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Agatha Christie & Dorothy Sayers, Part IV
by Subaru Diane
Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey and Glyn Houston as his faithful, ingenious, and super-competent manservant Mervyn Bunter.
Let’s talk about class tonight: upper class, servant class, professional class, unskilled underclass — all the hierarchies and subdivisions and strata of wealth, position, title, and family, or lack thereof.
Agatha Christie set many of her books — perhaps the majority (I haven’t counted) — in lavish country estates, sybaritic resorts, luxurious cruise ships, and perfectly-appointed trains and planes.
As we’ve discussed previously, her main characters (victims, suspects, and murderers alike) tend to be types — stereotypes, in fact — and they mostly populate the upper and upper-middle classes. The retired Anglo-Indian colonel, the local squire’s wife, the tightly-furled lawyer or civil servant, the gold-digging young widow of a minor aristocrat, and the abrasive, abusive “self-made” millionaire are all familiar types in Christie’s dramatis personae.
Domestic servants abound, but Christie (through her main characters) more often than not describes them unflatteringly as “somewhat bone-headed,” “half-witted but amiable,” “rather simple,” “distinctly moronic,” and (my personal favourite) “frequently adenoidal.”
Dorothy L. Sayers made her detective hero a younger brother of the richest peer in England and wealthy enough on his own account that he can afford to collect rare first editions, buy a new Daimler every year or two, keep “the finest soprano in Europe” as his mistress, and disappear on vacation in the wilds of Corsica for months on end. Lord Peter and his noble family unquestionably dwell among the uppermost of the upper classes.
Wimsey’s own personal manservant, Mervyn Bunter, is a richly-drawn character with an interesting backstory and a wide range of talents and interests. Further, Wimsey enjoys friendships, or at least cordial acquaintanceships, with an astonishing range of men and women from every conceivable social stratum and background.
From the perspective of a century later, how well did Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers capture Britain’s class system and the social changes that were beginning to upend that system? What is the value for us (liberal egalitarian jackals that we are) in reading and enjoying depictions of these hierarchical, preordained, and often repressive and restrictive lives?
Okay — Class is in session!
Good Thoughts for Pixie and Melissa
WaterGirl
This sounds like a fun one!
SiubhanDuinne
Fun, but possibly also a little tricky! We shall see :-)
Nina
Agatha Christie also had Tommy and Tuppence, who had an upper class background but were down on their luck. It’s been a while since I read them, but I recall them as scrappy young people.
Annie
I’m not sure I have an answer to “how well did Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers capture Britain’s class system?” — all I know about it is what I have read, in both fiction and nonfiction. For me, the value of reading about these depictions is that it shows me what the society was like, and how much it has or has not changed. Christie and Sayers were writing mysteries. Since they were not writing specifically about the British class system, what we get in these books is their tacit assumptions about what their society was like and what readers would accept about it. I find that revealing.
FelonyGovt
I remember reading some of these, as a youngster growing up decidedly lower middle class, and wondering, “exactly what do these people DO for a living?”
JoyceH
@Nina: That’s what’s so interesting about the books and the era – there are certain people who simply The Quality, even if they haven’t got a bean. And everybody knows it!
SiubhanDuinne
@Nina:
Good point, and in a way goes to one of the complexities of the British class system. You could be of a pedigreed family, and lack of money wouldn’t change that. Conversely, you could make a fortune in manufacturing buttons or inventing something, and buy yourself a title, but still be dismissed by the upper crust as “not quite one of us, dear.”
Of course, things were changing in the interwar years and after.
SiubhanDuinne
@FelonyGovt:
Occupation: Gentleman
JoyceH
Just as an aside, reading these books doesn’t really equip you for 21st century England. This fall I’ll be making my first trip to England. (Yay me!) I was looking into things I wanted to see, and due to the books I have read, I wanted to experience a Lyons Corner House, where so many book characters have visited for a downscale but quick and filling meal, so I Googled to find the most convenient locations — and the last Lyons close in the ’70s. The Seventies!
Wyatt Salamanca
“England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.” — George Orwell, 1946
https://roguepsych.medium.com/what-is-the-british-class-system-63ee7731b33f
JoyceH
@SiubhanDuinne:
The actual fortune maker wouldn’t ever be accepted, but within a few generations that money would be washed clean. The offspring of the person who made the money would be stigmatized as ‘smells of the shop’, but the generation after that? Quality all the way. The Bingleys in Pride and Prejudice were an example of that.
SiubhanDuinne
@FelonyGovt:
I saw a facsimile not long ago (possibly in one of Angela Lambert’s social histories?) of an official form in which the lady in question listed her occupation as “socialite.”
Another term for wealthy, well-bred people with no discernible skills was “clubman/clubwoman.”
Annie
@JoyceH:
IIRC the husband of Lady Dormer in Unpleasantness at the Bellona club made buttons with a patent indestructible shank, and was knighted late in life for (again IIRC) services not very clearly specified in the honors list. But also, she was from Quality so maybe that helped her husband.
Brachiator
I think that American readers often view the British class system as eccentric without considering how rigid, corrosive and oppressive the system actually is. I have not read either author widely (more familiar with TV and movie adaptations), so I ask how critical either author is of the class system.
I recall some episodes of the Inspector Lynley series where other police officers are resentful that Lynley, an Earl, would take a job as a police officer, since work belongs to the lower classes. And upper class suspects often act as though they are above the law and cannot be judged by their superiors.
SiubhanDuinne
@JoyceH:
I had a decent but very undistinguished meal at the Lyon’s Corner House in Piccadilly Circus in 1959.
You’ll have a great time!
Mr. Prosser
Both Wimsey and Poirot maintain friendships with policemen who were decidedly working class although progression to the upper ranks put a nice polish on chief inspectors who could be considered as skilled workmen and close to gentlemen; Charles Parker even married Wimsey’s sister. I’m not sure Poirot socialized with working folk but Wimsey was comfortable in village pubs, London temperance societies and so on. He also relied on the educated and underemplyed single women of the time who were sharp, observant and could be relied upon as much as Holmes relied on the Baker Street Irregulars. His unfortunate name for them was “My Cattery”
frosty
@FelonyGovt: @SiubhanDuinne: Met a British guy (20s, like us) in a tavern on a Greek Island when I was Railpassing around Europe with a buddy. We asked him “What do you do?” His response (verbatim): “Oh, I’m idle.”
SiubhanDuinne
@frosty:
Wow! That’s dialogue straight out of The Importance of Being Earnest!
Another Scott
@frosty: +1
One of the things that stuck with me about Dickens was the overbearing class structure. They may have gotten rid of the debtors prisons over time, but it seems like the rest of the horrible edifice is still there.
Yeah, “what do these people actually DO?” stuff is still there, and still with us here across the pond. E.g. “Friends” – giant Manhattan (?) apartment and they all have time to just (apparently) sit around all day gossiping and telling jokes. (I didn’t watch it often enough to know if the characters actually had jobs.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Annie
Although it’s true that “Wimsey was comfortable in village pubs, London temperance societies and so on” I’ve wondered if that was part of his privilege — that he just assumed it was OK for him to be there, at least initially.
middlelee
I read Whose Body a couple of weeks ago. About 50 years ago I read all of the Peter Whimseys and remember loving them. This time around I was put off by his speech affectations although I suspect Sayers was probably using real upper class males as her model. I was also put off by the casual anti-semitism and there was a lot of it since the murder victim was a “Hebrew.’ I also found the plot too convoluted.
The class distinctions were clearly shown by the way the uppers thought about and addressed the lowers, and the way the lowers assumed it was normal to be treated as less than the upper classes and that it was proper for them to be subservient.
I bought the second book in the series and am not sure I’m interested in reading it. I’m very old and there are so many books and who knows how much time left to read them.
stinger
@frosty: First name Eric, by any chance?
oatler
Don’t write a “modern” version of Christie because many of the sympathetic characters would have to be 21st century Tories…Liz Truss. Bojo, Suella…
SiubhanDuinne
Sayers was certainly something of an intellectual snob, but she was far less concerned with wealth or position than she was with “doing one’s proper job.” (From Gaudy Night: “I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well.”) In both Whose Body? and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club the villains are doctors who betray their profession. In Unnatural Death, it’s a nurse; in Strong Poison, an attorney. It’s a theme that runs through both her detective fiction and much of her nonfiction. I think social class per se was rather irrelevant to her, although she recognised it and saw that it was changing.
Brachiator
@SiubhanDuinne:
Glacial change. I recall reading that even though Ian Fleming was a success because of the Bond novels, his wife looked down on him because he was slightly lower class. I don’t think that the supposed difference would even register for Americans.
I have been watching some of the early interviews with the Beatles. It is amazing how snotty some journalists were, presuming that the group had overstepped their place, and on camera criticizing their accents. The group’s witty dismissal of this nonsense was a breath of fresh air that shocked many who had a death grip on the old order.
There is a British TV personality, Steph McGovern, I think, who gets criticized for her non posh accent and class even though she is well educated and extremely knowledgeable about business and economics.
And it is odd to see some traditional Labour Party supporters claim that party leader Starmer cannot represent the working class because he is a lawyer.
Steeplejack
I didn’t remember that this was a Christie-Sayers week, so I haven’t quite collected my thoughts. I am about 20% (thank you, Kindle) through Gaudy Night in my binge-read of the Wimsey novels, and I am already feeling a little sad that there is only one more to go after this. Then on to Christie, I guess. Marple or Poirot?
The Wimsey novels are soaked in classism, although it’s not always clear whether it’s Sayers or the characters (or both). One moment in particular that struck me was in the early part of The Nine Tailors, when Wimsey and Bunter wedge their car in a ditch in the Fens and seek help in the nearby village as night approaches. At first it’s “The gentlemen have had an accident with their car” (Mrs. Tebbutt, innkeeper). Then, after Wimsey introduces himself to Rev. Venables (“My name is Wimsey—here is my card—and this is my man, Bunter”), Bunter might as well disappear. Venables speaks only to Wimsey and says “your man” can do this or can do that. When they get to the rectory and Mrs. Venables is introduced, she says: “Do come in and sit down and get yourselves warm. Your man? Yes, of course. Emily! Take this gentleman’s manservant into the kitchen and make him comfortable.” Exit Bunter into the invisible background except to reappear when needed.
When it becomes clear that Wimsey’s car can’t be rescued until the next day, the Rector says to his wife: “Agnes, my dear, have you explained to Emily [the maid] that Lord Peter will be staying the night?” Bunter is just part of the luggage.
Lord Peter does interact with people at all levels of society, but all of the interactions are situation- and class-appropriate. Even the villains are sort of polite.
prostratedragon
@Brachiator: I take it you mean inferiors. That point is often a feature of American stories such as the Columbo mysteries, where his usually welltodo quarry start out regarding him as a low-level janitor.
I only know Christie from tv adaptations; thank you to those who recommended the Hickson Miss Marple movies. The episode “At Bertram’s” interested me in this regard, because what at first seems to be upper class exclusivity turns out to have a deeper layer, and this maybe could also be a critique by the author.
Almost Retired
It always fascinated me that so much (older) British literature focused on humanizing the “servant class” without challenging the class system itself. I guess that’s what passed for “woke.” These wonderful working class folk who are smart and loyal and we are grateful for their service. With no consideration of why these smart people have few economic options but to be loyal. This sort of attitude kinda ruined the Harry “Spare” book for me.
Steeplejack
I am liking Gaudy Night a lot. Nobody has been killed yet—no spoilers, please!—and so far it’s almost like a comedy of manners or a Barbara Pym novel.
The only one that landed with a thud for me was The Five Red Herrings, which was a morass of timing and train schedules and “who was where when?” Almost a parody of the mystery as a clockwork mechanism.
karen marie
@FelonyGovt: A recurring thread through a number of PG Wodehouse’s short stories and novels is the avoidance of “work.”
I started listening to the first Wimsey story last night via Audible, and it raised the question whether Wodehouse had any kind of personal interaction with Sayer or Christie, whether they read each other’s books, and what each thought about the other’s books.
Would anyone happen to have a copy of “A Job of Work”? I’m trying to figure out if it was published under another title (publications in England and America sometimes did have different titles). I thought I had read or at least knew of all of them but that one is new to me.
stinger
When SiubhanDuinne’s series of posts started, I began rereading the Sayers books. (I’m more familiar with the Christie books.) Started with Murder Must Advertise — for some incomprehensible reason, the books were OUT OF CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER on my shelves — got that corrected and read Whose Body and so on; in the middle of Five Red Herrings now.
Wimsey is fully accepted in the uppercrust world — his murder-solving eccentricities considered no worse than the usual gambling, drinking and other vices of his ilk — and is also accepted, with a bit of eye-rolling at his lordship’s oddities, by the lower classes. And the stories are all about class. In Five Red Herrings,set in Scotland, the victim is Scottish and the five suspects are mostly English or else we are told why they speak without a brogue. The accent is a class marker.
SiubhanDuinne
@Steeplejack:
Yeah, i think she wrote a “timetable-mystery” to prove she could! I have an affection for 5RH, but I get that it’s not to everyone’s taste — and it’s far from my favourite.
Glad you’re enjoying Gaudy Night.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
America also had debtors prisons in it’s early years. One of the Founding Fathers, Robert Morris, was confined in the Prune Street debtors’ apartment adjacent to Walnut Street Prison from 1798 to 1801.
Today, it seems absurd to imprison someone because of their debts, but it somehow made sense to American and European society through the 19th century. I was thinking about this recently in reading how some Americans are hard core adamant that student loan debt should never be forgiven. In some ways we still struggle with what to do about people who fall deeply into debt, but who are still expected to shoulder the responsibility for it.
Mr. Prosser
Yes I believe Wimsey felt comfortable in various places simply because of his station in life. As to the treatment of Bunter in many of the novels it was the way it was. But, Sayers was writing in the 20s and 30s when a great deal of this was changing. I’m sure Sayers bridled at the treatment of women, particularly educated women and used Harriet Vane as her foil. I read a comment years ago by a reviewer who surmised Sayers was writing of a romanticized Edwardian era plopped into post-war Britain.
PT&S
@middlelee: As a big fan of Sayers’ work, I’m with you that Whose Body is off-putting. Everything that comes after it is better (except perhaps Five Red Herrings), and much of it is vastly better.
stinger
@Brachiator: Fiona Hill, of impeachment testimony fame, had to come to the States for a career because her lower-class British accent made her stellar academic qualifications irrelevant in Toryland; I think she says in her book that Tony Blair made some snide comment about it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Almost kinda-sorta on-topic, I rewatched Gosford Park (murder mystery set in a country house weekend party in the 30s) a few weeks ago, and so much of it is about the class system, right down to bumbling middle class inspector (Stephen Fry) who is clearly enamored of and intimidated by all the Quality, and his working-class but much sharper constable. It’s interesting to compare the portrayal of aristos in GF, co-written by Julian Fellowes, Robert Altman and IIRC Bob Balaban, and the rather more affectionate, not to say worshipful, depiction when Fellowes is on his own in Downton Abbey.
rivers
@stinger: This is correct. I’m English and my father had a strong Lancashire accent ( this was in the 50’s) This was an indicator that he was working class. He was very ambitious and ended up working for an American company located in the UK – he explained to me that “the Americans have no idea what English accents mean, they think we just have an English accent.”
Annie
The different treatment of aristos in Gosford Park versus Downton Abbey also has to do with the difference between a movie and a TV series. Producers want people to tune in to the next episode so they can’t make the characters too villainous or disgusting. An unrelated example: there’s often a whole lot read into how Star Trek is an optimistic vision of the future. But that was partly because Gene Roddenberry understood if it was too dystopian no one would watch more than one episode so no network would ever pick it up.
zhena gogolia
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I love Gosford Park. Introduced me to Ivor Novello
billcoop4
As is, of course, Star Trek: The Original Series. Follows-on are always better. But Whose Body? is essentially, as are the somewhat vapid short stories.
I read through the Wimsey tales annually.
BC
stinger
I’m probably an outlier, but Bunter just doesn’t work for me as a character. He’s only around when Wimsey/Sayers needs something from him. He’s prim and ultracorrect — cringes at having to call certain “comestibles” such as shin of beef and leg of mutton by the Scottish “appellations” — yet the very next thing Wimsey says to him is that he, Wimsey, is going to go have a “chin-wag” with the neighbors, and Bunter doesn’t bat an eye.
Whenever the two are out together, hunting for clues, they eat their meals at different establishments. The class differences that indicate who should eat where are pretty clearly delineated. The only time they eat together is when they can close a door or pull a curtain and have privacy to discuss clues, but it also ensure that no one sees his lordship sitting at table with a mere valet.
Steeplejack
@karen marie:
It’s available at Amazon and at GoodReads, as well as some other places. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can download the (free) Kindle app and read it that way. The ebook version is $4.99 at both sites.
PaulB
Poirot started out as a poor war refugee in “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” didn’t he? Within a very short time, he was hobnobbing with the rich and powerful.
As I was thinking about this, a couple of stories came to mind, one a short story and one a novel. In “The Adventure of the Clapham Cook,” Poirot is scolded by Mrs. Todd when he initially turns down the request to investigate her missing cook. She points out to him that a good cook for someone like her is every bit as important as the cases his wealthy clients were bringing to him. Amused, he takes the case.
Then there’s “Mrs. McGinty’s Dead,” where Poirot is visited by Superintendent Spence, on the verge of retirement and horribly uncomfortable because he feels that he may have found the wrong man in his most recent case. Poirot takes the case because he does not want to think of Spence, in retirement, thinking that he may have been responsible for sending an innocent man to his death.
In just about all of these mysteries, though, it seemed to be accepted that even middle class Britishers had a servant, even if it was just a daily. It was only the poor and working class that had to fend for themselves, and I don’t think we saw much of those from either Sayers or Christie.
This topic also brings to mind the movie “Gosford Park,” in which one of the women is privately ridiculed for not being accompanied by a personal maid. Something about that this was a sign that she had given up or some such comment?
I’m really rambling tonight, but in the classic 1954 film, “Sabrina,” one of the concerns was that the character played by Audrey Hepburn was aiming above her station and this could only result in misery. She was servant class and thus she was supposed to remain.
Steeplejack
@SiubhanDuinne:
The characters and scenery were entertaining in The Five Red Herrings, but I couldn’t follow the mystery to save my life. Every time the focus switched back and forth among the suspects I had to refer back to the start of Chapter 3, where there was a handy thumbnail list of them. Easy to do on the Kindle, though!
Whomever
@JoyceH: You will have a great time, and 2023 UK is a very different place than 1970 UK foodwise (though it is expensive compared to much of the rest of the world).
Lyons is interesting, because it’s well known to anyone who is interested in the history of computers. Because, believe it or not, Lyons actually built one of the first computers ever built, the LEO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer) . This was 1951!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@PaulB: Looking for this quote from Agatha Christie, I found a blog post about the economics of her young, married (middle class in the British sense) life
Steeplejack
So as I proceed into Agatha Christie territory, should I read individual subseries (and which one first), or should I go in a more strictly chronological order? (I did the subseries route with Terry Pratchett and preferred that.)
Annie
SiubhanDuinne can comment on this more than I — maybe she already has — but (again IIRC) Sayers set up her detective as wealthy and aristocratic because he would be free from the regulations of Scotland Yard; could travel on his own dime (shilling?) for things like crossing the Atlantic to retrieve a letter, and a wider range of people would be willing to talk to him than to a Scotland Yard man. Wimsey would also thus have freedom to investigate when he was interested in a case, and not when he wasn’t.
something fabulous
@stinger: And then there is also the modern reverse, IIUC: Jamie Oliver for example, affecting a more working-class accent than what he’d been brought up to, as what the cool kids (Well, “kids”! How old is he now?!) of the time were doing. So interesting to me. Maybe some of our British Jackals can chime in
…and, always read the whole thread! Thanks @rivers: !
frosty
@stinger: Ha! I would have recognized him since I was a huge Python fan at the time.
Sheila in nc
@stinger: re Bunter, there is a great scene in Busman’s Honeymoon where the mask is stripped off…
Also I recall a couple of places in various novels and stories where the distinction of class and place are blurred simply because of the closeness of their relationship. Wimsey conferring with Parker in the living room and inviting Bunter to fix himself a drink and join them. I find their relationship comforting.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
This isn’t about class, but Christie definitely reflected the post-war upheavals, especially after WWII. A lot of her plots have people pretending or passing themselves off as other people, and she specifically discusses the changes in society, and how people are not vouched for to others as they were before the war. See A Murder is Announced. Before the war, everyone knew everyone (and presumably their place), and after the war, new people moved to the village and all anyone knew of the newcomers was what they said they were.
stinger
@Sheila in nc: Ah, I should get to Busman’s in a few more days!
lashonharangue
I’ve always wondered if more of the motivation of the Cambridge 5 was a rejection of the class system they were beneficiaries of as opposed to a rejection of capitalism as such.
frosty fred
A then-young man I used to know in England (he was Peter Gabriel’s first cousin) affected an increasingly working class accent over the years, but whether that was to unsettle his parents or to work in with his local friends, or perhaps both, I never knew.
I also remember attending a scientific meeting, probably in the early 90s, and being surprised that a featured speaker’s accent was much more working class than posh. In his case I assumed he had not found it necessary to adapt the up-market speech, but I don’t really know there either.
As to class in the US vs UK, I grew up in a socially circumscribed Upper South environment, and I gradually came to realize that my mother considered that she’d married beneath her; my father’s people were all farmers, while my maternal grandfather was from a law enforcement background and had been a state senator.
When I started researching family history, I found in the 1860 census a great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side was recorded as a sailor (in other censuses he was an oysterman). Two older women on the same census page reported their occupation as “lady.” So–I guess you never know.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Steeplejack: I would recommend reading her best novels first. Her early ones are not great, excepting the immortal The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, then there is a great, longish period when many of the books are great, and then she tails off badly in the last books (when she had gotten quite old). Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express, The Hollow, Sad Cypress, Five Little Pigs, A Murder is Announced, And Then There Were None, The Murder in the Library, Evil Under the Sun.
Annie
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
I think the best Miss Marple book is “The Mirror Crack’d.” It’s a later book but very good (and the only one I was ever able to solve).
Tony Jay
@something fabulous:
I think I’ve blathered about this before, but when Jamie Oliver hit the big time it was the late 1990s in Britain, when ‘posh’ was decidedly unpopular and all of the zeitgeist was about how cool and genuine the working classes and their accents were. That’s what Pulp’s ‘Common People’ was about.
This was not how the Establishment wanted it to be, and steps were taken to put the zeitgeist in its bally place before the peasants began to question if they really needed all of these blue-blooded scions of old crimes cluttering up their Cool Britannia after all.
Andrya
There’s another subtlety to the British class system that no-one has mentioned: there was a distinction between aristocrats and non-aristocrats, but also a distinction between gentry vs. non-gentry. Not all gentry were aristocrats, many were middle class- but they absolutely could not be working class.
A bit of context: my maternal grandfather was born in Scotland to a non-gentry family (fishermen, coal miners, light house attendant). He used to talk to me about his experiences in WW1, and in particular about the idiocy of the way the British army chose officers- officers MUST be gentry, never mind that they were 18 years old, just out of the British equivalent of high school, and knew nothing about anything. My grandfather was 26 when he entered the army in 1914, and had been self-supporting since age 12, so this was maddening to him. (For the other side of this, religious writer CS Lewis- son of a lawyer, and therefore gentry- was made an officer in 1916 at age 18, and admitted he knew absolutely nothing about what to do, and simply did whatever his working class sergeant told him to do.)
Agatha Christie writes about aristocrats and middle class people- but almost never about non-gentry. The only exception that I can think of is one of the murderers in “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe” (aka “The Patriotic Murders”) who is part of a traveling theatrical troupe, who marries the banker who (bigamously) marries the rich lady- the murderess is ruthless, but she is at least intelligent.
It seems to me reasonable that Christie never writes about working class people- as gentry herself, she would not have known any non-gentry on a personal level. Every writing class includes the advice “write about what you know”.
Sayers, as the daughter of a pastor, probably had a bit more personal acquaintance with non-gentry. And she does have admirable non-gentry characters- Bunter, Charles Parker, Miss Meteyard, and Padgett. (It’s rather horrifying that Padgett says in “Gaudy Night” that England needs a Hitler, but the novel was published in 1935 and a lot of people did not then realize what Hitler was about.) Sayer’s alternate detective Montague Egg (no novel, but a lot of short stories) is clearly working class- a traveling wine salesman- but is a person of intelligence and integrity.
The most interesting example of class conflict in Sayers (in my opinionated opinion) is in Gaudy Night. The working class villain is (I believe) fairly portrayed- her ethic (“loyal to family, right or wrong”) is set against the ethic of scholarship (“lying about history or science is never ok and must be refuted at any human cost”).
I’m a bit out of my depth on the next issue- I am not a social historian- but I had thought that the British class system did not begin to break down until Clement Atlee became Prime Minister in 1945. There was one huge social change- more opportunities for women- which meant that working class women (surprise, surprise!) did not want to become domestic servants. (Britain lost almost 900,000 men dead in WW1, and many of the jobs they would have had opened up to women.) Sayers, of course, was one of the first group of women to get an Oxbridge degree.
Ajabu
My personal experience as an unwilling subject in colonial Jamaica as a child (pre Independence) was the BRITs and their ridiculous class system were a giant pain in the ass. One of my favorite memories from elementary school was the saying “ “ The British woman is so refined, no lips, no bosom, and no behind.”
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
Oops, it’s The Body in the Library!
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Annie: Yes, it’s a good one.
SiubhanDuinne
@Annie:
Sayers once wrote, I think only somewhat tongue-in-cheek:
Lord Peter’s large income… I deliberately gave him… After all it cost me nothing and at the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.
But most certainly it was also useful for her as a storyteller to enable Lord Peter to use his many resources in the service of solving crimes in a way that, as you rightly note, an ordinary policeman couldn’t do.
Peter was so intelligent and curious and intuitive that he would probably have been a fine detective whatever circumstances he came from. We’ll obviously never know. But Sayers makes it clear again and again that this is, for Wimsey, his proper job (see my comment @24).
Steeplejack
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
Thanks for the suggestions. Hard to know which ones are the best before you’ve read them! I think The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the only Christie I have read.
middlelee
@PT&S: Thanks, that’s good to know. I will happily read #2 on your recommendation.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack: Orient Express is really good. It stands up as a novel, not just a mystery novel.
SiubhanDuinne
@Sheila in nc:
Oh yes, that is a wonderful scene! There’s a less intense but equally telling passage in The Nine Tailors where Bunter reduces the vicarage housemaid to tears for a similar kind of infraction.
Annie
@SiubhanDuinne:
It’s also a lot more fun for a reader. I’ve been pretty broke sometimes. I know everything I need to know about that. I have no desire to read about it in fiction that I am reading for fun.
something fabulous
@Tony Jay: Aha, thank you that does sound familiar! So the posh-pendulum swung back? I know it did for fashion, but accents seem harder to put on and take off! (As one who’s been trying to get the FLAAAAAAAT Chicago somewhat modulated her whole life….)
middlelee
@karen marie: I sometimes go to AmazonUK to find titles that might be different.
SiubhanDuinne
@lashonharangue:
Oh, that’s a really interesting question!
And thinking about that in terms of Sayers’ secondary characters, Lord Peter’s sister, Lady Mary Wimsey (later Lady Mary Parker) rejected the class system of her ducal upbringing by running off to nurse in WWI (instead of staying home and doing more genteel and acceptable war work), becoming a Socialist for a few years, and plotting an elopement with a leftist agitator. These were youthful passions with not much staying power, but they do show that she experienced profound discomfort with her class privilege. I admire the fact that Sayers wrote about Lady Mary with humour and sympathy.
SiubhanDuinne
@Annie:
Heartily agree with your entire comment!
RAM
A few points I’ve always found interesting:
1. Wimsey suffered from extreme PTSD after WWI, almost dying from it. His ‘man’ Bunter was his sergeant during the war who helped dig Wimsey out of a dugout that had collapsed after an artillery shell hit it, saving Wimsey’s life. From what passed between them, Wimsey seemed to think Bunter could take care of both himself AND Wimsey. And then, of course, Wimsey married a commoner–after she refused to have him for a few years.
2. Miss Marple was an interesting character who had apparently gone to school with upper class people but who, herself, was definitely living a simple village life, although one with more than its share of murders.
3. Periot underwent his share of prejudice due to his Belgian heritage.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
Thanks. I will make a list of these “best” novels and probably read them in chronological order of publication, perhaps after the initial appearances of Poirot and Marple.
schrodingers_cat
@Steeplejack: Most of the books are standalones. I read them in no particular order. Whatever was available at the library was my choice.
Steeplejack
@schrodingers_cat:
Thanks. I like to read in rough chronological order to also get a feel for the author’s development and changes in perspective (if any).
Another Scott
@Andrya: What with King Chuck being in the news, your post reminds me of the hours and hours and pages and pages spent talking about Diana Spencer and her family and whether Chuck was marrying too far below his status when their engagement was announced. Even though by any measure her family was way, way up there in British social status compared to almost any non-royal.
It was weird.
And gave me a tiny bit of a view of how toxic the UK press coverage could be (and of course they got much, much worse).
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
@Steeplejack: I might do a reread and start at the beginning, The Mysterious Affair at Styles and then go in chronological order.
Tehanu
@Steeplejack:
I agree that the book The Five Red Herrings is, as you say, nearly unreadable. However, the TV version with Ian Carmichael is IMNSHO the best of all of that series. Some years after the series was made, we stayed at the Selkirk Arms in Kirkcudbright, which is where several scenes were shot and the cast also stayed, and it was a delight. (It’s also the place where Robert Burns wrote the Selkirk Grace).
Steeplejack
@Tehanu:
I called up that section of Scotland on Google Maps while I was reading to get a sense of the geography and to help with all of the comings and goings at various train stations. It didn’t help at all, but I had the thought that it might be cool to visit there one day.
Steeplejack
@Tehanu:
After I finish the books I might watch the Ian Carmichael series. I vaguely remember watching them when they were on Masterpiece Theatre, God, almost 50 years ago.
Steeplejack
I will add that I particularly enjoyed Murder Must Advertise, again because of Sayers’s excursions into comedy and social commentary with the various cliques and commotions at Pym’s Publicity Ltd.
Andrya
@Another Scott: Thanks! Fun fact: The “S” in Winston S. Churchill stands for “Spencer”- he was related to Princess Diana.
The British tabloids are beyond belief. One of my brothers married a British lady and moved to England. In the 1980s my sister and I were visiting them and my sister (not me!) asked to see a genuine British tabloid. My sister-in-law heroically went out to buy one, and returned holding it at arms length between finger and thumb, as though it had been a bag of feces.
And the content was unbelievable- outing ordinary people whom the tabloid believed were having an affair, plus lots of racism.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Annie: And it introduced me to the Tennyson The Lady of Shalott
SiubhanDuinne
@Steeplejack:
In the final Sayers-Christie Medium Cool, four weeks from now, I’m hoping to spend some time on both of the Wimsey series (the five that Ian Carmichael did and the three Wimsey-Vane stories with Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter) as well as television and film adaptations of Christie — among other odds and ends of discussion topics.
kalakal
Blast! Forgot this was tonight. Really interesting set of posts. Thanks all
And off to bed with me
Steeplejack
@SiubhanDuinne:
Thanks for the heads-up. I will compose my thoughts.
I think David Suchet is excellent as Poirot—haven’t read any of the books—and the arc of the series is very interesting as it goes from extremely “cozy” to dark and deep in the last episodes.
My lesser PBS station is currently running Miss Marple, and I am confirming that Joan Hickson is my favorite Marple. It’s not that Geraldine McEwan or Julia McKenzie is bad, but Hickson shows a glint of steel beneath the surface that the others don’t. Probably also relates to the “cozy” factor being dialed up or down in the various series.
Annie
@SiubhanDuinne:
very happy to hear there will be 2 more of these.
Tehanu
@Steeplejack: If you ever get the chance to visit Kirkcudbright, take it by all means. I’m a fanatic about the Highlands, but the Lowlands have their charms. I also love Murder Must Advertise; all the secondary characters are individual and memorable, and so is her affectionate but clearsighted — and somewhat deprecating — view of the advertising business. When you read Christie, you’re reading drawing-room drama, and what’s going on in the world outside the drawing room or the country estate is at best just a backdrop. When you read Sayers, you find out about real things.
Tony Jay
@something fabulous:
The pendulum did, indeed, swing back so hard it smashed us into 13 years of Tory rule. But at the time even the social-climbing products of private schooling (which is the real mechanism by which the upper classes rinse any lingering sentiment for the lower classes out of their new blood) like Blair affected a kind of ‘common-man’s error’ at the end of some words.
He’s stopped that now he openly works as a fixer and propagandist for authoritarian dictators, but back in the day he liked to disguise some of the terrible things he was.
Miss Bianca
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Funnily enough, I just finished A Murder is Announced. And you’re right – a major plot point – helpfully summarized by one of the characters, I believe it’s Miss Marple herself – is that “back in the (pre-war) day”, everybody knew everybody else in their little towns and villages, but post-war, more and more people are moving around, to places where nobody knows who they are and what their bona fides may be.
Miss Bianca
@Tehanu: My introduction to the Wimsey-verse was, in fact, the BBC Five Red Herrings, so that’s the book I started with. It speaks volumes for Sayers’s skills as a writer that I then proceeded to read all her other mysteries!
schrodingers_cat
OT: BJers who work with water based media, how do you make your travel palettes , according to color or according to the medium.
All the greens (watercolor, gouache, acrylics) together or all watercolors together?
karen marie
@Steeplejack: Yeah, I can’t do ebooks. Reading anything more than articles on a tablet doesn’t work for me.
I came back here because I am about halfway through listening to Whose Body? (book 1 in the Wimsey series) and I am stunned. How did I miss the conversations that must have happened about the shocking racism and antisemitism?
My jaw is completely dropped as I’m listening. I cannot believe that anyone would recommend this book.
Did that change over the course of Sayers’ writing career?
It’s just weird because it’s not just one passing antisemitic/racist comment by one character, it’s everyone in the entire fucking book.
Peter Wimsey himself is a complete ass. How does one warm to someone as self-involved and self-important as this asshole?
karen marie
@middlelee: So I did miss the “antisemitism” discussion!
I’m listening to that same book now, and it’s freaking me out.