Dorothy Sayers is considered one of the great writers of the Golden Age of Crime, alongside Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, and Margery Allingham. While I knew of and read Agatha Christie from a younger age (teenage years), the other authors were more of a mystery to me (pun intended).
It wasn’t until I took a mystery writing class with Gotham Writer Workshops that I even knew who Dorothy Sayers was. The author who ran the class suggested we read Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers and The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block, as they were examples of great mystery novels. I read them both and liked them both, for different reasons (they are very different novels).
However, when I first read Gaudy Night, I wasn’t as enamored with it as I am now. I liked it; I liked the setting, I liked the heaviness of the prose and the dialogue; and I liked the discussion and themes. But I didn’t really understand what the big deal was.
But now I do. This book has so many layers and deep themes woven in, under and over the plot. It is more than just a mystery; in fact, the mystery is the weakest part of the book. And that is why it is one of my favorite books (I still don’t understand all of it) and the subject of this Throw Back Thursday book review.
The Plot
Harriet Vane, the love interest of Lord Peter Wimsey, is invited back to Oxford University for a Gaudy, better known as a reunion for past graduates. She didn’t want to go, due to her having been charged and then exonerated for murdering her ex-boyfriend, the mystery of which Peter solved and fell in love with her. She also was worried her occupation of writing mystery novels wasn’t intellectual enough anymore for Shrewsbury College.
Deciding she needed to face it (and that is a big theme for her in this book – facing things), she attends and gets reacquainted with the dons (professors for the Americans) and her former classmates. This visit sets in motion the rest of the plot.
You see, the dons of this all-female college, Shrewsbury, are under attack by a poison pen and they’d like Harriet to come and figure out who it is. They don’t want the police to get involved or for it to leak out of the college, because it could ruin the college’s reputation and potentially set women’s education back at Oxford.
Harriet reluctantly agrees to at least investigate it. She spends quite a bit of time at the college under the guise of helping Miss Lydgate, a don, and researching her own scholarly work about Sheridan Le Fanu, while patrolling the college at night in a vain attempt to stop the prankster.
The poison pen letter writing escalates, and a student almost commits suicide because of it. After that, Lord Peter Wimsey is called in to help solve it, which he does.
But that’s not what the book is about. It’s about women: their roles at home, at work, at university, as intellectuals, as mothers, as partners. The conversations that occur between Harriet and the dons at the college cover a myriad of themes, from science to the death penalty and back again.
It’s also about Harriet’s struggle to reconcile who she is with her past and her relationship with Peter. She’s survived the trial and has become a successful novelist by keeping her head down and moving through it. But she hasn’t faced the emotional damage done to her by it, but she does face quite a lot of it here and in the later books as well.
And this is why it’s a beautiful novel. And also why a lot of people don’t like it.
Major Complaints About the Plot
The people who are not enamored with this book fall into one of two categories:
T;ldr (too long, didn’t read)
Hardcore mystery readers
Many of the complaints focus on its length – 500 pages – and how slow the build is for the plot. It is not a small book and Sayers’ prose is beautiful, but also dense. The action moves slowly as well. Most of the first half of the book is filled with conversations, adventures, and a few random night escapades as everyone runs around like chickens with their heads cut off.
Peter Wimsey, the sleuth, doesn’t make an appearance until past the halfway mark. Even then, he’s not front and center in the plot at all, except in Harriet’s thoughts and in revealing the poison pen writer at the end. This book isn’t about him, except for his interest in Harriet.
Yes, the mystery action is tame compared to other mysteries, where the body flops on the page within the first act. There is no body here, at least not a physical one, and no murder. Yes, the poison pen escalates, but not until the last quarter of the book and even then, it’s tame in comparison to the other Peter Wimsey books, let alone another author.
If you’re looking for a standard mystery, this is not that book. And so, your complaint is valid, especially if you only read it because everyone touts it as a masterpiece of the Golden Age of Crime. I get it; you were sold a different tale than the one the book holds.
Another complaint is that Harriet spends most of the book waiting for something to happen instead of detecting. As a mystery writer by profession, she drastically fails at detecting. Peter says that it’s because she’s too close to it, but I also wonder if it’s due to the age when it was written – between the two wars – when men were still seen as heroes. Or if Sayers was worried she’d lose the ability to use Peter Wimsey as a detective if she allowed Harriet to solve it. Either way, Harriet captures what happens when and to whom, which allows Peter to identify the perpetrator.
But I can see why people may find it boring. (I don’t, by the way, find it boring.)
To Sum Up (Too Late!)
I love this book for its depth, its themes, its setting at Oxford. The previous time I read it (a year ago or so) prompted me to find other mysteries set in Oxford or Cambridge, because I loved how rich the culture and world building was in this book.
Yes, it is slow and the mystery is non-existent, but this book was written at a time when: women at Oxford was a fragile endeavor; women were just beginning to split domestic duties with employment; being intellectual or an academic as a woman meant something more than just you were intelligent; society was just starting to figure out how to navigate this new normal. For all these reasons, I love this book. But honestly, I just really love the story.
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was a renowned British author, translator, student of classical and modern languages, and Christian humanist.
Dorothy L. Sayers is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories set between World War I and World War II that feature English aristocrat and amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. However, Sayers herself considered her translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia to be her best work. She is also known for her plays and essays.
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