Lord Peter Wimsey

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Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey is a fictional character in a series of detective novels and short stories by Dorothy L. Sayers, in which he solves mysteries — usually murder mysteries. The novels have a setting contemporary to when they were written, from the early 1920s to the late 1930s; the story "Talboys" (and Jill Paton Walsh's recent continuations Thrones, Dominations and A Presumption of Death) continue this into the early 1940s.

Roy Ridley, whose appearance Dorothy L. Sayers used for Lord Peter Wimsey
Roy Ridley, whose appearance Dorothy L. Sayers used for Lord Peter Wimsey

Born in 1890 and aging in real-time, Wimsey is described as having at best average height with straw-colored hair, a beaked nose, and a vaguely foolish face (reputedly his looks were patterned after academic Roy Ridley). He also possessed considerable athletic ability, especially at cricket. Sayers peppered the Wimsey stories with many locations and details from her own life, with her hero's abundant wealth being in contrast to the penury that led her to try her hand at detective fiction. Wimsey's London home is at 110A Piccadilly, W1, from which he moves upon his marriage to a townhouse on Audley Square, in the heart of Mayfair. The ancestral home of the Wimsey family is Bredon Hall, Duke's Denver, Norfolk. The 'original' Denver is a village on the A10 near Downham Market in the west of the county; Duke's Denver (fictional like the dukedom it gives its name to) lies some fifteen miles beyond.

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[edit] Biography

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Lord Peter is the second child of Mortimer, 15th Duke of Denver, and Honoria Lucasta, who lives on throughout the novels as the Dowager Duchess.

Lord Peter was educated at Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a first-class degree in history. He served in World War I, suffering shell shock, which causes occasional problems throughout the books, especially the earliest ones. His biography is given in a Who's Who or Debrett-like entry in the rear of each book, supplemented in later books, and in subsequent reprintings of the earlier novels, by a short biographical essay, said to be the work of Peter's uncle Paul Austin Delagardie, the brother of the Dowager Duchess. The same Who's Who article is consulted by Miss Meteyard in Murder Must Advertise when she begins to suspect that new copywriter Mr. Bredon is not just the bumbling oaf he pretends to be.

He first met his trusty right-hand man and valet (or manservant or gentleman's personal gentleman), Mervyn Bunter, when Bunter served as his batman in the Great War. Bunter is a man of as many talents as Lord Peter, not least photography which often proves instrumental for Peter's investigations. When Bunter finally finds a wife, in Thrones, Dominations (a plot device created not by Dorothy Sayers, but by Jill Paton Walsh), she is a professional photographer; their son Peter Meredith Bunter is born in December 1937. During World War II, where Lord Peter serves in military intelligence, and his nephew St. George is a fighter pilot, Bunter, too old for regular service, founds a Home Guard battalion. Bunter's ability to ingratiate himself with servants and tradesmen often results in important leads for his master's cases. Likewise, Wimsey recruits Miss Climpson to run an undercover employment agency for women in order to be able to garner information from the world of spinsters and widows which neither master or man would be able to access (see especially Strong Poison and Unnatural Death). The novels also feature multiple appearances from solicitor Murbles, newshound Salcombe Hardy, and city whizz The Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot, who finds himself entangled in the case in the first of the Wimsey books, 1923's Whose Body?.

His siblings, Gerald, 16th Duke, and Lady Mary, both feature in the novels, most notably in Clouds of Witness, where Mary's fiancé dies violently and Gerald stands trial for the crime in the House of Lords. Gerald's snobbish wife, Helen, and devil-may-care heir, Viscount St. George, also make appearances in the novels. Mary marries Peter's friend and foil, Chief Inspector Charles Parker of Scotland Yard, in Strong Poison. By Murder Must Advertise they have a young son, named Charles Peter.

In Strong Poison Lord Peter meets Harriet Deborah Vane and falls in love with her. Harriet is a cerebral, Oxford-educated mystery writer on trial for the murder of her former lover. Needless to say, Wimsey saves her from the gallows, and after many many proposals of marriage throughout Strong Poison and Have His Carcase, Vane finally accepts Peter's proposal in Gaudy Night. The couple marry, on October 8, 1935, at St. Cross Church, Holywell, Oxford, depicted in the opening collection of letters and diary entries in Busman's Honeymoon. The Wimseys go off on honeymoon to Talboys, a house in east Hertfordshire near to where the young Harriet's father was a country doctor, and which she has loved from childhood, and which Peter has bought for her as a wedding present. There, they find the body of the previous owner, and spend their honeymoon solving the case, thus having the eponymous busman's honeymoon (see Busman's Honeymoon).

The Wimseys have three children: Bredon Delagardie Peter Wimsey (born in October 1936 in the story "The Haunted Policeman" and featured in the 1942 story "Talboys"); Roger Wimsey (born 1938), and Paul Wimsey (born 1940). Note that in A Presumption of Death the second son is called Paul, because in the wartime publications of The Wimsey Papers Dorothy L. Sayers called him that.

Among Lord Peter's hobbies, apart from criminology, is collecting incunabula (very early printed books). He is an expert on matters of food (especially wine) and male fashion, as well as on classical music. He is quite good at playing Bach's works for keyboard instruments on a piano he babies even more than his books, wines, and cars. One of Lord Peter's cars is a 12-cylinder ("double-six") 1927 Daimler four-seater, which he calls "Mrs. Merdle" after a character in Little Dorrit (by Charles Dickens).

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

With year of first publication

[edit] Short story collections

[edit] Stage, movies, television and radio

The cover of Gaudy Night, from the BBC series. Featuring Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter Wimsey
Enlarge
The cover of Gaudy Night, from the BBC series. Featuring Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter Wimsey

The novel Busman's Honeymoon was originally a stage play by Sayers and her friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne.

Some of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels were made into two very successful television series by the BBC. Lord Peter Wimsey was played by Ian Carmichael during the 1970s, in a series that ran from 1972 to 1975 and adapted five novels, and by Edward Petherbridge in 1987, wherein the three major Wimsey/Vane novels were dramatized. Harriet was played by Harriet Walter. The BBC was unable to secure the rights to turn Busman's Honeymoon into the fourth part of the series. Both series are now available on videotape and DVD.

Edward Petherbridge also played Wimsey in the UK production of the Busman's Honeymoon play staged at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1988 (it also toured in the North of England), with the role of Harriet being taken by his real life spouse, Emily Richard.

Ian Carmichael also starred as Wimsey in radio adaptations of the novels made by the BBC, all of which have been available on cassette and CD from the BBC Radio Collection. In the original series, which ran on Radio 4 from 1973–1983, no adaptation was made of the seminal Gaudy Night, perhaps because the leading character in this novel is Harriet and not Peter; this was corrected in 2005 when a version specially recorded for the BBC Radio Collection was released starring Carmichael and Joanna David. The CD also includes a panel discussion on the novel, the major participants in which are P. D. James and Jill Paton Walsh.

There was a 1935 British movie of The Silent Passenger in which Lord Peter solved a mystery on the boat train crossing the English Channel, but the film does not seem to be available on videotape, at least in the United States. Sayers disliked the film; James Brabazon describes it as an "oddity, in which Dorothy's contribution was altered out of all recognition."

The 1940 movie The Haunted Honeymoon (US title) or Busman's Honeymoon (UK title), starring Robert Montgomery and Constance Cummings as Lord and Lady Peter, is available on videotape in generic boxes on the secondary market. Any resemblance of its characters and events to those in Busman's Honeymoon is more than coincidental but less than satisfactory to Sayers's fans; the film script simplifies the novel's plot a great deal. (In the TV adaptation of Murder Must Advertise, a movie poster of Robert Montgomery is prominently visible on the wall in the secretaries' office.) Sayers refused even to see this movie.

[edit] Books about Lord Peter by other authors

As a footnote, Lord Peter Wimsey has also been included by the science fiction writer Philip José Farmer as a member of the Wold Newton family; and Laurie R. King's detective character Mary Russell meets Lord Peter at a party in the novel A Letter of Mary.

[edit] External links

[edit] See also

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