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o-uncle-newt · 7 days

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Enter Sir John (and Lord Peter)

This is basically a Sayers blog alongside a Finnemore blog at this point- and this is going to be mostly a Sayers post but also a bit of a window into my other detective fiction reading, which I don't really post about here but kind of want to. A bit of an experiment. (Also, some spoilers to a very old and AFAIK out of print book that I don't particularly recommend below, as well as a Sayers novel.)

So I have been reading a LOT of random old timey detective fiction recently, and at one point made a reading list based on having read the fabulous The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards, which I highly recommend to basically anyone with even the faintest interest in the subject (and even more so to Christie and Sayers fans). ANYWAY, I made the list, then completely forgot where I got it from, ordered a bunch of books through the NYPL's interlibrary loan system, and somehow got all of them at once. So now I have a stack of books from five states on my dresser, many of which are first editions. One of those is my copy of Enter Sir John by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, which isn't only a first edition but literally has the pencil inscription by the original owner from Christmas 1928, when he bought/received the book. Gah I love reading other people's old books.

Reading other people's old books in general is fun- reading this particular one was more of a mixed bag. The pacing was kind of weird, the mystery was kind of thin (and the motive was... PECULIAR for a 21st century reader, a mix of oddly progressive and deeply, deeply problematic depending on how you look at it), and the characterization of most of the characters was pretty thin. The atmosphere of the small-time theatrical setting was fun, and the detective, Sir John Saumarez, is reasonably entertaining. To go through, and mildly spoil (you'll see why shortly), the plot- someone is found dead who had been known to have previously quarrelled with a woman in the past, under circumstances which make it clear that this woman had both motive, means, and opportunity. The woman is arrested and her trial is attended by a man with a title who is struck by her and feels compelled to work on her behalf. He works hard to find the actual killer when the trial goes poorly for her, and realizes that he is in love with her and confesses his feelings to her.

Sound familiar?

For context, Enter Sir John was published two years before Dorothy L Sayers's Strong Poison, and to be transparent I fiddled a bit with the timing and phrasing to make the synopsis as CLEARLY correlated as it is (he doesn't confess his feelings to her until after he's gotten her off the murder charges, she's actually in the room when the murder victim is found, she actually is convicted and her conviction is overturned on appeal, among other changes). If the above plot sounds interesting and you HAVEN'T read Strong Poison, just skip and read Strong Poison because it does the whole thing SO much better. For one thing, the mystery is better- this was Dane and Simpson's first mystery, and while I largely enjoyed Dane's earlier novel Regiment of Women (which I may post my thoughts about sometime), this book just didn't really work for me. It's technically fair play, I guess, but there aren't a whole lot of actual suspects or clues (there aren't many suspects in Strong Poison either, but there are many more clues and there's a much more robust structure).

The other major difference, and this is pretty important because it's at exactly the point where the two books are so similar, is that the characterization of the romance in Enter Sir John is REALLY NOT GOOD. Sure, as Sayers noted in her 1929 introduction to her Omnibus of Crime anthology, love interests in detective novels are often shitty and this isn't necessarily significantly worse than certain others I have read. But while there do seem to be attempts to describe the suspect's personality in a way that makes her sound more honest, frank, straightforward, etc (the kinds of ways that Harriet Vane comes across later in Strong Poison), she also comes across really naive and dumb, and really doesn't have a whole lot to do in the book at all to counteract that impression. On the plus side... she isn't AS racist as some other people, I guess? (This plays into the motive, which I can describe in the comments for people- it's too annoying to get bogged down in.) But anyway, Sir John largely (apparently? it's not characterized super well) is compelled by her and falls in love with her because of her striking appearance and her good breeding and gentility or whatever, and it's all just super awkward. (Also, there's the same "oh no I didn't realize you were proposing" awkwardness in this book as in Regiment of Women, which does it MUCH better and for MUCH better characterization-related reasons. In this book it's just kind of skin-crawling to read.)

Anyway, why have I made you all read about why I didn't particularly like a not-super-easy-to-find book that you were unlikely to ever read anyway? Well, partly because it's an interesting curiosity- and because as I was reading I was like "what the hell, how did Sayers get away with this?" So I cracked open my copy of The Golden Age of Murder again and in its description of the book realized that it mentions that Sayers and Simpson were friends and that Enter Sir John is of interest as an inspiration to Strong Poison, which in retrospect is probably why I put it on my list in the first place.

But I'm still left with some lingering questions. While the actual murder plot and motive are entirely different, this particular throughline on the part of the detective is really STARTLINGLY similar, not least because Sir John Saumarez has some distinctive surface resemblances to Wimsey. For one thing, the method used to trap the killer (casually having them be part of a reenactment/discussion of the way the murder took place) is used by Sayers in Strong Poison as a ruse that Wimsey uses to try to catch Harriet Vane out, if there's anything to catch (when he "casually" brings up the murder-for-book-profits mystery plot idea he had). For another, like Wimsey later would in Strong Poison, Saumarez has a whole inner monologue about how he has only a month to solve the case (though in his case it's before the suspect is executed, and in Wimsey's case it's the IMO more plausible situation of being before the retrial occurs).

All that being considered, one major difference is, of course, that at the end of Strong Poison Wimsey and Harriet don't get engaged, and Saumarez and the suspect (whose name I don't even remember, if I'm being honest, she REALLY wasn't that memorable) do. But Sayers famously wrote that she wanted to use this book to marry Wimsey off! If she had followed through, and still used this same book as a way to do it, would she have literally lifted, if substantially improved, this plotline from her friend's book in order to do it? She was such an original writer- would she have borrowed so significantly from another writer to finish off a series that she had worked so hard on, even if it was one she was wearying of?!

It's interesting, because I wrote in a previous post about how it feels like after writing the Omnibus of Crime intro, including how bad mystery romance plots are, she dared herself to do it better. Reading this book makes me wonder if she read THIS PARTICULAR BOOK and decided she wanted to do it better. Which would be fascinating whether that was a decision that she made before she'd decided to continue the series after this book or afterward- before, in which case she'd be wholesale lifting the plot but at the same time elevating it lol I feel like I'm writing crossword clues) just by virtue of better writing and characterization in both that plot and the mystery that surrounded it, or after, in which case one of her ways of elevating it would de facto BE changing the ending to make it less corny and awkward, and writing a detective romance which is actually psychologically plausible and satisfying rather than just pairing pants and a skirt, so to speak.

Anyway- decidedly mediocre book that I don't particularly recommend, but one that made me ask some questions that I had a lot of fun pondering! I also had fun writing this, and am considering doing another one on Leo Bruce's The Case for Three Detectives, which was tremendously fun as a pastiche of Wimsey as well as Poirot and Father Brown.

#dorothy l sayers #lord peter wimsey #wimsey #harriet vane #enter sir john #clemence dane #helen simpson #classic mystery fiction #also worth noting- hitchcock directed an adaptation of this called murder!#i'm not especially excited about this #murder! is just what it's literally called #if you've seen it and it's any good let me know!

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o-uncle-newt · 14 days

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Imagining a world in which ACD married Holmes off to Violet Hunter* and Sayers had Wimsey killed by that "plug ugly" mentioned in Gaudy Night (or heck, by Goyles's bullet in Clouds of Witness)

I mean, hey, while we're at it, what about one where Christie married Poirot off to Vera Rossakoff and they went off to live with her son Dimitri in America, and where Tommy and/or Tuppence (or maybe both of them, what the hell) was killed off messily and dramatically in The Secret Adversary?

*No, I don't get it either, but for some reason Watson was REALLY into the idea so... maybe he saw something we didn't?

Thinking about Peter Wimsey va Sherlock Holmes and mostly about how if you are Doyle you try to stop writing your detective by killing him off, and if you are Sayers you successfully stop writing your detective by marrying him off.

#sherlock holmes #arthur conan doyle #lord peter wimsey #dorothy l sayers #hercule poirot #tommy and tuppence #agatha christie #worth noting that according to her letters sayers always intended to kill off jerry #even before jill paton walsh had wwii as an excuse #so it's not like she CAN'T kill people off

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o-uncle-newt · 20 days

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A friend of mine just made the mistake of telling me she's going to Oxford to do research at the Bodleian this summer- I sent her back a five minute long voicenote screaming about Sayers and Wimsey and Harriet Vane and have not heard from her since

Welp, at least she's not going to Cambridge- if she were I'd probably have found a way to attach an audio file of the full 28 minutes of Here's What We Do

#oxford #dorothy l sayers #wimsey #lord peter wimsey #harriet vane #gaudy night #john finnemore #here's what we do #jfda #john finnemore's double acts

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o-uncle-newt · 25 days

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We've got both Roger Allam and John Finnemore (plus a few more fun-sounding names) in a "playful and innovative whodunnit"?! Who's been reading my list of impossible birthday gift requests?! Next someone will be telling me about the long-lost and equally good S2 of the original Police Squad!.

The synopsis explains: "In Brighton on the South coast of England, sharpened by the sting of sea spray, and mellowed by numinous light, a tight-knit community of oddballs and heart-felts live together in a tatty old mansion, the Fletcher Apartments. When a golden feather, the priceless antique mascot of the building, unexpectedly disappears, the residents have a mystery to solve. Will they find the talisman that previously bound them together, or will their community, now divided against itself, irrevocably unravel?"

#John Finnemore #Roger Allam #Police Squad #(...just in case)#i know about angie tribeca #i know about touch of cloth #i know about the naked gun series and that it's being revived with liam neeson for some reason #but nothing hits quite the same as the OG

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o-uncle-newt · 28 days

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I mean, Peter's the last one standing in his friend group after his buddies all got married and had kids and did their own thing. This is classic symptoms.

Me: Do you think Freddy Arbuthnot was hurt that Peter didn't ask him to be best man at his wedding? Do you think he knew that, although Peter was his best friend, he was not Peter's best friend? Did it ever make him sad?

Her: Ma'am this is a Lyons

#lord peter wimsey #freddy arbuthnot #dorothy l sayers #totally not projecting from a recent friend reunion weekend

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o-uncle-newt · 1 month

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#god i started listening to double acts because of this #its like cabin pressure in all the ways i like and more #just finished hot desk… i’m screaming

@molokiahamster YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW HAPPY THIS MAKES ME, I feel fulfilled as a human

I listen to either Hot Desk or Penguin Diplomacy whenever I'm in a shitty mood and they never fail to make me happier

A guide to John Finnemore (in particular his Double Acts) for the Good Omens S2 lovers, haters, and everyone in between (I promise, there's something for all of you!)

Found this in my drafts recently and honestly, I feel this is evergreen, so here y'all go:

As I mentioned semi-facetiously in my previous post, I don't care whether you loved or hated Good Omens S2- you're probably sleeping on John Finnemore. He's a super talented writer and while he's collaborated with other writers like Mitchell and Webb and Armando Iannucci before, I still think his best stuff is his solo stuff.

But where to start? Behold! I shall now recommend a different Double Act (that is, a different episode of his radio series of excellent half-hour two-hander comedies) for every kind of person who has reacted in literally any kind of way to Good Omens.

If you love stories about two people working on opposite sides in a conflict who over time break down each other's defenses to become valued friends despite the continued conflict between their sides, with some queer undertones: Unquestionably you want S2 E4, Penguin Diplomacy

If you loved Good Omens S2 because it's quiet, gentle, and romantic: S1 E6, Hot Desk

If you like quiet, gentle and romantic in principle but wish there was a bit more plot structure: Still Hot Desk

If you like quiet, gentle and romantic but watched Good Omens S2 and were like "this is quiet, gentle and romantic?!?!": DEFINITELY still Hot Desk

If you hate quiet, gentle and romantic and want something darker and more cynical: S1 E3, Red Handed

If you were meh on S2 but did find yourself enjoying the Job minisode: FREE ROLL! You can choose any Double Act at random and will probably enjoy it.

If you loved Good Omens S2 because you love characters who give off vibes of being dim yet helpful: Well, really you want to meet Arthur in Cabin Pressure, but from Double Acts you'll do great with S2 E5, Here's What We Do, and in a very different way S2 E2, Mercy Dash

If you loved Good Omens S2 because lesbians: S2 E3, The Rebel Alliance

If you like lesbians in theory but wish that Good Omens S2 had maybe sketched out theirs a bit more: Still try Rebel Alliance

If you were annoyed by the minisodes because there wasn't enough old-timey dialogue in the olden-day bits: S1 E4, The Goliath Window

If you like the Victorian minisode because you like the era: check out S2 E1, The Queen's Speech, which literally has Queen Victoria in it

If you think that Crowley making gentle fun of Aziraphale's magic tricks is entertaining: try S2 E6, The Wroxton Box

If you like relationship dynamics where one half is trying/pretending to be cool and the other one has absolutely no interest in it and likes the first half just how they are: try Here's What We Do

If you enjoy the whole corporate-nonsense aspect of Good Omens: give S1 E2, WYSINNWYG a whirl

If you think that one of the main flaws of S2 was that it didn't have Mr Young in it anymore: S1 E1, A Flock of Tigers

If you like Good Omens because you like fandom and fanfic: S1 E5, English for Pony Lovers

And, if you love the idea of a cliffhanger but also want the satisfaction of knowing there's an amazing ending coming: Wait on Double Acts and just listen to Cabin Pressure. And when you get to the end of Yverdon-les-Bains, before you move on to Zurich just take a moment to remember all of us who nearly died for two years waiting for the finale.

Anyway, happy listening!

#john finnemore #john finnemore's double acts #double acts #jfda #MY RECS WORKED

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o-uncle-newt · 1 month

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I mean, clearly you're right that Martin would never- but he'd want to be the kind of person who could pull it off. Like David Niven or Omar Sharif.

I would like to thank Wes Anderson, who, in the course of his adaptation of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, has illustrated for us how Martin Crieff imagines himself in the privacy of his own head.

#cabin pressure #john finnemore #martin crieff #otter day 2024

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o-uncle-newt · 2 months

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Oh, undeniably- I'd say it's not that crazy that they're all specifically from A Dorothy L Sayers Mystery, just because that was made only a couple of years before S1 of Poirot and so it makes sense there would be a similar pool of actors and they'd look the same, but the fact that one was BBC2 and one was ITV presumably means that it's not a matter of overlapping producers or casting companies or whatever. (Though who knows!)

Tonight I watched Poirot Season 1, Episode 7: "Problem at Sea," and almost immediately recognized Colin Higgins, who I know as Mr. Morecambe from the 1987 miniseries adaptation of Dorothy L. Sayers' Have His Carcase. I immediately made the connection that the episode also contained two characters named Mr. and Mrs. Tolliver, and of course "Tilly Tolliver" was Mrs. Morecambe's stage name in HHC. I thought the actor playing Mr. Tolliver also looked familiar, so I looked him up as well....and found out he was played by Geoffrey Beevers, who I was recognizing because he played Ryland Vaughn in the 1987 Strong Poison. I also noticed that Mrs. Tolliver was played by Caroline John, his real-life wife...who also played Miss Burrows in Gaudy Night.

England really do be a small island, sometimes.

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o-uncle-newt · 2 months

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If you watch, like, five British shows (including Doctor Who, Poirot, a police procedural or two, and... Call the Midwife maybe? The Crown?) you will have all the tools you need to recognize at least one actor in every other British production you ever watch again. Like, not me because I don't do faces, but the principle stands.

England really do be a small island, sometimes.

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o-uncle-newt · 2 months

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Related to your reblog on the post about John Finnemore's tryout nights - do you know about Tall Tales?

Yes I do! But those are generally not announced til a couple of weeks before either as far as I can tell... and they seem generally regularly scheduled but there doesn't seem to be a guarantee he'll be performing. I live in the US so any planning I make to try to go see him live, I'd want to be reliable lol. (Though honestly I just as much want to see the rest of the Souvenir Programme crew so this does sound way better as an opportunity... I wish I didn't have prescheduled work stuff or I could probably have made the April date work!)

That said, when I do schedule the London vacation I've been planning, I'll try to make it around the time when I know Tall Tales is usually scheduled and hope for the best, probably.

#john finnemore #jfsp #john finnemore’s souvenir programme #tall tales

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o-uncle-newt · 2 months

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...anyone want to buy me a ticket to London? (More seriously, I wish he announced this farther in advance because I would have genuinely considered flying out for something like this- plus other fun UK tourism- with more notice. But I get why he can't prioritize my personal convenience.)

Subscribe for free to John's new newsletter here

#John Finnemore #jfsp #john finnemore’s souvenir programme

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o-uncle-newt · 2 months

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As someone who preordered in the crowdfunding round, though more to say I did (and the hopefully fun art on the postcards) than because I see myself as having any chance of solving this, I'll mark my calendar for August!

youtube

#John Finnemore #The Researcher's First Murder #Cain's Jawbone

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o-uncle-newt · 2 months

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It's so funny, I actually almost think the opposite re point B- my facial recognition is awful so when watching Gaudy Night I couldn't remember who was who at all, whereas in the book where they all have very distinctive names I had no problems!

And yeah, that Petherbridge anecdote is what I was referencing when I was discussing their rewriting bad material- and honestly, given the way that the trajectory of the Peter-Harriet relationship in the show differed from that in the books, I think their version is reasonable. If I recall, Petherbridge mentions in the anecdote that they'd read the original Sayers proposal but quickly deemed it unfilmable- and while I definitely concede that "placetne magistra" was never going to make it on screen (and that's probably the right call even in the hands of a good director), I do kind of wish that a few more of the really good lines from the book proposal could have made it into theirs.

(I also find it hilarious that the big romantic line in the proposal before Harriet kisses Peter is "my dear idiot"... because of course, in the book, that line comes from earlier in the story and, in full, is "my dear idiot, it's only the corporation garbage dump." Beautiful.)

We don't talk enough about the Petherbridge/Walter adaptations of the Wimsey/Vane novels.

(Well, we probably talk EXACTLY enough about Gaudy Night, which is really pretty bad, but besides for that...)

(Sorry, just a warning, Richard Morant as Bunter is fine but I won't have much to say about him here. I just really like this picture.)

The casting is basically perfect, especially Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane. I no longer see the book character in any other way- the only notable difference is that in the book she's noted as having a deep voice, but Walter's has a distinctive enough tone that I think it works regardless. She is just so, so, so good- captures the character beautifully, sells everything she does whether mundane or ridiculous (probably the best/most realistic reaction of someone finding a body I have EVER seen in Have His Carcase), makes the most of every limited minute she's on screen in Strong Poison and leaves her mark every minute that she isn't... and she looks AMAZING doing all of it. Just perfect, could not imagine better casting.

Edward Petherbridge I don't hold up to that level of perfection- I think that, try as he might, he's not really able to capture Wimsey's dynamism (possibly because he's a bit too old for the role) and is a bit overly caricatured in many of his mannerisms. But overall he does a pretty good job, in addition to looking quite a lot like how I'd imagined Wimsey- but in particular, I think he does a really lovely job of selling a lot of the emotion that he has to convey in some scenes that feel like they SHOULDN'T be adaptable from the book- specifically the scenes of him and Harriet. Him proposing to Harriet, him being disappointed when she (completely reasonably) turns him down... those shouldn't work on screen with real humans rather than in Sayers's calculated prose, but it DOES work and in no small part because he's great at selling Wimsey's feelings as being genuine even when his actions seem over the top. And, of course, Harriet Walter sells her end of the scenes right back. All in all, I think I have mixed feelings about Petherbridge as Lord Peter Wimsey the detective, but I'm a fan of him as Peter, the man who has feelings for Harriet.

Overall, though, both are, I think, very successful in capturing these characters- the fact that they take these people who even in the book can sometimes push the boundaries of likeability (which to be clear, is part of what I love about reading them) and make them eminently watchable is a great achievement. And also, in addition to their really looking like their characters individually, they're very well matched as a pair in the way that one pictures them from the book. They're even of very similar height and build, which we know is canonically true from Gaudy Night, and thus at least a somewhat relevant element of their dynamic.

Now, the adaptations are very uneven, and that's even without talking about Gaudy Night because, while it has about as good a rendition of the punting scene as I think we were ever going to get, most of the rest of it is crap and massively expands on what I think are serious problems to Peter and Harriet's relationship that the series as a whole had (not to mention cutting the character of St George, which is a travesty). None of the adaptations are perfect, and mess with aspects of their relationship in negative ways- for example, the ending of Strong Poison is exactly backward in a really awful way. I'll get back to this.

But when the show gets the two of them right, it gets them RIGHT, even when it's adapting Sayers's text/creating new dialogue. There are scenes in this one that I love almost as much as the canon text, like this one:

I don't think any of this is in the book, and there are things that happen here that I don't think Sayers would have ever written. But at the same time, a combination of the dialogue and the actors makes it COMPLETELY believable as these two people, and it captures a moment that is just really key for Peter as he faces his limitations and his feelings- something that in the book is conveyed through a lot of internal narrative on Peter's part that would be impossible to adapt as is, but that in the world of the show needed to happen in a much more visual and narrative way. Not all of the dialogue that this series chooses to fill in those gaps works, but even when it doesn't the actors do their best to sell the heck out of it, and when the dialogue DOES work it is seriously brilliant.

Probably my favorite of the adaptations is Have His Carcase, and scenes like this one are a big part of the reason why:

They change the location, but otherwise it's EXTRAORDINARILY faithful to the equivalent scene in the book, and honestly it shouldn't have worked with real people doing it and yet it does. It's just acted perfectly, given just enough arch and silly humor (particularly with the spinning door) that we don't attempt to take it too seriously, while also conveying the relevant emotions so well. The actors in the scene through only their faces and ways of speaking convey subtext that Sayers, in the book, conveyed a lot later on as actual text in the characters' thoughts, and there's something pretty great about that.

Other Have His Carcase scenes are less good (the dance scene is mediocre at best, I think), but if there's another Have His Carcase scene that I think illustrates how great Walter and Petherbridge are at selling the human sides of their characters, it's That Argument- seen here:

The Argument is a pale imitation of that in the book- the one in the book is, in fact, probably unadaptable as is- but it is still just so good because the actors are so good at selling it. Walter is just brilliant in the role and utterly inhabits it while also imbuing it with her own spin, and makes us feel Harriet's pain- and Petherbridge, through some relatively subtle facial expressions and reactions, is able just as well to make US understand what all of this means to him and how he feels. It's actually really remarkable that, just like how Sayers writes a relationship dynamic that only feels like it works because she's the one who wrote it that very specific way, this scene feels like it only works because these two actors play it in this specific way. Could two other actors do it? Very possibly, but it would feel super different and I wonder if it would feel this authentic. (I do want to note though that this scene made me really wish that we'd seen a Frasier-era David Hyde Pierce in the role of a younger and spryer, but equally posh, witty, and vulnerable, Wimsey. It just gave me vibes of something that he'd do beautifully.)

Now, as I said above, this doesn't get EVERYTHING right. In fact, quite a lot of their relationship ends up going pretty wrong- as I think a major mistake is their throughline which emphasizes Peter's continued pursuit of Harriet as not just reiterating his interest to make it clear that he hasn't changed his mind, but actively taking advantage of moments and situations in a romantic sense, taking a much more specific role in engaging with her physically, commenting on her appearance, saying how difficult it is for him to NOT pursue her more, etc. It makes the whole thing feel a lot more cat-and-mouse rather than a budding relationship of equals, and one where Peter acknowledges the whole time that they HAVE to be equals for a) Harriet to feel comfortable with him and b) them to be good together. In fact, however good the Argument above is, it's kind of undercut by this very pattern- he makes the book's point about him treating his feelings like something out of a comic opera, but he also at that point in the story has had a few much more oppressively serious scenes with her that clearly make her uncomfortable- nothing like anything in a comic opera. It's like the show misses the point a little.

I think the place where this really starts is at the end of Strong Poison. (I could see an argument to be made that it starts earlier, in a few smaller nuances of their jailhouse scenes, but I like those enough that I choose not to read into them too much lol.) After what I think is a great addition to the final jailhouse scene (one that I loved so much I repurposed it for a fic)- "it's supposed to be about love, isn't it" and some excellent reactions from Petherbridge- Harriet goes to court, her charges are dismissed, and unlike in the book, when it's Wimsey who leaves first (which Eiluned and Sylvia point out is a sign of his decency in not waiting for Harriet to thank him), here Wimsey is the one who watches as Harriet rejects him and walks away from him- the beginning of the chase. But nothing about their relationship is meant to be a chase! It's so frustrating to watch as that proceeds to be a continuing issue to a limited degree in Have His Carcase (where it's at least balanced by enough good moments that it doesn't matter so much) and to a MASSIVE, genuinely uncomfortable degree in Gaudy Night.

The only praise I will give it is that while the punt scene in the book is unfilmable, I think this adaptation did its best here and it's pretty good.

I'm not going to spend much time talking about Gaudy Night otherwise, because I'd need all day for it and also I'd probably need to rewatch it to make sure I get the details right and I have zero interest in doing that, but the way that it has Wimsey imposing himself and his feelings/hopes on Harriet to a really ridiculous degree, in a way that he never, ever does in the book, is just so so discomfiting and makes me feel terrible for Harriet. She doesn't deserve that. If I recall correctly, in that scene at the dance at the beginning, she's so happy just being with him and then he's all "oh so this means you want to marry me" and she just droops. He's so aggressive!

And that's what makes the worst part so bad, because not only does this miniseries not depict Wimsey's apology as the book does- one of the best scenes in a book full of brilliant scenes- it would actually be weird if it did, because this show doesn't imply that there's ANYTHING for Wimsey to be apologizing for! In fact, unlike in the books where we see Wimsey growing and deconstructing the parts of himself that had been demanding of Harriet, in the series we only see him get more demanding- until finally he wins. It's honestly infuriating and I hate it- the actors do their best to sell it (and apparently they were given bad enough material that they actually had to rewrite some of it themselves, though I have mixed feelings about the results) but it is just massively disappointing. Basically the whole emotional journey between the two of them is not just neutered but twisted.

For all of my criticisms of the adaptations' all around approach to their relationship, I do have to reiterate- Walter and Petherbridge do a wonderful, wonderful job. (Especially Walter.) When they're given good material to work with, and even often when they aren't, they are able to sell it so well- and particularly in the case of Walter, I genuinely can't think of the character as anyone but her rendition now. She IS Harriet Vane for me. And, for all the flaws that the series has, that's something pretty dang special.

Anyway, for anyone who read through this whole thing and hasn't seen these adaptations, I DO recommend Strong Poison and Have His Carcase- but not Gaudy Night unless you're either really curious or a glutton for punishment. The first two, though, have very good supporting casts, are quite faithful plot wise (sometimes to a fault- another flaw is that they are really devoted to conveying the whole mystery with all its clues sometimes to the point of dragginess, but will drop sideplots like, for example, Parker and Mary- which is totally reasonable, but still vaguely disappointing as those sideplots tend to add some levity/characterization), and just generally are an overall good time. (Some standout characters for me are Miss Climpson in Strong Poison and Mrs Lefranc in Have His Carcase.) And, of course, the best part is seeing the little snippets of Peter and Harriet that come through- less so their journey, vs in the book where that's central, but so many scenes where we just see the two of them together as they are in that moment and it's so satisfying.

#Lord Peter Wimsey #dorothy l sayers #A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery #classic mystery fiction #peter wimsey #peter wimsey series #Edward Petherbridge

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o-uncle-newt · 2 months

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Thank you for adding all that wonderful context to my post about The Nine Tailors! And I look forward to your separate post about Agatha Christie being good at romance, because I've read a lot of her books and...well, I'm curious to hear your argument, we'll put it that way ;D

Thank YOU for posting the thing about The Nine Tailors, which I'd never heard of before and is so delightfully Sayers!

And... ok I need to clarify lol

One definite thing- and I don't think this is something I actually NEED to be saying outright- Sayers is MUCH better at writing romance than Christie, as such. I think she's also better at portraying the intricacies of human emotion and reaction and all those delicious things that make her books so vivid.

Where I think Christie is better is the synthesis, and at assembling pieces to synthesize.

Sayers does an absolutely beautiful job of CREATING characters- much of this is helped by, say, putting a lot of herself in both Peter and Harriet, as so many of the best writers do with their creations, and I'm sure putting plenty of other people into her other characters and basing settings on real environments (see John Cournos/Philip Boyes and Benson's/Pym's). She manages to make EVERYONE vividly human, which is a) a big job and b) often difficult to fit in around all of the machinations of a detective story, as Sayers so eloquently describes in Gaudy Night as Harriet Vane.

A lot of people criticize Christie for writing "archetypes." The thing is, though, that shouldn't be a criticism at all! She had a really brilliant gift for understanding stories, understanding the kinds of people who appear in stories, and manipulating the genre such that she's able to fit the right kinds of people around the right kinds of stories. That's actually why I tried to make the point that her strength isn't romance, because I think that's actually a weakness in her mysteries, when she decides she has to randomly pair people off. The thing that's great though is that she's able to customize the archetypes into entertaining and very readable people, these people do things for psychologically plausible reasons, and the motivations that they have and the mystery stories that they find themselves in end up syncing up incredibly well- and the whole built-up story ends up flowing absolutely seamlessly in a way that I think Sayers found a lot harder.

It's like Christie's playing in a Lego set and using a box of assorted pieces to put together in new configurations and make masterpieces- and Sayers is trying to combine the Lego bricks with more realistic-looking... Idunno, Barbies. Something that doesn't fit. The metaphor may be over-extended.

That's what's so fascinating about reading both the introduction to The Omnibus of Crime and then the later mystery novels that Sayers wrote, as I was saying. Sayers so clearly LOVES the genre, but she is also so clearly a literary stylist, an Intellectual (who had something of a sense of humor about it- but not entirely), and someone who had an incredible skill at characterization. She also understood the puzzle mystery and the detective genre in a way that few did, as one of the first real experts on it as a genre in the first place and as someone who not only researched its history (she traces it all the way back to the Bible and the ancient Greeks) but reviewed mystery novels and co-created the Detection Club. And it's precisely her deep understanding of the genre that made her realize, as she describes in Gaudy Night, how difficult it is to integrate deep character portraits into a relatively formulaic genre. I've seen it said that her books presage the modern crime thriller more than they reflect contemporaneous puzzle mysteries, and I think there's a lot of truth to that. She was learning the limitations of the genre she'd come to love.

In my opinion, Sayers's novel that does the best job of integrating the puzzle plot and the character work is Bellona Club, which I actually have a draft post about how incredibly underrated it is. She integrates both seamlessly, but you can also see how difficult it was, if only because she was rarely so successful tonally again. Probably the closest she comes are, weirdly, The Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night, but only because there she chooses whether she wants to foreground the novel or the crime (as I mention in my original post that started this whole tirade) and sticks to that. In books like Clouds of Witness, Have His Carcase, and Unnatural Death, to pick a random few, there are plenty of occasions where a chapter of exquisite literary character development is suddenly ground to a halt by an extremely technical disquisition about an extremely convoluted murder/coverup plot. (Something like Murder Must Advertise does this a bit less, but there the tonal issue is that, and I acknowledge this is arbitrary of me, the whole drug subplot does not work and that's where most of the detection is.)

Back to Christie, which is where all this started! What she has and Sayers doesn't isn't the ability to build complex characters (though honestly I don't doubt that she could if she wanted to- it's just not what she wants to do- and one of these days I'll read a Mary Westmacott and see if I'm right about that). It's the ability to build a complex story full of just-complex-enough people that feels authentic. The reason why her romances are among the weaker elements of her books is, in my opinion, because their actualization is generally the LEAST integral to the careful structures that she's building- however, the people who are part of the romances are often very strong, when the feelings that they have as part of those romances end up motivating something that they do. Take, for example, Death on the Nile- is the central romance the important part? No, the way that the characters in it act based on that romance is, because that directly influences the plot. And there she shines and it is all beautifully compelling.

In my opinion, Sayers was a brilliant writer and novelist who happened to enjoy detective fiction and so forced herself into the genre. Christie somehow magically managed to waltz her way into the exact right genre to suit her talents, right when the genre was exploding in popularity. Sayers is a more versatile and talented writer as a writer, but nobody ever owned the genre of detective stories, in all the ways that they could be written, like Christie did. With Sayers, we say "oh look she's getting experimental" with a book like The Nine Tailors or Gaudy Night or even, in a certain light, Five Red Herrings- we see her books in a pattern and context of the way her mind works and her life goes and her tastes change. With Christie, no matter how fertile and creative her mind and no matter how different the results are from each other, we're like "oh, that's classic Christie." Her versatility, and the way that she can change on a dime and be consistently great (for most of her career...) in so many different modes.

#wow this went WAY overlong #dorothy l sayers #agatha christie #classic mystery fiction

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o-uncle-newt · 3 months

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Personally my favorite example of this is when she wrote in her (excellent) introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, in 1929, that "one festering convention, from which detective fiction is only just now freeing itself, is that of the 'love interest" and then basically IMMEDIATELY turned around and published Strong Poison in 1930. It makes me wonder whether she was drafting this section about the drawbacks of the genre to date and, in the process, was like "I can SO do better":

A few notable highlights:

...some of the finest detective-stories are marred by a conventional love-story, irrelevant to the action and perfunctorily worked in.

The Instances in which the love-story is an integrated part of the plot are extremely rare. One very beautiful example occurs in The Moonstone. Here the entire plot hangs on the love of two women for Franklin Blake [and the mystery comes from] their efforts to shield him.

EC Bentley, in Trent's Last Case, has dealt finely with the still harder problem of the detective in love. Trent's love for Mrs Manderson is a legitimate part of the plot; while it does not prevent him from drawing the proper conclusions from the evidence before him, it does prevent him from acting on his conclusions and so prepares the way for the real explanation. Incidentally, the love-story is handled artistically and with persuasive emotion [emphasis mine]

Apart from such unusual instances as these, the less love in a detective-story, the better. ... A casual and perfunctory love-story is worse than no love-story at all, and since the mystery must, by hypothesis, take the first place, the love is better left out.

There is the whole difficulty about allowing real human beings into a detective-story. At some point or other, either their emotions make hay of the detective interest, or the detective interest gets hold of them and makes their emotions look like pasteboard. It is, of course, a fact that we all adopt a detached attitude towards a "a good murder" in the newspaper. Like Betteredge in The Moonstone, we get "detective fever," and forget the victim in the fun of tracking the criminal. For this reason, it is better not to pitch the emotional key too high at the start; the inevitable drop is made less jarring.

My hypothesis- just as, in 1932, Sayers was probably about to start (if she hadn't already started) The Nine Tailors, which famously took her enough time to write that she had to write and publish a whole-ass Murder Must Advertise in the middle because she was too busy teaching herself campanology to actually progress on The Nine Tailors, in 1929 she was already going to start Strong Poison- in which she had already had the avowed intention of Reichenbaching Wimsey off through marriage- and writing this analysis of the love interest made her dare herself do it BETTER, ultimately leading to her realization that she could, actually, and leaving her so attached to these two characters that she couldn't dare drop them. And by extension, I have to wonder if The Nine Tailors came from a similar challenge to herself- "this is overdone but I bet I could make it ART." Which obviously she did.

I think that one of the many, many things I love about Sayers is how much she loved and devoted herself to a genre that was, simultaneously, not the main place where her gifts and literary interests lay. She loved detective stories but eventually chafed at writing them, and comparing this section of the Omnibus introduction to the discussions that Harriet and Peter have about the book she's writing in Gaudy Night is instructive- as is comparing it to what she ended up writing in Gaudy Night as a whole. By then, she's completely disposed of the idea that "the mystery must, by hypothesis, take first place"- the main linchpin of her argument here! It's genuinely fascinating.

Dorothy Sayers in 1932: "Church clocks and bodies in belfries are rather overdone lately."

Dorothy Sayers in 1934: lol jk I have a new special interest so strap in

#dorothy sayers #dorothy l sayers #lord peter wimsey #peter wimsey series #the omnibus of crime #strong poison #gaudy night #the nine tailors #i actually think that agatha christie did a VERY decent job at incorporating love interest into mystery plots in a way that made it work wi #i think a genius that she had that sayers didn't is just the ability to blend everything together beautifully #keeping the emotions plausible while still keeping the thing very much A Detective Novel #and i think that sayers possibly didn't realize this yet #admittedly most of christie's high points in this regard come later #the romances themselves aren't always deep and compelling #but the characters who are in them usually are in ways that become integral to the plot #(think death on the nile)#anyway that's a whole different post

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o-uncle-newt · 3 months

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We don't talk enough about the Petherbridge/Walter adaptations of the Wimsey/Vane novels.

(Well, we probably talk EXACTLY enough about Gaudy Night, which is really pretty bad, but besides for that...)

(Sorry, just a warning, Richard Morant as Bunter is fine but I won't have much to say about him here. I just really like this picture.)

Probably my favorite of the adaptations is Have His Carcase, and scenes like this one are a big part of the reason why:

The only praise I will give it is that while the punt scene in the book is unfilmable, I think this adaptation did its best here and it's pretty good.

#peter wimsey series #peter wimsey #lord peter wimsey #harriet vane #dorothy l sayers #edward petherbridge #harriet walter #a dorothy l sayers mystery #as was apparently the official title of the petherbridge/walter series #my thanks to the as my wimsey takes me podcast people #for a) coming back and finishing have his carcase #which was very enjoyable plane listening #but also for mentioning the adaptation in one of the episodes and inspiring the rewatch that led to this post #also this blog is basically now a sayers blog just as it is a finnemore one i guess #which as i note is fitting due to my Dog Collar Theory #which is YET ANOTHER THING THAT THE GAUDY NIGHT ADAPTATION LEAVES OUT GRRRRRR #strong poison #have his carcase #gaudy night