Lord Peter Death[1] Bredon Wimsey is a bon vivant amateur sleuth in a series of detective novels and short stories by Dorothy L. Sayers, in which he solves mysteries; usually, but not always, murders. Wimsey is an archetype for the British gentleman detective.
Born in 1890 and aging in real time, Wimsey is described as having at best average height with straw-coloured hair, a beaked nose, and a vaguely foolish face. (Reputedly his looks were patterned after those of academic Roy Ridley.) He also possesses considerable intelligence and athletic ability, evidenced by his playing cricket for Oxford University while earning a First and by creating a spectacularly successful publicity campaign for Whifflet cigarettes while working for Pym's Publicity Ltd. and still, at 40, being able to turn three cartwheels in the office corridor, stopping just short of the boss's open office door (Murder Must Advertise). Wimsey sometimes affects a slightly silly behaviour, so that people underestimate him.
Among Lord Peter's hobbies, apart from criminology, is collecting incunabula. He is an expert on matters of food (especially wine) and male fashion, and on classical music. He is quite good at playing Bach's works for keyboard instruments on a piano he treats even more carefully than his books, wines, and cars. One of Lord Peter's cars is a 12-cylinder ("double-six") 1927 Daimler four-seater, which (like all his cars) he calls "Mrs. Merdle" after a character in Little Dorrit (by Charles Dickens) who "hated fuss".
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In How I Came to Invent the Character of Lord Peter Wimsey,[2] Sayers wrote:
Lord Peter's large income... I deliberately gave him... After all it cost me nothing and at the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.
Janet Hitchman, in the preface to "Striding Folly", remarks that "Wimsey may have been the sad ghost of a wartime lover(...). Oxford, as everywhere in the country, was filled with bereaved women, but it may have been more noticeable in university towns where a whole year's intake could be wiped out in France in less than an hour." There is, however, no verifiable evidence of any such World War I lover of Sayers on whom the character of Wimsey might be based.
Another theory is that Wimsey was based, at least in part, on Eric Whelpton, who was a close friend of Sayers at Oxford.
The novels are set in Britain contemporaneously with 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, while Paton Walsh's third continuation The Attenbury Emeralds is set in the postwar era.
Lord Peter Wimsey's first known ancestor is the 12th-century knight Gerald de Wimsey, who went with King Richard The Lion Heart on the Third Crusade and took part in the Siege of Acre.[3] This makes the Wimseys an unusually ancient family, since "Very few English noble families go that far in the first creation; rebellions and monarchic head choppings had seen to that" (as reviewer Janet Hitchman noted in the introduction to "Striding Folly"). The family coat of arms is described as sable, 3 mice courant, argent; crest, a domestic cat couched as to spring, proper. The family motto, displayed under its coat of arms, is "As My Whimsy Takes Me."[4]
Lord Peter's extended family appears frequently in the novels. He is the second of the three children of Mortimer Wimsey, 15th Duke of Denver, and Honoria Lucasta Delagardie, who lives on throughout the novels as the Dowager Duchess of Denver. The Dowager Duchess is affable, intelligent, and strongly supports her younger son, whom she may prefer over his less intelligent and more conventional older brother, Gerald, the 16th Duke. Gerald's snobbish wife, Helen (who detests Wimsey), and their devil-may-care heir, Viscount St. George (Wimsey's nephew, who likes him), also make appearances in the novels, as does Lady Mary, the younger sister of the Duke and Lord Peter.
Lord Peter was educated at Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a first-class degree in history. He was also an outstanding cricketer, whose performance would still be well remembered decades later (and lead to unmasking his disguise in Murder Must Advertise). Though not taking up an academic career, he was left with an enduring and deep love for his Oxford alma mater (which in Gaudy Night would be a major factor in his at last winning Harriet Vane).
At that point he was engaged to a girl named Barbara. When the First World War broke out, he hastened to join the British Army and released Barbara from her engagement in case he was killed or mutilated. The girl later married another, less principled officer.
Wimsey served on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, reaching the rank of Major in the Rifle Brigade. At one stage, he was appointed an Intelligence Officer. This included, on one occasion, going disguised into the staff-room of a German officer.[5] Though not otherwise stated, being able to do that implies that Wimsey spoke a fluent and unaccented German. As noted in "Have His Carcase", he at that time communicated with British Intelligence using the Playfair cipher and became proficient in its use.
For reasons never clarified in any of the books, after the end of his mission as a spy behind enemy lines Wimsey was in the later part of the war removed from Intelligence and resumed the job of a regular line officer. He was a conscientious and effective commanding officer, popular with the men under his command — an affection still retained by Wimsey's former soldiers many years after the war, as evident from a short passage in "Clouds of Witness" and an extensive flashback in "Gaudy Night".
Especially, at this time in the army he met Sergeant Mervyn Bunter, who had previously been in service. After sharing what the Dowager Duchess referred to as "a jam," the two arranged that if they were both to survive the war, Bunter would become Wimsey's valet. Throughout the books Bunter always takes care to address Wimsey as "My Lord". Nevertheless, he is obviously a friend as well as a servant, and Wimsey again and again expresses amazement at Bunter's high efficiency and competence at virtually every sphere of life.
In 1918, Wimsey was severely injured by artillery fire near Caudry in France. He suffered a breakdown due to shell shock/post-traumatic stress disorder, and was eventually sent home. After the war he was ill for many months, recovering at the family's ancestral home in Duke's Denver (fictional, like the dukedom it gives its name to) which lies some fifteen miles beyond the original Denver on the A10 near Downham Market. As noted on several occasions, Wimsey was for a time unable to give servants any order whatsoever since his wartime experience made him associate the giving of an order with causing the death of the person to whom the order was given. Bunter arrived and, with the approval of the Dowager Duchess, took up his post. Bunter moved Wimsey to a London flat at 110A Piccadilly, W1 while Wimsey recovered. Also much later, however, Wimsey would have relapses - especially when faced with his actions causing a murderer to be hanged. As noted in "Whose Body?", on such occasions Bunter would take care of Wimsey and tenderly put him to bed, and they would revert to being "Major Wimsey" and "Sergeant Bunter".
Lord Peter begins his hobby of investigation by recovering The Attenbury Emeralds in 1921. He also becomes good friends with Scotland Yard detective Charles Parker, a sergeant in 1921 who eventually rises to the rank of Commander. Bunter, being a man of many talents himself—not least photography—often proves instrumental in Peter's investigations. However, Wimsey is not entirely well. At the end of the investigation in Whose Body? (1923) he hallucinates that he is back in the trenches. He soon recovers his senses and goes on a long holiday.
The next year, he returns (in Clouds of Witness (1926)) to the fictional Riddlesdale in North Yorkshire to assist his older brother Gerald, who has been accused of murdering Captain Denis Cathcart, their sister's fiancé. Gerald is the current Duke of Denver and points out that, strictly, to be tried by his peers would be difficult. Nevertheless, as required by the law at that time, he is tried by the entire House of Lords to much scandal and the distress of his wife Helen. Their sister, Lady Mary, also falls under suspicion. Lord Peter clears the Duke and Lady Mary, to whom Parker is attracted.
It is not exactly known when Wimsey recruited 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 nor man would be able to access, but it is prior to Unnatural Death (1927), in which Miss Climpson assists Wimsey's investigation of the suspicious death of an elderly cancer patient.
As recounted in the short story "The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba", in December 1927 Wimsey faked his own death, supposedly while hunting big game in Tanganyika, in order to penetrate and break up a particularly dangerous and well-organised criminal gang. Only Wimsey's mother and sister, the loyal Bunter and Inspector Parker knew he was still alive. Emerging victorious after more than a year masquerading as "the disgruntled sacked servant Rogers", Wimsey remarked that "We shall have an awful time with the lawyers, proving that I am me." In fact, he returned smoothly to his old life, and the interlude is never referred to in later books.
In Strong Poison Lord Peter meets Harriet Vane and falls in love with her at first sight, while she thinks he's a bit crazy. 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, but based on the principle that gratitude is not a good foundation for marriage, she politely but firmly declines his frequent proposals. Lord Peter does encourage his friend and foil, Chief Inspector Charles Parker, to propose to his sister, Lady Mary Wimsey, despite the great difference in their rank and wealth. They marry and have a son, named Charles Peter ("Peterkin"), and a daughter, Mary Lucasta.
Wimsey continues to pursue Miss Vane, but does not get much satisfaction. He investigates the murder of an artist while on a fishing holiday in Scotland (Five Red Herrings). On his return he finds Miss Vane is not at home; he learns her location when reporter Salcombe Hardy asks Wimsey to comment on the murder victim Vane discovered on her walking tour of England's coast (Have His Carcase). Hardy does not have to point out that Vane might have committed the murder herself—one who was once tried for murder does not have the best reputation. The next morning Wimsey is at her hotel, not only to investigate the death and once more offer proposals of marriage, but also to act as her patron and protector with press and police. Despite a prickly relationship, they do work together to identify the murderer.
Back in London, Wimsey goes undercover as "Death Bredon" at an advertising firm, working as a copywriter (Murder Must Advertise). Bredon is framed for murder, leading Charles Parker to "arrest" Bredon for murder in front of the press. To distinguish Death Bredon from Lord Peter Wimsey, Parker smuggles Wimsey out of the station and urges him to get into the papers. Accordingly Wimsey accompanies "a Royal personage" to a public event, leading the press to carry pictures of both "Bredon" and Wimsey.
By 1935 Lord Peter is in continental Europe, acting as an unofficial attaché for the British Foreign Office. Harriet Vane contacts him about a problem she has been asked to investigate in her college at Oxford (Gaudy Night). At the end of their investigation, Vane finally accepts Peter's proposal of marriage. The couple marry, on 8 October 1935, at St. Cross Church, Holywell, Oxford (depicted in the opening collection of letters and diary entries in Busman's Honeymoon).
The Wimseys go on honeymoon to Talboys, a house in east Hertfordshire near where the young Harriet's father was a country doctor, 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.
Over the next five years, the Wimseys have three sons: Bredon Delagardie Peter Wimsey (born in October 1936 in the story "The Haunted Policeman"); 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 Sayers called him that.) It may be presumed that Paul is named after Lord Peter's maternal uncle Paul Delagardie. "Roger" is an ancestral Wimsey name. (Sayers told friends orally that Harriet and Peter were to eventually have five children in all.)
In the final Wimsey story, the 1942 short story "Talboys", Peter and Harriet are enjoying rural domestic bliss with their three sons when Bredon, their first-born, is accused of the theft of prize peaches from the neighbour's tree. Peter and the accused set off to investigate and, of course, prove Bredon's innocence.
Wimsey is described as having authored numerous books, among them the following fictitious works:
Dorothy Sayers wrote 11 Wimsey novels and a number of short stories featuring Wimsey and his family (including Inspector Parker). Other recurring characters include solicitor Murbles, barrister Sir Impey Biggs (who defends both Denver and Harriet Vane when each is tried for murder), newshound Salcombe Hardy, and city whizz the Honourable Freddy Arbuthnot, who finds himself entangled in the case in the first of the Wimsey books, 1923's Whose Body?.
Sayers wrote no more Wimsey murder mysteries (and only one story involving him) after the outbreak of the Second World War. In one of the Wimsey Papers (a series of fictionalised commentaries in the form of mock letters between members of the Wimsey family), there is a reference to Harriet's difficulty in continuing to write murder mysteries at a time when European dictators were openly committing mass murders with impunity; this seems to have reflected Sayers' own wartime feeling. The Wimsey Papers included a reference to Wimsey and Bunter setting out during the war on a secret mission of espionage in Europe (pointing to the possibility of a spy thriller featuring them, which was never written).
The only occasion when Sayers returned to Wimsey was the 1942 short story "Talboys". The war at that time devastating Europe got only a single oblique reference. Though Sayers lived until 1957, she never again took up the Wimsey books after this final effort. In effect, rather than killing off her detective, as Conan Doyle unsuccessfully tried with his, Sayers pensioned Wimsey off to a happy, satisfying old age. Thus, Peter Wimsey remained forever fixed on the background of inter-war England, and the books are nowadays often read for their evocation of that period as much as for the intrinsic detective mysteries (as Sherlock Holmes is often read for the distinctive late Victorian atmosphere of his background).
Many episodes in the Wimsey books express a mild satire of the British class system, in particular in depicting the relationship between Wimsey and Bunter, the two of them clearly being the best and closest of friends, yet Bunter invariably punctilious in using "my lord" even when they are alone, and "his lordship" in company. In a brief passage written from Bunter's point of view in "Busman's Honeymoon" Bunter is seen, even in the privacy of his own mind, to be thinking of his employer as "His Lordship". Wimsey and Bunter even mock the Jeeves and Wooster relationship.
However, in "Whose Body?" it is seen that when Wimsey is caught by a severe recurrence of his WWI shell-shock and nightmares, being taken care of by Bunter, the two of them revert to being "Major Wimsey" and "Sergeant Bunter". In that role, Bunter - sitting at the bedside of the sleeping Wimsey - is seen to mutter affectionately "Bloody little fool!" [6]
In "The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps That Run," the staunchly democratic Doctor Hartman invites Bunter to sit down to eat together with himself and Wimsey, at the doctor's modest apartment. Wimsey does not object, but Bunter strongly does: "If I may state my own preference, sir, it would be to wait upon you and his lordship in the usual manner". Whereupon Wimsey remarks: "Bunter likes me to know my place"[7]
At the conclusion of Strong Poison, Inspector Parker asks "What would one naturally do if one found one's water-bottle empty?" (a point of crucial importance in solving the book's mystery). Wimsey promptly answers "Ring the bell." Whereupon Miss Murchison, the indefatigable investigator employed by Wimsey for much of this book, comments "Or, if one wasn't accustomed to be waited on, one might use the water from the bedroom jug."
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 television productions by the BBC. Lord Peter Wimsey was played by Ian Carmichael in a series of independent serials that ran from 1972 to 1975 and adapted five novels, and by Edward Petherbridge in 1987, wherein the three major Wimsey/Vane novels were dramatised. Harriet was played by Harriet Walter. The BBC was unable to secure the rights to turn Busman's Honeymoon into a proposed fourth adaptation of the planned 13-episode series. Unable to adapt Honeymoon, the series was trimmed to ten episodes and was transmitted under the title A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery. Both the 1970s productions and the 1987 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 1973–83, 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. Gaudy Night was released as an unabridged audiobook read by Ian Carmichael in 1993.
There was a 1935 British movie of The Silent Passenger, in which Lord Peter (played by Peter Haddon) solved a mystery on the boat train crossing the English Channel; 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 film 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.
With year of first publication
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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 up with Lord Peter at a party in the novel A Letter of Mary.
