S: Dorothy Sayers

First, I want to take a moment to acknowledge a nice (meaningless) threshold, which is that sometime over Saturday night I passed the 10,000 page views mark.  Unfortunately, since Blogger doesn't sift out the robovisits, I think a significant portion were due to Russian sites of dubious virtue checking out that "old-fashioned girl" post.  Still.  Ten thousand views.

And I only need 13 more members to hit the 50 follower mark!




Now for our regularly scheduled Mystery Monday post: Dorothy Sayers and the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.

First I want to say that Ms. Sayers was a serious scholar and she herself considered her Lord Peter stories (and other unrelated mysteries) as a sort of sell-out.  But, let's be frank: who reads her theological works today?  A whole lot fewer than read her mysteries, that's for sure (for the record, I have read at least one of her non-fiction works, The Mind of the Maker, and it is an excellent exploration of the relationship between the creativity of God and the creativity of the artist, for those who think in those terms.  The woman could write, whatever her subject matter).

The 12 Lord Peter novels (and 3 collections of short stories) are definitely products of their period (the 1920s and 30s), being more intellectual than action-oriented.  The series is also slightly schizophrenic.  In 8 of those 12 books, Lord Peter appears alone, and the books are classic intellectual puzzles.  In Strong Poison, she introduces Harriet Vane, and (after ignoring her existence in intervening books) develops a complex love interest in Have His Carcase, which erupts into the central place in the last two books, Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon.  Gaudy Night in particular stands out because the entire story is from the perspective of Harriet Vane, and we finally truly see Peter through another's eyes.  Busman's Honeymoon shifts perspectives, but her view again predominates, leaving me to wonder what kind of change in the nature of her mysteries, or maybe in the mystery novel, Ms. Sayers was contemplating.

Gaudy Night, in particular, is a great read for a writer, as Harriet is (just by chance, of course!) a writer of mysteries.  In many ways the book (which contains a perplexing mystery but lacks a corpse) is a meditation on marriage and work, for women (and especially the woman artist), as well as on the value of writing as work.  It is a theme that I think Sayers would have further developed had she continued to write, and in fact is developed in Jill Paton Walsh's completion of Sayers' unfinished final novel, Thrones, Dominations.  It is unclear in that work what is Sayers and what is Walsh, but I suspect that the concern with the difficulty Harriet has with her writing was planned by Sayers.

I can heartily recommend any and all of the Lord Peter books, though a couple get a little dense and dry (The Five Red Herrings according to rumor was written to demonstrate the perfect construction of red herrings, and I could believe it).  The books can be read in any order, as they are only very loosely tied, though I think a little sense of development is gained from reading them in the order written.  Other details of Lord Peter's life are added by reading the short stories, though any effort to construct a timeline would, I think, lead to madness and despair.

Oh, and one final reason I like the books?  Lord Peter is addicted to word play.

Drowning in words

Dorothy Sayers said it, and I heartily agree: "The rereading of one's own works is usually a dismal matter" (Gaudy Night).  Even the bits that you can see are really pretty good have a great deal less shine to them than they did when they were new.

And why, you ask, this spirit of disheartened eloquence?  Because, like thousands who "won" NaNoWriMo, I am struggling with the revision of a novel that isn't quite there yet.  Unlike the NaNers, mine isn't fresh, but rather a book abandoned about five years back when I couldn't interest an agent in it.  Now, it's better than five-year-old fish--the book doesn't stink--but five years is long enough to let me see it as an editor might, which is rather harsher than the casual reader, I suspect.

Thus the "dismal matter."  But here's the thing: if I don't push through the dismalness (did I just make that word up?  The spell-checker thinks so), my book will never be more than mediocre.  So I'm rereading, outlining, making notes of what works and what doesn't, all preparatory to heavily revising a manuscript that I have already revised two or three times.  And, of course, getting some distance and reading it like an editor will make for a better book.

Does this make me happy?  Frankly, no.  This is the work side of writing, and not much fun. Oh, there are occasions when the realization that you've figured out how to make something that was just okay into something good is as exciting as was composing the crappy first draft.  But most of the time, it hurts a little.  "Dang," you think.  "I loved that scene.  But it really doesn't work.  Not unless I figure out a way to get the dog out of there, and I already made such a big deal about the dog never leaving the girl's side."  So out goes the scene.  Or days are spent in dealing with the dog, only to decide that your changes ruin something else, and the scene gets the chuck after all. (I made that up, so when the book comes out, please don't go looking for a girl and a dog and writing me snippy letters when you can't find them.)

This painful reality explains the sudden burst of short-story writing I've indulged in.  I can only edit for so long before I need a creative booster shot, and have to write something.  So, coming up next week: "An Elegant Apocalypse," just in time for the end of the world on December 21st.  You know, just in case.