#whose body

The Hollow Man: Obviously there's the locked room of it all. You've also got someone dressing up as someone else making it seem like a dead person was somehow alive.

Whose Body?: Body in the bath. Also an element of body swapping but, from what I can remember, mostly just body in the bath.

The Murdsrs in the Rue Morgue: Locked room again, and an innocent man accused. Finding the logical truth in the face of impossibility. Though, in Rue Morgue the truth turns out to involve an orangutan, and I'm finding myself a bit stuck on the intervention of something that is not human, even if it's an ape, while WUDM involves proving that everything was done by humans.

The Murder of Roger Aykroyd: Poirot gets called in to investigate and enlists the help of the narrator, who turns out to be the murderer - major red herring for Jud that distracted me so much the first time around I forgot to pay attention to the rest of the list.

The Murder at the Vicarage: Religious person gets murdered. There's a reveal of hidden parentage, and some discussion of greed

You really do need to read the Wimsey books in order, if just to watch in fascination how Sayers develops her Ideas About Women, which culminates in the whole Harriet Vane arc. For context, Christie doesn’t really have Ideas About Women. She has Ideas About People. Her vision of psychology comes down to environment and social pressures, but these are less frequently gender-based. Class, age, and income dictate her characters much more than relations between the sexes, even in crimes of passion (and there aren’t many).

Sayers, on the other hand, develops the theme that finally comes to full chorus in Gaudy Night. E.g., Whose Body? is very much in the Christie vein. You get the impression she could keep going on like this for several more books, but she doesn’t; she writes Clouds of Witness and gives Peter a mother, a sister, and opens her theme of privilege and sexuality in the form of the farmer’s wife. The wife is vital here to understanding how Sayers sets up Peter as the peer of the realm, used to taking because that's his privilege. I love the pithiness of this line:

[she had] a shape so wonderful that even in that strenuous moment sixteen generations of feudal privilege stirred in Lord Peter's blood.

This image is vital to understanding how Harriet (rightly) sees him as presumptuous in Strong Poison and sets up why she refuses to tangle with him on his own turf.

Unnatural Death offers another vision of womanhood—queer and single womanhood. The relationships between Agatha Dawson and Clara Whittaker, and to a lesser extent Mary Whittaker and Vera Findlater, are clearly Sapphic and complicate the easy upper-class commerce of seduction and possession. In fact, it turns conventional heterosexuality into a farce, in the scene when “Mrs. Forrest” attempts to seduce “Mr. Templeton" to poison him.

He pulled her suddenly and violently to him, and kissed her mouth with a practised exaggeration of passion. He knew then. No one who has ever encountered it can ever again mistake that awful shrinking, that uncontrollable revulsion of the flesh against a caress that is nauseous. He thought for a moment that she was going to be actually sick.

The two principals are in disguise; one is a lesbian and the other suspects her of murder. Heterosexuality becomes a pantomime, a play of dishonesty in violent and overt language (Sayers, notably by Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon, gets much more coy about real and honest feelings). It's the yearning for honesty that becomes the knot to unravel with Harriet (proclaimed pretty baldly in Have His Carcase).

Aside from queering relationships, this book also introduces us to the inimitable Miss Climpson: the smart sleuthing "old maid" who Parker first conventionally mistakes for Peter's mistress and represents Sayers slyly breaking expectations. A proto-Miss Marple, Miss Climpson both provides Peter with a sensibility of feminism that will eventually help redeem him--he's not too proud to see the worthiness of an independent single woman--and (on a narrative level) allows Sayers to explore female protagonism and her own religious outlook in her fiction.

Finally, The Unpleasantness of the Bellona Club offers us two major women, who interestingly collide in the character of Harriet Vane: the artistic Marjorie Phelps, who exists in a relationship of ambiguous intimacy with Peter, and the plain persecuted Ann Dorland, whose essential non-villainy gets endangered by a man she's in love with. I slightly wonder whether Sayers got her idea for Harriet from the way she wrote Ann Dorland especially; Ann, despite her limited page time, suggests the same love problems, level-headedness, and appeal to Wimsey that typifies Harriet, though isn't allowed the same play.

Sayers has been setting up Peter and his relationships this way for maximum impact when we get to Strong Poison. Harriet, interestingly, gets very little initial on-page description in this book (as opposed to, say, Ann Dorland or Mary Whittaker), and there's the simultaneous sense of her being disappeared and becoming typified not by her looks but by her words/voice, as her dialogue is how we get to know her.

There is a great deal of absurd charm in the openings of the Wimsey/Vane relationship, of course, but Sayers reminds us not to get carried away by it with one line:

[The books] could not show him how to save the woman he imperiously wanted from a sordid death by hanging.

Clearly, we know Peter wants Harriet. We even believe that the way he wants her is rather nice, and at least infinitely superior to the way she had been wanted by her lame ex Phillip. But Sayers cautions us with that fantastic adverb, "imperiously." Remember the farmer's wife in Clouds of Witness, she seems to say. Remember that the way Peter likes Harriet has as much to do with the certainty of his own brilliance as how he sees her. Remember that, even if he says he's not blackmailing her into marrying him by helping her out, he's still Lord Peter, second son of the duke.

As alluded to in my previous post from earlier today...

Okay, so there is a pretty common thing you see from people, whether they like Gaudy Night or hate it, which is this idea that Sayers made Wimsey taller and/or hotter over time- as, some say, she fell more and deeper in love with him. The "hotter" I think is debatable, though I fall on the side of not- IMO his actual physical description remains very consistent over time, with him being described as having a "high beaked profile" as late as Busman's Honeymoon, and his personal character traits/manners and wealth/title/intelligence do a lot of work for him in terms of attractiveness to women. (The strongest counterargument to this point is probably Murder Must Advertise in which he's somehow crazy attractive to multiple women while undercover- presumably that's a combination of the manners, intelligence, and... macho pond diving ability? Not really my favorite Sayers book tbh. We'll get back to it.)

But it's VERY easy to refute the "taller" allegation, and in fact when you try to you notice something weird- that Wimsey may arguably get SHORTER over the course of the books and then yoyo back.

Do we care about continuity?

Sayers and continuity, I will say, is weird. I love how she remembers incredibly clearly that she had Abrahams the cartoonishly Jewish jeweler show Wimsey a ruby engagement ring in an earlier short story and has Abrahams sell him that very ring in Busman's Honeymoon (in fact I love it enough that I wrote a missing scene fic about it). I also perversely love how she has Harriet de-age by about three years for literally no reason and how, to make the scenario for Busman's Honeymoon work, she transfers her upbringing from the city (as made clear in Have His Carcase) to the country. It's like she cares more about some things than others, and the things she cares about are the vibes. I respect that, because her vibes are generally impeccable.

And that's why I think that it's actually pretty important that Sayers may actually shrink Wimsey to make a point, and important to point out to people that she very much does not make him taller, certainly not in a bid to emphasize his attractiveness. So let's go through the known stats (and if I'm missing anything, please comment to add!):

A) When you google "Lord Peter Wimsey height" you get that he is of "average height." I refuse to word search all the books until I find the exact reference for this but I don't doubt it's there somewhere.

B) In Whose Body?, Wimsey is described as "rather a small man, but not undersized," in comparison to if he'd been "six foot three." Vague but definitely he's not meant to be tall per se.

C) In Clouds of Witness, as Wimsey and Parker are trying to figure out whether "No. 10" could have gotten over the wall, Wimsey says that he's five foot nine. This is unambiguous- he says it straight out. (Parker, in contrast, is six feet.)

D) In Murder Must Advertise, Wimsey is stated to be too short to be a Metropolitan Police officer. This is VERY often pulled out as an example of how short he is, but the real question is what it actually means. In doing some online searching, I got anywhere between 5'7 and 5'10 as the potential required height (with 5'10 being the height as listed in the Lord Peter Wimsey Companion). HOWEVER, I believe that the required height at the time would be somewhere between 5'8 and 5'9, as expressed in this Parliamentary record. If someone can find a better reference point, please share! But in the meantime it would seem that Wimsey may be shorter than 5'9, his previously listed height in Clouds of Witness.

E) Gaudy Night is a FASCINATING one, so I'm going to divide it into two parts. One is the part that people tend to pull out, in my opinion wrongly, to indicate that Wimsey got taller. The other is the part that makes me even more convinced that Sayers shrank him.

E1) It's sometimes said that Wimsey clearly got taller because Harriet "can see him in a crowd." Let me pull out the quote:

Scanning those sacred precincts, therefore, from without the pale, Harriet became aware that the local colour included a pair of slim shoulders tailored to swooning-point and carrying a well-known parrot profile, thrown into prominence by the acute backward slant of a pale-grey topper. A froth of summer hats billowed about this apparition, so that it resembled a slightly grotesque but expensive orchid in a bouquet of roses.

Nothing about him being tall and visible, just about his hat being tall and visible and his face being seen underneath it! And he may well be taller than the women he's surrounded by, but at anywhere between 5'7 and 5'9 (as established above) he most likely would be, given that men tend to be taller than women- which we'll return to below. There is no indication from here that Wimsey is meant to be shown as tall.

E2) More tellingly, there's the famous line closer to the end of the book:

"Bless the man, if he hasn't taken my gown instead of his own! Oh, well, it doesn't matter. We're much of a height and mine's pretty wide on the shoulders, so it's exactly the same thing."

I can't easily find the average height of an English woman in the 1930s, but after reading a bunch of different sites and articles and such and extrapolating, I get a general impression of between 5'1 and 5'4. For context, the average height of an English woman now is apparently 5'3-5'4, and while immigration from developing countries may affect that, average heights worldwide still seem to have overall increased since the start of the 20th century, if not necessarily by massive margins. These days, the countries that have the tallest average height for women have it at about 5'6/5'7, as far as I can tell.

We don't get a tremendous amount of vital statistics about Harriet Vane. Wimsey describes her as "long limbed" in Busman's Honeymoon, which presumably implies tall (though could also just say something about her proportions), but at the same time she is never, to my knowledge, remarked upon by any other character to be of any kind of exceptional height. This is subjective, of course, but from experience (as a shortie whose sister is six inches taller), once a woman is about 5'9 people start making comments, so let's assume that she's tallish but not notably Tall. 5'7 or 5'8 would work at the upper end of that, which is the height we established from Murder Must Advertise for Wimsey, as it happens!

Obviously, Harriet may not be EXACTLY the same height as Wimsey- but we know that she can't be that much shorter from the above quote. Here's an indication, though, that she may even be shorter than 5'7- the fact that she's around the same height as Annie, who is described as of medium height. We deduce this from two places at least- Lord Saint George says that the woman he saw at Shrewsbury is "about your height or a bit less" to Harriet, and Miss Pyke observes that the dress on the dummy is for a woman of "medium height." While as Gherkins notes Annie may be a bit shorter than Harriet, "medium height" in the context of women's clothing would, given height tendencies, be shorter than "medium height" for a man like Wimsey. So even if Harriet is taller than Annie, and relatively tall for a woman, for her to be both "medium height" and about the same height as Wimsey he'd have to be on the short side.

And, finally,

F) In Busman's Honeymoon, we're told that "[Wimsey's] height was a sensitive point with him" and then that he is... five foot nine. Just the same as he'd been in Clouds of Witness.

All this to say- it seems pretty clear to me that Wimsey starts off about 5'9, a perfectly respectable male height, and either stays that way or gets even shorter, depending on how you look at it. 5'9 a perfectly respectable male height while not being considered tall per se, at least in Europe. Wimsey also (as he's often described) being very slim would contribute perhaps to him seeming a bit smaller than he is.

So why does Wimsey shrink? I like to think that I've made the case for it that he does, and the reason why I emphasize it (rather than, as in my previous post, just yelling about him not growing) is because it's hard not to imagine that she very much did it to make a point.

Murder Must Advertise, as alluded to above, I think is partly a function of a certain kind of action-novel laziness rather than a statement about Wimsey as a person, to be honest. "Death Bredon" is a rogue, and rogues have women fall for them and use it. By showing that Wimsey is able to attract so many women as Death Bredon, without the advantages of name, title, money, and manners (or at least, his usual kind of manners), and also without height, Sayers conveys his charm. Again, I don't find it particularly convincing, but I do find it interesting that much of the charm and mystery that gets Dian de Momerie, at least, interested in "Death Bredon" is based on his athleticism and nimbleness, which actually are helped by his comparatively small and slim stature. A taller man may not have managed that dive into a pond in the same way...

Gaudy Night... well, I mean, that's the one that is basically all narrated by Harriet, who is falling/has fallen in love with Wimsey. She's naturally going to be biased, and her biases and blind spots are basically the structure around which the book is constructed. The whole book is constructed around how Harriet sees Wimsey, and so the fact that they are the same height, that Wimsey is significantly shorter (for example) than Reggie Pomfret, that Wimsey's self defense classes with Harriet focus on skill and using the other person's strength to compensate for being small yourself, that Wimsey get Harriet to accept his proposal by putting his head down and making himself smaller... the whole book is about Harriet seeing Wimsey as equal to her so him being specifically physically small relative to other men in a way that will not overpower her is very relevant. (In marked contrast, incidentally, to AS Byatt's Possession, about which I've written a long screed about how much I hate its approach to male/female dynamics as relate, among other things, to size.)

Started reading Whose Body by Dorothy L. Sayers, and was startled by an appearance from an English relative of my skateboarding cousin Throckmorton