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truepenny[5/13/03: fixed rather embarrassing transcription typo. --Ed.]
Previous DLS posts: Concerning Lord Peter Wimsey, the Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot, Miss Katharine Alexandra Climpson, Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 1, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 2, Strong Poison, The Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase 1, Have His Carcase 2, Have His Carcase 3.
Ch. 11, "The Evidence of the Fisherman," through Ch. 15, "The Evidence of the Ladylove and the Landlady."
The usual. Spoilers.
I'm not sure there's going to be a coherent theme or argument for this essaylet. My plan is to start talking and see what happens.
We begin this segment with the story of the gold, which again flicks the idea that Alexis used ideas from novels in his real life:
A little down the page, Peter punctures the cliché: "A £300 diamond is nothing very out of the way, and if you wanted one you could buy it in Bond Street, without paying in gold or dragging in Indian potentates" (HHC 130). And Abel Bennett didn't entirely buy the story, either. The incident shows us how Alexis's mind worked and gives a little insight into his taste in literature.
Also, this seems like a good moment to point out the elaborate theories which get constructed and reconstructed and debated and analyzed throughout HHC. All of the characters are involved in making up stories, searching and searching for the one which happens to be true. Clues and evidence are certainly part of the plot, but more so than any of the other Wimsey books (it seems to me), this one is about stories and how to put them together. There's a discussion later about plausibility which emphasizes the meta-ness of this particular endeavor.
And we get another demonstration of it later in the chapter. (I have nothing to say about Esdras Pollock and intend to ignore him as much as possible.) Peter and Salcombe Hardy cold-bloodedly constructing a newspaper story to be bait. This scene emphasizes the rhetoric involved:
Sally and Peter aren't just making up a story here; they're also framing a story, deciding which details to put in and which to leave out, discussing ways and means of using language to conceal or highlight. This little scene is itself a cautionary tale, warning us to view other narratives in the novel with suspicion.
Nothing in particular to say about the first appearance of Henry Weldon, except that his aggressive, bullish, stupid masculinity stands in pointed contrast to both Peter and Alexis. (I probably need to do an essaylet on Alexis as a shadow-doppelganger of Peter, but that's not going here.) And that brings us to "Evidence of Trouble Somewhere," where we again have particularly blatant (neon-pink-and-a-fanfare-of-trumpets blatant) discussion of series detectives and how they operate.
And then Harriet comments admiringly, "How professional it looks" (HHC 166), and results of the exercise are exactly as Golden Age conventions demand: "Really, every character seems more suspicious than the last" (HHC 170). Peter and Harriet are both supremely self-conscious of their roles as detectives, although not in the way in which Harriet is conscious of it in Gaudy Night, as a role for which she is not suited. They are performing detectiveness, and their troubles in this chapter spring from Harriet's departing from her role, reminding them both that she is doubling as Suspect and possibly even (in the minds of the police) Murderer. This prompts an immediate break-down of roles all the way around. Harriet deconstructs her own behavior in seeking publicity; Peter does the same for his "comic opera" style wooing (HHC 175). (This scene also contains one of my favorite shifts of viewpoint moment:
The deflation of romance in that paragraph change is just fantastic. Peter uses words like "scathed," "embittered," "stormy," "delicate structure," "wreck"--all very Byronic. Harriet uses words like "injustice" and "unreasonable." Peter may romanticize Harriet all he likes (although I think another step of the progress from Strong Poison to Gaudy Night is him learning not to), but Harriet and the narrator won't go there with him.) They have a scene--the only such scene in the canon--and just at the moment when romantic conventions demand kisses and reconciliation, the role of detective is suddenly revealed to have a second layer of truth--much less suave, debonair, and controlled--beneath the performance: "He bolted out like a cat that hears the cry of 'Meat, meat!'" (HHC 177). Peter plays a detective, but he also is one (as Harriet will come up against again in Busman's Honeymoon). Peter's facade is the obverse face of his true self.
With Bright, we get another narrative, another consideration of plausibility and narrative construction. Bright, too, tells a very novelistic story, and gets tripped up on the details of reality, which does not conform to his romantic notions. And, as counterpoint, we are given Harriet's struggle with writing a romantic story herself.
The romance sub-plot between heroine and detective's friend is one of the frequently tiresome staples of Golden Age fiction; the fact that Harriet is writing one at all demonstrates that she is a practitioner of the formulaic G.A. novel (at, it must be noted, the behest of her publisher). The fact that she refuses to do the romance in this particular book indicates that she is--or is in the process of becoming--a better novelist than formula allows. Also, of course, Betty and Jack's witless conversation reflects upon Harriet's own situation, as she herself is well-aware of, and perhaps offers, a trifle obliquely, an answer to the question of why Harriet can't marry Peter at the end of Strong Poison. She'd have to be Betty, and he'd have to be Jack.
Mrs. Lefranc will give us another kind of story about Alexis, which Harriet finds implausible on characterological grounds, while Leila Garland introduces the motif of the letters, and also the moment around which I had been intending--when I was dreaming foolishly of writing an article--of structuring an argument. The article would have been called, "Lord Peter and the Purple Python: The Generics of the Series Mystery in Have His Carcase," and it would have started with Leila's reading material:
To amuse myself, I'm going to pause here and lay out all the bits of this story that have echoes in HHC. First of all, the cipher letters which Alexis had been receiving (which brought up the Purple Python in the first place) are written in purple ink. Secondly, Henry Weldon's tattoo is of a blue and red snake, and the combination of blue and red is, of course, purple. Moreover, the detective's young lady disguising herself as an obelisk to discover the Purple Python's secret is not so very different than Harriet "vamping" Henry Weldon--and discovering his secret. Peter calls Henry Weldon's amorous technique "disgusting embraces" (HHC 224), which echoes Leila's "loathsome embraces," and the fact that Harriet rescues herself merely tells us that we are in a feminist novel rather than a pulp-adventure one. I also find a certain resonance between "Lord Humphrey Chillingfold" and "Lord Peter Wimsey," but that's a bit more of a stretch. But this account of the novel is a meta-foreshadowing of parts of the plot of HHC and also a send-up of the conventions of a certain type of novel.
We also learn, of course, that Alexis read exactly this sort of novel like popcorn, and da Soto's scornful comments point out, again, the disjunct between novels and reality. Alexis dreamed of being a pulp-adventure hero, but could never be one. And since this is where my Alexis-as-Peter's-double thing would start and since my wrists are still giving me trouble, I'm going to stop here.
Next up, Have His Carcase 5.
---
WORKS CITED
Sayers, Dorothy L. Have His Carcase. 1932. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, n.d.
Previous DLS posts: Concerning Lord Peter Wimsey, the Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot, Miss Katharine Alexandra Climpson, Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 1, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 2, Strong Poison, The Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase 1, Have His Carcase 2, Have His Carcase 3.
Ch. 11, "The Evidence of the Fisherman," through Ch. 15, "The Evidence of the Ladylove and the Landlady."
The usual. Spoilers.
I'm not sure there's going to be a coherent theme or argument for this essaylet. My plan is to start talking and see what happens.
We begin this segment with the story of the gold, which again flicks the idea that Alexis used ideas from novels in his real life:
"He tells old Bennett a rambling kind of story about wanting gold sovereigns for some purpose or other. Something about wanting to buy a diamond from a foreign rajah who didn't understand bank-notes--some bosh of that kind."
"He got that out of a book, I expect," said Wimsey. "I've seen something like it somewhere."
(HHC 129-30)
A little down the page, Peter punctures the cliché: "A £300 diamond is nothing very out of the way, and if you wanted one you could buy it in Bond Street, without paying in gold or dragging in Indian potentates" (HHC 130). And Abel Bennett didn't entirely buy the story, either. The incident shows us how Alexis's mind worked and gives a little insight into his taste in literature.
Also, this seems like a good moment to point out the elaborate theories which get constructed and reconstructed and debated and analyzed throughout HHC. All of the characters are involved in making up stories, searching and searching for the one which happens to be true. Clues and evidence are certainly part of the plot, but more so than any of the other Wimsey books (it seems to me), this one is about stories and how to put them together. There's a discussion later about plausibility which emphasizes the meta-ness of this particular endeavor.
And we get another demonstration of it later in the chapter. (I have nothing to say about Esdras Pollock and intend to ignore him as much as possible.) Peter and Salcombe Hardy cold-bloodedly constructing a newspaper story to be bait. This scene emphasizes the rhetoric involved:
"'The history of this razor has been traced up to a point--'"
"Who traced it?"
"I did."
"Can I say that?"
"If you like."
"That makes it better. 'Lord Peter Wimsey explained, with his characteristically modest smile, that he had himself been at pains to trace the previous history of the razor, a search which lead him--' Where did it lead you, Wimsey?"
"I don't want to tell 'em that. Say that the search covered many hundred miles."
"All right. I can make that sound very important. Anything else?"
"Yes. This is the important bit. Get 'em to put it in black lettering--you know."
"Not my business. Sub-editor. But I'll try. Carry on. 'Leaning over the table and emphasizing the point with an eloquent gesture of his artistic hands, Lord Peter said--'"
(HHC 139-40)
Sally and Peter aren't just making up a story here; they're also framing a story, deciding which details to put in and which to leave out, discussing ways and means of using language to conceal or highlight. This little scene is itself a cautionary tale, warning us to view other narratives in the novel with suspicion.
Nothing in particular to say about the first appearance of Henry Weldon, except that his aggressive, bullish, stupid masculinity stands in pointed contrast to both Peter and Alexis. (I probably need to do an essaylet on Alexis as a shadow-doppelganger of Peter, but that's not going here.) And that brings us to "Evidence of Trouble Somewhere," where we again have particularly blatant (neon-pink-and-a-fanfare-of-trumpets blatant) discussion of series detectives and how they operate.
"What system are we going to adopt about this? Do you favour the Michael Finsbury method by double entry as in The Wrong Box? Or one of those charts, made out in columns, with headings for 'Suspect,' 'Alibi,' 'Witnesses,' 'Motive' and so on, worked out in percentages?"
"Oh, don't let's have anything that means ruling a lot of lines and doing arithmetic. Let's behave like your Robert Templeton, and make a schedule of Things to be Noted and Things to be Done. That only means two columns."
"Very well, I'm glad you approve of it. I always make Templeton start with the corpse."
(HHC 163)
And then Harriet comments admiringly, "How professional it looks" (HHC 166), and results of the exercise are exactly as Golden Age conventions demand: "Really, every character seems more suspicious than the last" (HHC 170). Peter and Harriet are both supremely self-conscious of their roles as detectives, although not in the way in which Harriet is conscious of it in Gaudy Night, as a role for which she is not suited. They are performing detectiveness, and their troubles in this chapter spring from Harriet's departing from her role, reminding them both that she is doubling as Suspect and possibly even (in the minds of the police) Murderer. This prompts an immediate break-down of roles all the way around. Harriet deconstructs her own behavior in seeking publicity; Peter does the same for his "comic opera" style wooing (HHC 175). (This scene also contains one of my favorite shifts of viewpoint moment:
And finally, the certainty that the best way out of a bad situation was to brazen it out--Harriet's word--even if it meant making a public exhibition of his feelings, and the annihilation of all the delicate structure of confidence which he had been so cautiously toiling to build up between this scathed and embittered woman and himself.
He said nothing, but watched the wreck of his fortune in Harriet's stormy eyes.
Harriet, meanwhile, having worked herself up into committing an act of what she obscurely felt to be injustice, was seized by an unreasonable hatred against the injured party.
(HHC 174)
The deflation of romance in that paragraph change is just fantastic. Peter uses words like "scathed," "embittered," "stormy," "delicate structure," "wreck"--all very Byronic. Harriet uses words like "injustice" and "unreasonable." Peter may romanticize Harriet all he likes (although I think another step of the progress from Strong Poison to Gaudy Night is him learning not to), but Harriet and the narrator won't go there with him.) They have a scene--the only such scene in the canon--and just at the moment when romantic conventions demand kisses and reconciliation, the role of detective is suddenly revealed to have a second layer of truth--much less suave, debonair, and controlled--beneath the performance: "He bolted out like a cat that hears the cry of 'Meat, meat!'" (HHC 177). Peter plays a detective, but he also is one (as Harriet will come up against again in Busman's Honeymoon). Peter's facade is the obverse face of his true self.
With Bright, we get another narrative, another consideration of plausibility and narrative construction. Bright, too, tells a very novelistic story, and gets tripped up on the details of reality, which does not conform to his romantic notions. And, as counterpoint, we are given Harriet's struggle with writing a romantic story herself.
The romance sub-plot between heroine and detective's friend is one of the frequently tiresome staples of Golden Age fiction; the fact that Harriet is writing one at all demonstrates that she is a practitioner of the formulaic G.A. novel (at, it must be noted, the behest of her publisher). The fact that she refuses to do the romance in this particular book indicates that she is--or is in the process of becoming--a better novelist than formula allows. Also, of course, Betty and Jack's witless conversation reflects upon Harriet's own situation, as she herself is well-aware of, and perhaps offers, a trifle obliquely, an answer to the question of why Harriet can't marry Peter at the end of Strong Poison. She'd have to be Betty, and he'd have to be Jack.
Mrs. Lefranc will give us another kind of story about Alexis, which Harriet finds implausible on characterological grounds, while Leila Garland introduces the motif of the letters, and also the moment around which I had been intending--when I was dreaming foolishly of writing an article--of structuring an argument. The article would have been called, "Lord Peter and the Purple Python: The Generics of the Series Mystery in Have His Carcase," and it would have started with Leila's reading material:
"But surely," said Harriet, "an ordinary blackmailer wouldn't write letters in cipher."
"Oh, but why shouldn't they? I mean, they might have been a gang, you know, like in that story, The Trail of the Purple Python. Have you read it? The Purple Python was a Turkish millionaire, and he had a secret house full of steel-lined rooms and luxurious divans and obelisks--"
"Obelisks?"
"Well, you know. Ladies who weren't quite respectable. And he had agents in every country in Europe, who bought up compromising letters and he wrote to his victims in cipher and signed his missives with a squiggle in purple ink. Only the English detective's young lady found out his secret by disguising herself as an obelisk and the detective who was really Lord Humphrey Chillingfold arrived with the police just in time to rescue her from the loathsome embrace of the Purple Python. It was a terribly exciting book."
(HHC 193)
To amuse myself, I'm going to pause here and lay out all the bits of this story that have echoes in HHC. First of all, the cipher letters which Alexis had been receiving (which brought up the Purple Python in the first place) are written in purple ink. Secondly, Henry Weldon's tattoo is of a blue and red snake, and the combination of blue and red is, of course, purple. Moreover, the detective's young lady disguising herself as an obelisk to discover the Purple Python's secret is not so very different than Harriet "vamping" Henry Weldon--and discovering his secret. Peter calls Henry Weldon's amorous technique "disgusting embraces" (HHC 224), which echoes Leila's "loathsome embraces," and the fact that Harriet rescues herself merely tells us that we are in a feminist novel rather than a pulp-adventure one. I also find a certain resonance between "Lord Humphrey Chillingfold" and "Lord Peter Wimsey," but that's a bit more of a stretch. But this account of the novel is a meta-foreshadowing of parts of the plot of HHC and also a send-up of the conventions of a certain type of novel.
We also learn, of course, that Alexis read exactly this sort of novel like popcorn, and da Soto's scornful comments point out, again, the disjunct between novels and reality. Alexis dreamed of being a pulp-adventure hero, but could never be one. And since this is where my Alexis-as-Peter's-double thing would start and since my wrists are still giving me trouble, I'm going to stop here.
Next up, Have His Carcase 5.
---
WORKS CITED
Sayers, Dorothy L. Have His Carcase. 1932. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, n.d.
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no subject
Date: 2003-05-12 10:43 am (UTC)I am so impressed with Sayers right now. More than before.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-13 06:28 pm (UTC)Reading your analysis is setting off fireworks in my brain. I always enjoyed HHC for the plot of it (actually, one might say, for the plots of it). Thank you for posting these.
You said "I also find a certain resonance between 'Lord Humphrey Chillingfold' and 'Lord Peter Wimsey,' but that's a bit more of a stretch." And I immediately saw the name "Chillingfold" and thought of the description of Peter in Busman's Honeymoon as "a chattering icicle in an eyeglass." (Of course, being as Chillingfold is an English name it's probably pronounced "Chiffle.")
no subject
Date: 2003-05-13 07:42 pm (UTC)Words cannot even express how pleased I am that you (and everyone else who's posted comments, for that matter) are enjoying these posts and that they're opening up new ways of thinking about these books (and my god that they're causing you to slam HHC in 3 days--I do not underestimate the magnitude of your accomplishment). It's just very cool.