World War I is over. Humanity has gone by hell and emerged strung between merry, hectic giddiness and entrenched, unspeakable grief. And Lord Peter Wimsey—scion of the aristocracy; navy hero; buoyant connoisseur of wine, uncommon books, piano music, and ladies—is on the hunt for his subsequent beguiling case.
I first encountered Wimsey, essentially the most well-known creation of the thriller novelist Dorothy L. Sayers—whose first novel, Whose Body?, was printed a century in the past this yr—in January 2022. The surprising, devastating finish of a COVID-era romance had left me feeling every thing, even boredom, with scary depth. I’ve all the time turned to detective tales after I really feel susceptible; there may be nothing so enjoyable because the promise that even the grisliest drawback can, with the right strategy, be neatly solved. A set of Sayers’s tales, Lord Peter: The Complete Lord Peter Wimsey Stories, had sat on my shelf for years; I picked it up. And it, in flip, plucked me out of the sense that I used to be trapped on some perilous brink. I set off on a yr of obsession, first with Wimsey and his fictional cohort, then with the remainder of Sayers’s oeuvre.
But Sayers’s work didn’t consolation me in the way in which I had initially anticipated, with intelligent, full solutions to daunting questions. The energy of her writing lies as an alternative in the way in which she turns the basic promise of a thriller novel on its head. Wimsey solves crimes with class and enthusiasm, however true decision eludes him. The deeper mysteries of the folks concerned—why they’ve made sure disastrous decisions, whether or not they really feel regret, how their moral sense bought skewed—stay obscure and sometimes, on the finish of every investigation, seem much more tangled than earlier than.
This is strictly what soothed me about Sayers’s work: She was preoccupied with the query of how, when you notice you’ll doubtless by no means perceive these round you, you may nonetheless stay a significant life. I discovered in her exploration of that quandary a strong balm: assurance not that the entire challenges I face shall be tidily resolved however relatively that existence stays rewarding even when they won’t be.
Sayers, born in Oxford in 1893, got here of age at a time when the thriller style, first popularized within the nineteenth century, was taking a contemporary flip—its characters have been formed by warfare and financial deprivation; its temper was much less fuel lamps and fog and extra quick automobiles and jazz. That interval is now considered the style’s golden age. Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, got here out in 1920. Josephine Tey, the creator of The Daughter of Time, printed her first tales within the mid-Twenties. By the tip of the last decade, Dashiell Hammett had begun to popularize hard-boiled detective noirs within the United States.
Although Sayers is finest identified for her crime writing, detective novels have been solely a small a part of her mental and artistic output. She was one of many first girls to be awarded a level by Oxford University. She was a translator of Dante and an influential thinker about Anglican theology, the rights of ladies, and the aim of schooling. (She was additionally at finest impolitic about individuals who weren’t white Christians, particularly Jews. “Semitic-looking” males within the cash trades commonly crop up in her work; in Whose Body?, one character presents the regrettable opinion, “I’m sure some Jews are very good people.”)
Above all, Sayers was concerned about what she known as “the exasperating mysteriousness of human beings.” She wrote with a novel appreciation for the fragility of postwar society, and for the members of that society who discovered it notably tough to navigate a world turned practically unrecognizable.
Her novels—whodunnits set in Wimsey’s cosmopolitan London, the distant Scottish countryside, or the fraught educational Eden of Oxford—teem with people who find themselves unbearably, generally catastrophically, delicate to how the world disappoints them. A employee at a coastal lodge, preoccupied with the grand adventures of the characters in his low cost romance novels, simply believes schemers who attempt to persuade him that he’s a Russian royal. A Scottish painter picks fixed fights along with his friends partly as a result of his human interactions really feel like no match for the pure magnificence he finds in rocks, rivers, and timber. The detective novelist Harriet Vane, Sayers’s different most well-known character and Wimsey’s eventual spouse, avoids looking for love, fearing {that a} relationship will subsume her individuality.
Across Sayers’s fiction, characters search for methods to mitigate life’s miseries. As for Wimsey, he searches for reduction in his work. He is a detective match for Sayers’s instances, and for ours: a person striving for order in an incomprehensible world. But he by no means closes his circumstances with actual satisfaction. Instead, he leaves them feeling that humanity is much more complicated and maddening than he beforehand understood, and that justice has been imperfectly allotted.
The paradox that Wimsey finds in his mysteries—though they make his life extra difficult, he can’t assist looking for them out—is probably most evident in The Nine Tailors, which is extensively thought-about to be considered one of Sayers’s finest works. In it, Wimsey solves sure mysteries surrounding the looks of an nameless, brutalized physique present in England’s jap fens—whose it was, when and why he died, how he ended up in another person’s freshly dug grave—however struggles to reply the query of how, exactly, he was killed. Toward the tip of the novel, the native drainage system collapses throughout a mighty storm. The catastrophe takes lives, ruins properties, and units a hardship-ridden village up for an particularly unhealthy yr. But it additionally exhibits Wimsey the inconceivable reply to his query. After the storm, he seems out on the flooded fens. They are lovely, a mirror to the calmed sky.
It’s no accident that the flood reads as biblical. The work of mystery-solving is in some methods akin to the work of faith. Both present a technique for viewing the violence of life with extra curiosity than worry. Sayers, a detective novelist and a theologian, understood that such a framework is important to discovering which means, even when it’s illusory. There is not any logic to the moments of readability in her work. But with each new case comes the hope that this time, there is perhaps—that decision is, in actual fact, potential. This hope, regardless of how usually it goes unfulfilled, makes Wimsey’s work worthwhile.
That is what I discovered from my yr with Sayers. It is sweet to hunt, even when you understand that you’re unlikely to search out. In wanting clearly on the ugly reality of the world, you see, additionally, its magnificence.