we see here is a far cry from the silly-ass-about-town that we encounter in Whose Body? Just as Vane attempts to inject some character into the protagonist of the book she is writing, so Sayers -- despite the classical advice to keep "subtly worked-out character analyses" out of mysteries -- is doing the same. Accordingly, the Wimsey of Gaudy Night retains all his accomplishments and accolades, but also shows a new vulnerability. Sayers, in fact, breaks a number of those rules-for-mysteries in an effort to write something less formulaic and more literary. I think she had considerable success in that endeavour.

I'll close with some interesting wisdom from Miss de Vine: "I’m quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest... If you are once sure what you do want, you find that everything else goes down before it like grass under a roller -- all other interests, your own and other people’s."

I have NEVER found this to be the case. Never reached this place... Not with anything...