2 Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born on 13 June, 1893, in Oxford; her father, Henry Sayers, MA, was then chaplain to Christ Church College and headmaster of the Cathedral Choir School. Her mother, Helen Mary Leigh Sayers, is described as a lively, self-educated and "[...] a woman of exceptional intellect [...]"^[1]. Dorothy was their only daughter, and the family's move to the desolated Fenlands in 1897 deprived her of any playmates equal in age. Consequently, she transferred her energies towards inventing her own friends or procuring them out of the pages of books. She could read by the age of four, and her parents and a series of governesses instructed her in Latin, French and German; with Latin, and later Greek, came classical history, and in a family were both parents were religious, though not devout, and highly musical, this part of Sayers' education ensued almost naturally. Her familiarity with literature and her delight in language, be it English, French or Latin, her deeply religious and scholastically argued theology, have their roots in this rather haphazard early education.

At the age of 16, Sayers' parents sent her to Godolphin Boarding School in Salisbury. Academically, the other students there were no match for her, but her isolated youth, her intellectual superiority (of which she was rather too aware) and her non-conformist interests in, for example, medieval romantic literature, singled her out and made her a social failure. Sayers' biographers agree that she was predominantly unhappy during her two years at Godolphin. Being the school's outsider, however, furthered her difference into eccentricity; she obviously considered it preferable to be seen as consciously setting herself apart rather than being outcast against her will. Thus her taste in dress became, and remained, quite exotic, her manner and speech more pronouncedly arrogant, and her musical and literary interests as unusual as possible.

Her role as the odd woman out, though to some extent suitable to her personality, clashed painfully with her need to be accepted and liked. In the conformist atmosphere of a girls' boarding school, her chances for social approval were slim if not non-existent. All this changed when her academic achievements secured her the coveted Gilchrist Scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Modern Languages. Even though Oxford University, at that time, did not award degrees to women, she was, as a scholar, obliged to take a degree course and to read for honours, thus qualifying in theory for an award that was, in practice, inaccessible to her. When, on the other hand, women were finally admitted as full members of academe, she was one of the first women to receive a University degree. As a matter of curious fact, she obtained two degrees in a matter of minutes, for she qualified for both the Bachelor of Arts and the Master of Arts titles.

More importantly, however, Oxford suited her in every possible way; academically, she excelled as usual, and socially she was for once an eccentric in a group of people comprising an almost infinite variety of eccentricity. She joined various college and University activities, such as the Bach Choir, founded the Mutual Appreciation Society, staged the Going Down Play, found friends which were to remain with her for the rest of her life, and always referred to Oxford with the loving, longing sentimentality that also echoes through her greatest tribute to the university, her novel Gaudy Night.

The blissful happiness of life in Oxford could not last long, however. After three years, Sayers went down in 1915 and took up a teaching post in Hull. Teaching and the constrained atmosphere of a girls' high school irritated Sayers, but she tried to make the best of it for almost a year. When Basil Blackwell, an Oxford printer who had just published Sayers' first volume of poetry, offered to apprentice her, she returned to the town she loved so well. She rejoined the Bach Choir and met again her University friends, while at the same time learning the publisher's business from every conceivable angle. As one of her biographers put it:

"She must have been happy; otherwise, not even Sayers would have marched down the High, singing 'Fling wide the gates, for the saviour waits'."^[2]

During those two years, she continued writing poetry, translated a French poet's twelfth century work and submitted short stories and essays to various magazines. She also fell in love with a young man named Eric Whelpton, invalided out of the army. With undergraduates flooding Oxford once more after the end of the war, accommodation became a rarity, and employment followed suit. Whelpton left Oxford to teach in France, leaving Sayers miserable, and Blackwell dismissed her as he abandoned his poetry line and concentrated on the publication of school books. Just as the future looked bleaker than it ever had, Whelpton offered her the post of his administrative assistant at Les Roches. Working together seemed to have dampened their relationship to a certain degree, but when Whelpton got engaged to somebody else, it was a devastating blow to Sayers who did not, perhaps could not see that he had only, at most, a passing fancy for her. She went down with mumps and a recurrence of alopecia; she could not stay in France, nor could she return to Oxford "which had failed her as do all revisited haunts of youth."^[3] Instead, she moved to London, a city she later described thus:

"To the person who has anything to conceal - to the person who wants to lose his identity as one leaf among the leaves of a forest - to the person who asks no more than to pass by and be forgotten, there is one name above others which promises a haven of safety and oblivion. London."^[4]

After going up to Oxford briefly to receive her degree in 1920, she settled in London and began seeking employment. Despite her brand-new academic credentials, however, this proved to be more difficult than she had expected, and she had to take up minor teaching posts to survive. While thus marking time, she also started her first detective novel, creating Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey, unaware that he was to be her ticket out of financial insecurity. Before Whose Body?, originally titled The Singular Adventure of the Man with the Golden Pince-Nez, was published, however, Sayers had eventually found permanent and surprisingly satisfactory employment at Benson's, then Britain's largest and most progressive advertising agency. Her life and work at Benson's, salaried at a stable though unimpressive four pounds a week, is reflected in her 1933 novel Murder Must Advertise. Through Lord Peter Wimsey, she describes a copywriter's daily work:

"The copy department on the whole worked happily together, writing each other's headlines in a helpful spirit and invading each other's rooms at all hours of the day. [...] he found the department a curiously friendly place. And it talked. Bredon had never in his life encountered a set of people with such active tongues and so much apparent leisure for gossip. It was a miracle that any work ever got done, though somehow it did. [...] The atmosphere suited him well enough."^[5]

Actually, Wimsey states that this atmosphere reminded him of his Oxford days, and it is fairly safe to assume that this sentiment stems from his creator.

Whose Body? was, as first novels rarely are, a financial success. With publication in the United States and the serialisation in People's Magazine, money was not an existential problem any more, and the continued success of her novels cemented Sayers' financial security. In private life, things did not turn out to be as safe. She had a devastating relationship with a Russian-American novelist who left her in October 1922. In April 1923, Sayers became pregnant by a still unidentified man; their relationship appears to have been entirely physical, and even though the father refused any share in responsibility, Sayers' religiosity prevented her from aborting the child. John Anthony was placed, after his birth, with Sayers' friend and cousin Ivy Shrimpton, and her pregnancy and deliverance were successfully kept secret. Her motherhood became known only after her death in 1957, and even then only to her closest friends. Sayers visited her son off and on and provided all his financial needs with scrupulous regularity. She never lived with him, and when she married the journalist Oswald Atherton Fleming in 1925, he strictly refused to share his home with another man's child.

Her marriage failed just as all her previous relationships had; she had a tendency to choose men who could not invest as much emotion into her as she was prepared to invest into them. Sayers was Fleming's second wife, and their shared professional interest in writing and crime (he was special correspondent for motor-sports and crime to the News of the World) might have provided sufficient common ground for the marriage to be happy. In the continuing depression, however, he lost his job and succumbed to alcoholism. He saw his situation as further aggravated by his wife's on-going professional success, and his descent into failure accelerated consistently until his death in 1949.

Sayers' private turmoil, on the other hand, was not mirrored in her professional life. Her novels and short stories continued to attract a large number of readers, and maybe her work provided a refuge from emotional disappointments. She quit Benson's in 1930, becoming "[...] effectively that rare bird, a self-supporting free-lance writer [...]."^[6] Opinions vary on what her best novel is, but in summary, the list of contenders consists of The Documents in the Case, Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night. Since each of them embodies characteristics of plot and style, background and cast entirely different from all the others, single and combined, it is almost impossible to compare them analytically, so the choice of favourites is more a question of personal taste than an approximately objective evaluation. All of them, as well as most of her other novels, are "[...] among the classics of the genre, being outstanding for its well-researched backgrounds, distinguished style, observant characterization, and ingenious plotting [...]."^[7] She contributed more to the development of the genre towards 'serious' literature than any other writer, and her last full-length novel, Busman's Honeymoon, is so much more a comedy of manners than a detective story that Sayers subtitled it 'a love story with detective interruptions'.

Having provided her detective with a love interest and eventually a wife, she abandoned Lord Peter Wimsey in 1939 with two final short stories, 'The Haunted Policeman' and 'Talboys'. To say that she then turned towards religious playwriting would imply a shift of interest towards a field entirely unrelated to her former work of detective fiction, whereas it is much more apt to say that her religious plays are a natural extension of her novels. Religiosity permeates even that allegedly light genre of detection, and the success of her plays is based mainly on the experienced handling of story-telling that made her novels so popular. Even though her biographers do not dwell on her sales figures or the number of languages into which her novels have been translated (they are probably negligible compared to Agatha Christie's), she is nonetheless remembered as one of the most eminent authors of detective fiction in its history. The Oxford Companion to English Literature points out that "[...] her learning, wit, and pugnacious personality made her a formidable theological polemicist"^[8], and these qualities, additional to her "[...] fertility of invention, ingenuity and a wonderful eye for detail"^[9], should be held responsible for her success in either field. Even though her religious plays are almost forgotten today compared to her novels, at the time of publication, usually through the BBC's broadcasting, they were smash hits.

3 Similarities and Differences

For the purpose of this treatise, it is necessary to take a comparative look at Christie and Sayers. The first striking correspondence between these women is the fact that they are the two earliest female authors of detective fiction whose fame outlasted almost any other detective novelist of their time, but also of earlier and later authors. On the basis of this distinction, the question underlying this study, namely what enabled women to emerge as eminently successful authors of classic crime novels after the First World War, developed; therefore, some aspects of their respective biographies have to be analytically merged to explain this phenomenon.

The first striking similarities between Christie and Sayers can be found in their childhoods. Both authors are described as being comparatively solitary girls; in modern times, where a large number of peers are thought to be necessary to provide a healthy and satisfactory environment for children, Christie's and Sayers' childhoods would be described as lonely. They both had few friends of their own age and spent their time either in adult company or with themselves.

Then again, loneliness may be called solitude, and the negative connotations of a state of isolation may be changed into a positive image of a quiet sanctuary. While playmates of one's own age are an important requisite for the process of growing up, solitude can increase self-sufficiency, introspection and imagination; at least, it did for Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. In their autobiographical work, they both describe that they compensated their lack of playmates by filling their days with imaginary friends. For Christie, it was first The Kittens, then The Girls in her fantasy school, and for Sayers, it was a wide range of fictitious characters, including some taken from novels such as The Three Musketeers. Their vivid imagination and extensive reading of almost everything within their range is sufficiently akin that it is worth mentioning in the context of this treatise.

The undeniable drawback of a solitary childhood is the lack of exercise in the art of social interaction; here, yet again, the two women resemble each other. Both were shy as children, though they developed different techniques to handle their timidity. Christie "[...] sought to avoid any publicity whatsoever, and would not even let her publishers print her portrait with her books."^[10] Sayers, on the other hand, defended herself by becoming extroverted, boisterous and eccentric in order to mask noisily what was in fact "[...] an essentially shy woman [...]".^[11]

However, I suggest that solitude did, to some extent, contribute to their respective choice of careers. Obviously, other factors influenced that choice, as many children are solitary and imaginative without becoming world-famous authors of detective or any other fiction. Aside from those elusive concepts like 'calling' or 'talent', one of those factors might be an early propensity to creating characters and to telling stories. This partiality to story-telling is also common to both Christie and Sayers, and the early training proved helpful in later life.

Imagination, bred by seclusion or not, and a talent for inventing stories may be prerequisites for any writer's career, but the range of available genres would still be open and attractive for anyone with this inclination. In the case of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, then, it is necessary not only to look at some aspects of their development towards writers, but to search for those similarities that made them authors of detective fiction.

As I will analyse in more detail in chapter IV, the detective story in its classical form is essentially conservative. It creates what has been termed'Mayhem Parva' by students of Christie's fiction. Fundamentally, Mayhem Parva is the epitome of order; in the context of Agatha Christie, it is a village or any other closely confined community, regulated, law-abiding, peaceful and stable. This community is interrupted by crime, preferably murder as the most extreme kind of crime, whereupon a detective enters the scene, investigates the crime and restores order. (This restoration of status quo is a very important concept, and I will elaborate its significance later.) In a wider sense, this system applies to Sayers novels as well, though her settings are less physically regulated. Christie's world of fiction is "[...] shut off from the political and social preoccupations of the day. It cares little about what happens in London, and Europe might not exist for all it cares. It is a world on which the 19th century has made little impact, and which accepts the 20th century only slowly and grumblingly."^[12] Sayers includes almost everything of contemporary interest (indeed, this is one of the characteristics that make her so enjoyable), from modern advertising to Bright Young People, from education for women to the League of Nations, from free love to Communism. The order of her world is represented in the elements of the puzzle, not so much in its outside circumstances. Hers is "[...] a view that endorses the traditional values of order and civility, as well as the concepts of personal responsibility and justifiable limits to human behavior."^[13]

In that sense, Christie's outside and Sayers' inside 'Mayhem Parva' was "[...] a flat representation of a community blessed with contentedness and regulated by what people who do not much care for explorative thought call 'common sense'. It featured neither dramatic heights nor chasms of desperation, just the neat little hedges of the maze, the puzzle, whose centre awaited a mysterious figure labelled Murderer."^[14] In both cases, the disrupted order is restored by the end of the novel, and although "[...] the great detective, as an amateur, generally works outside the law, he does not work against it or seek to rend the basic social fabric. This essential conservativism informs most detective fiction, at least in England."^[15] A detective is "[...] dedicated to the righting of wrong (the trade of our national saint, no less) and to the defence of property and social order."^[16] The return to stability is the basic notion that underlies the classic detective story of this genre's Golden Age. In that sense, it supports a very conservative value system.

For different reasons and with a different background, both Christie and Sayers were essentially middle-class women. Christie's father, living on money earned by a family estate and later ruined by his trustee's mismanagement of financial affairs, emerges in her biographies as a prototypical gentleman of leisure. He attended his clubs, played croquet and never needed to work for a salary. The only time he tried, shortly before his death in 1901, he failed because of his lack of qualification. His wife is described as a sociable, intelligent and bright woman who might have, in later times and with more education, taken up any career she chose. Being a Victorian, however, she dedicated her wits to the education of her children, garden parties and social welfare work - again, typical upper middle-class occupations. Thus Christie grew up within precisely that conservative value system that characterises the detective novel, and she remained within that system, embracing it with full conviction and dedication, throughout her career. In her fiction, particularly in her early thrillers which she always claimed to have enjoyed more than the meticulous plotting of straight 'whodunits', the impression is given "[...] that the modern world has caught up with their middle-middle-class characters, but that they have scarcely caught up with it. Their attitudes and ideals are still aggressively Edwardian."^[17] And so, one might add, are the attitudes and ideals of their creator.

Sayers' background was slightly different. Her father was a scholar, a teacher and a clergyman, thus existing fully in the realms of the gentry; church and the universities were always accepted, prestigious professions for those whose social class was high enough to render any trade demeaning. Though his income, typically, could not cover the life-style necessary to maintain upper-class standards, the Sayers's provided themselves with as many paraphernalia of nobility as possible. Servants, nurses, governesses were just as normal for the upper-class gentleman Henry Sayers as thorough classical education for his daughter was for the scholar. More importantly, however, and quite independent from her class background, Sayers, as "[...] the only child of an Anglican minister, held deep religious convictions, and once was almost as well-known for her religious plays and translation of Dante as she was for her mysteries."^[18] This is the most relevant legacy of Henry Sayers to his daughter; it is the backbone of her value system, which is traditionalistically Christian (without being unduly dogmatic), deeply religious and conservative.

It is necessary to add in this context that the term 'conservative' in connection to Christie and Sayers does not so much denote a political orientation, though that, too, is to some degree espoused by both. More relevantly, however, it denotes an identification with traditional values such as Christianity, responsibility, integrity, lawfulness and justice. As indicated above, these are, sometimes more, sometimes less, the foundations on which a detective story, for all its suspense, light-handed style and clear 'fun' is essentially based^[19]. Again without excluding anyone lacking Christie's or Sayers' background from producing first-class detective fiction and without eliminating other reasons for their choice of genre, I would propose the conservativism of their respective upbringing as an important factor in that decision.

Additionally, the war years had thoroughly opened the publishing market for enterprising women. Since many male writers were, as other men, enlisting in the armed forces, publishers suffered from a lack of possible authors. More women could penetrate beyond the critical eyes of the editors who were seeking material for circulation. By the same token, the want of novels by established male authors forced those concerned with the dissemination of printed works, such as book-sellers, but also critics to turn their attention towards other possible sources. Thus it is, for example, equally signifiant, at least for Sayers whose financial situation when commencing her writing career was less than satisfactory, that detective fiction sold.

No matter how much weight one attaches to the similarities between the two authors, the differences must not be overlooked. Agatha Christie, after her conventional childhood, continued to lead a comparatively conventional life. Apart from the admittedly vast extraordinariness that came with her success as a writer, her private life remained well within the boundaries of custom.

Sayers' life, on the other hand, constituted anything but ordinariness; her talent for and accomplishment in foreign languages, her academic achievements, her son born out of wedlock, the lateness of her marriage and her turn towards writing Christian plays for radio broadcasting earmark her, from a very early age until her death, as a more than unusual woman. She was, though to some degree more by necessity than by choice, an eccentric.

I propose that the two authors' difference is mirrored in their fiction, or rather, in the attidude that each expressed towards it. Christie always called her novels and short stories an exercise of craft, and though she was unparalleled in the execution of this craft, she never had any claims to literary ambitions, and rightly so. Her stories, long and short, are pure puzzles, and though they are humorous and remarkable for their dialogues, they are memorable mainly for their ingenuous plots. Re-reading them, one might marvel again at Christie's dexterity in working out an intricate crime, hiding all the clues in plain view and then startling her audience with a breathtaking solution, but, provided one had memorised the identity of the murderer, the lack of the original suspense leaves one with a rudimentary, well-written but uninspiring story.

"But none can gainsay that at her frequent best Agatha Christie is easily one of the half dozen most accomplished and entertaining writers im the modern field."^[20]

Sayers, while summoning almost as much ingenuity when plotting her novels, takes great care to flesh her fiction with three-dimensional characters, social comment, genuine human relationships and, above all, literary style. She remained avowedly modest about her achievements throughout her life, but her detective fiction is much closer to a comedy of manners than to the pure puzzle. Provided one does not despise Sayers for her increasing disregard for the importance of the whodunit, re-reading her remains pleasurable no matter how familiar one is with her crimes and their solution. Her tendency towards a novel outside the genre of detection culminates in her last full-length Wimsey mystery, which is 'a love story with detective interruptions'. Here, indeed, the identity of the murderer becomes so secondary that one is tempted to forget it altogether; fortunately, Sayers provided the long-standing solution that is so easy to remember: the gardener did it. What remains memorable in her novels more than the identity of the criminal are her penetrating descriptions of even minor characters, be they lovable like the Dowager Duchess or Miss Catherine Climpson (in various books), the Dean of Harriet Vane's college (in Gaudy Night) and the Reverend Venables (inThe Nine Tailors), or antipathetic like Helen of Denver, Wimsey's sister-in-law (she, too, recurs frequently).

"No single trend in the English detective story of the 1920's was more significant than its approach to the literary standards of the legitimate novel. And no author illustrates the trend better than Dorothy Sayers [...], who has been called by some critics the greatest of living writers in the form. Whether or not the reader agrees with this verdict, he can not [...] dispute her preëminence [sic] as one of the most brilliant and prescient artists the genre has yet produced."^[21]

Thus the major distinction between Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers emerges as the difference between craft, however unparalleled, and art. In second rank, there is also the distinction between talent and education, for where Christie created from an intuitive sense for the right form or word, Sayers brought all her academic training, her classical schooling and her intoxication with language into her novels.

4 Embedment

Each author's individual development, then, is the second factor that qualified Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers to be the first two and most successful writers of classic detective fiction. To summarise the distinctive feature that shaped their characters and their writing, I venture to coin the phrase of the paradox of progressive conservativism. Basically, both authors are almost painfully conservative; in their value system, their religious beliefs, their - in the broadest sense - political convictions, they maintain a perspective of protecting the traditional, the Christian, the conventional. Yet in their fiction, in their unerring way to the highest echelons of detective fiction, in their attitude towards their own success and their attitudes towards their fictional women (as I will show later) they are effortlessly modern. They both take their achievements in a field that only ten years earlier had been a male domain as a matter of course, assuming equality and independence against a society that still tended towards the reactionary. They acknowledged the opposition, but it did not really deter them from their convictions, and the one thing they probably never doubted was their own obvious right to produce precisely the kind of fiction that made them so famous, despite the fact that almost all their colleagues were male, that the genre itself was male-dominated. They not only held their ground but surpassed every single contemporary author of detective fiction. Though seemingly contradictory to their essential conservativism, I contend that in this particular aspect, they asserted their very own, emancipated, independent and manifest progressiveness.

^[1] Coomes, David Dorothy L. Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life, Oxford, 1992, p. 28

^[2] ibid., p. 63

^[3] ibid., p. 75

^[4] Sayers, Dorothy Unnatural Death, London, 1989, p. 190

^[5] Sayers, Dorothy Murder Must Advertise, London, 1985, p. 33

^[6] Kenney, Catherine The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers, Kent, Ohio, 1990, p. 6

^[7] The Oxford Companion to English Literature, op. cit., p. 870

^[8] ibid., p. 870

^[9] Ruth Rendell, as quoted on most of the Coronet Crime editions of Sayers' books

^[10] Ramsay, op. cit., p. 27

^[11] Coomes, op. cit., p. 26

^[12] Barnard, Robert A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie, London, 1980, p. 34

^[13] Kenney, op. cit., p. 15

^[14] Watson, Colin 'The Message of Mayhem Parva' in Keating, op. cit., p. 110

^[15] Kenney, op. cit., p. 15

^[16] Watson in Keating, op. cit., p. 99

^[17] Barnard, op. cit., pp. 21

^[18] Lewis, Terrance L. Dorothy L. Sayers' Wimsey and Interwar British Society, Lewiston, 1994, p. 113

^[19] For further elaboration, cf. IV, 1.2,

^[20] Haycraft, Howard, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, New York, 1968, p. 133

^[21] ibid., p. 135