“From time to time complaints are made about the ringing of church bells. It seems strange that a generation which tolerates the uproar of the internal combustion engine and the wailing of the jazz band should be so sensitive to the one loud noise that is made to the glory of God.” In her Foreword to The Nine Tailors (1934), Dorothy L. Sayers then pleads for the “indulgence” of “change-ringers” who identify any errors in the author’s depiction of bell ringing.
The Nine Tailors is a mystery novel that offers more instruction in the art of the bells than the art of murder, which is treated as a bit of an aside. And not all critics have responded favourably, as I discuss below.
For me, as with all of Sayers’s erudite fiction, which its heady intellectual debates and its frequent insertion of Greek and Latin quotations, this is a pleasure. But it’s not an easy read, in part because of the sheer technical detail that Sayers works in about the bells.
The novel opens on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, as Lord Peter Wimsey finds himself in an unfortunate predicament. His motor car has landed in the ditch and even his unflappable manservant, Bunter, can’t offer an immediate solution:
“The car lay, helpless and ridiculous, her nose deep in the ditch, her back wheels cocked absurdly up on the bank, as though she were doing her best to bolt to earth and were scraping herself a burrow beneath the drifting snow. Peering through a flurry of driving flakes, Wimsey saw how the accident had come about. The narrow, hump-backed bridge, blind as an eyeless beggar, spanned the dark drain at right angles, dropping plump down upon the narrow road that crested the dyke. Coming a trifle too fast across the bridge, blinded by the bitter easterly snowstorm, he had overshot the road and plunged down the side of the dyke into the deep ditch beyond, where the black spikes of a thorn hedge stood bleak and unwelcoming in the glare of the headlights.”
Sayers writes lovely sentences, piling on her metaphors, imagery, and alliteration. So much personification!
Lord Peter is thrilled to discover that while he’s a long way from home, at least he and Bunter are within walking distance of a church: “where there is a church, there is civilization.” And since in Sayers’s day churches were not yet being converted to condo buildings, sure enough, the local clergyman is willing to offer them food, lodging, and scholarly conversation for the night, even apologizing for the limitations of his own library.
Not a bad place to turn up unexpectedly in the snow on New Year’s Eve, in short.
A Sayers fan has gone in search of the origin of Nine Tailors‘s fictional St. Paul’s church in Fenchurch St. Paul, and there are complications. It’s a fun read.
Lord Peter is cheerful about the delay and admiring of the surprisingly grand local church. Like P.D. James, Sayers tends to linger on ecclesiastical architecture with an array of lovingly observed clerestory windows, naves, and transepts.
But the centrepiece of this particular church is its set of famous bells, and this New Year’s Eve the rector and his hardy volunteers are set to “accomplish a real feat” with “no less than fifteen thousand, eight hundred and forty Kent Treble Bob Majors.”
For our collective edification, here’s a quick video of a Kent Treble Bob Major at Blackburn Cathedral. I would also share a definition, but they’re baffling to the uninitiated.
My mother was a church organist, so I have a fondness for church bells, but I’m not at all certain I’d want to listen to the din for nine hours straight–and overnight, at that, on New Year’s Eve.
Lord Peter Wimsey, however, is game to not only listen but actually participate, agreeing to fill in for an ailing bell-ringing member of the flock, and . . . the game’s afoot.
I did say the mystery itself is a but muted–drowned out, as it were, in the peal of the bells. But it’s a decent story, with a somewhat convoluted plot that harkens back to the war years.
For Lord Peter, the recollection of his wartime trauma, and the guilt he continues to feel about the deaths of soldiers who were in his charge, is accompanied by overwhelming pain and turmoil. At various points in the series, he retreats for days or weeks, while Bunter–who met him when they fought alongside each other–tends to him.
Bryonny Muir’s article “Bringing up the Body (Don’t Mention the War)” argues that Sayers conjures up an apparent pastoral idyll that is haunted by history, including recent war history, with bell-ringing connecting the past and the present. Her reading of The Nine Tailors as a story about traumatic repetition is persuasive.
Intriguingly, while The Nine Tailors is hailed by some readers as DLS’s best book, Edmund Wilson, back in 1945, was exceptionally cranky about her approach here, including the amount of bell-ringing technical detail that the mystery author worked into her story.
In the infamous “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” (New Yorker, 1945), Wilson–who averred in an earlier article that he has not read any detective fiction since Sherlock Holmes and did not see much point in newer writers–was taken to task by letter-writers to the magazine, who urged their favourites on him.
Obediently, Wilson set out to read Sayers, “who was pressed upon me by eighteen people.”
A long excerpt, because I find this all rather fascinating, as cultural criticism (but a caution: spoilers ahead):
“I must confess that it seems to me one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field. The first part of it is all about bell-ringing as it is practised in English churches and contains a lot of information of the kind that you might expect to find in an encyclopedia article on campanology. I skipped a good deal of this, and found myself skipping, also, a large section of the conversations between conventional English village characters: ‘Oh, here’s Hinkins with the aspidistras. People may say what they like about aspidistras, but they do go on all the year round and make a background,’ etc. There was also a dreadful conventional English nobleman of the casual and debonair kind, with the embarrassing name of Lord Peter Wimsey, and, though he was the focal character in the novel, being Miss Dorothy Sayers’ version of the inevitable Sherlock Holmes detective, I had to skip a good deal of him, too. In the meantime, I was losing the story, which had not got a firm grip on my attention, but I went back and picked it up and steadfastly pushed through to the end, and there I discovered that the whole point was that if a man was shut up in a belfry while a heavy peal of chimes was being rung, the vibrations of the bells might kill him. Not a bad idea for a murder, and Conan Doyle would have known how to dramatize it in an entertaining tale of thirty pages, but Miss Sayers had not hesitated to pad it out to a book of three hundred and thirty, contriving one of those, stock cock-and-bull stories about a woman who commits bigamy without knowing it and larding the whole thing with details of church architecture, bits of quaint lore from books about bell ringing, and the awful whimsical patter of Lord Peter.
I had often heard people say that Dorothy Sayers wrote well, and I felt that my correspondents had been playing her as their literary ace. But, really, she does not write very well: it is simply that she is more consciously literary than most of the other detective-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub-literary level. In any serious department of fiction, her writing would not appear to have any distinction at all.”
So Wilson, at least, would not concur with my love of Dorothy L.’s delightful prose style, or rich characterizations, or clever and inventive plots. But I’m not at all sure that his view is more correct.
And generations of readers who have been delighted by Sayers’s novels beg to differ with Wilson’s pejorative (if perfectly phrased) assessment.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 
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