Striding Folly Read Free

absolutely consistent, he never does an un-Wimseylike thing or utters an un-Wimseylike speech. The first hint we have of him is in the first volume of verse published in 1916. It is called A Man Greatly Gifted and the subject is likened to an elusive jester. Wimsey was certainly greatly gifted.
     
He was a respectable scholar in five or six languages, a musician of some skill and more understanding, something of an expert in toxicology, a collector of rare editions, an entertaining man-about-town, and a common sensationalist . . . His passion for the unexplored led him to unravel the emotional history of Income Tax collectors and to find out where his own drains led to. *
    * Clouds of Witness , p. 71.
     
    He could perhaps have been the sad ghost of a lost war-time lover. Oxford, as everywhere else in the country, was filled with bereaved women, but it may have been more noticeable in university towns when a whole year’s intake could be wiped out in France in less than an hour. The jester simile of the poem is echoed throughout all the Wimsey books, becoming rather absurd in Murder Must Advertise when his lordship rushes round the countryside disguised in a harlequin costume, enticing a wanton woman to her destruction with a tune played on a whistle.
        The pose, however, of never taking things seriously is just a front which he found difficult to reconcile with his conscience.
        He had taken up criminology as a hobby or, as we would say nowadays, a therapy to help him over his ghastly war experiences. He found it exciting and he enjoyed it – up to a point. When it was clear that his investigations were likely to lead a man to the scaffold, he despised himself for becoming involved because, unlike the professional policeman, he did not rely on the job for his living. Like all the best detectives in fiction Wimsey was an amateur in the true sense of the word. From the first book to the last he never ceased to have bad dreams about the villains he brought to justice. He shied away from responsibility. As his mother who, in spite of her apparent scattiness understood him very well, said, giving orders for nearly four years to men to go and get blown to pieces ‘gives you an inhibition, or an exhibition, or something, of nerves’. Miss Sayers was one of the few detective writers to make her hero follow through the consequences of his work, but fortunately for his peace of mind, not all his villains reached the scaffold. Two of the nicer characters took ‘the gentleman’s way out’. Penberthy in Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club shoots himself as becomes an ex-officer, and Tallboy in Murder Must Advertise allows himself to be run over. In Five Red Herrings the murder was accidental. In Unnatural Death the villainess, quite the nastiest character Miss Sayers created, commits suicide, and the victim is a suicide in Clouds of Witness . Miss Sayers does not shrink from detailed descriptions of the state of her victims, but she is sparing of corpses; in only two books are there more than one.
        Wimsey’s looks and behaviour were meant to give the impression of the typical ‘silly ass’ of the period. He had straw coloured hair which romantic young ladies saw as gold. A long face, grey eyes and a pointed chin. A prominent nose which nothing could disguise but which proclaimed his aristocratic breeding. He wore his collars high, affected a monocle which was really a powerful magnifying glass and a proceeding which no reputable eye specialist would recommend, particularly in sunny weather. He carried a sword stick marked out in inches, with a compass let in the top. He was short for a romantic character, standing only 5 ft 9 ins., but strong as steel, expert, of course, at ju-jitsu. On only three occasions are we told that he carried a revolver, and only once is it fired but even then only to disarm the villain. He smoked a pipe, cigarettes or cigars as the fancy takes him. His passions are Bach, John Donne and