Striding Folly Read Free Page B

except to start up useful trains of thought. The Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot was almost brainless but he knew all about stocks and shares. This was the age of the Hatry scandals and the papers were filled with reports of dubious financial undertakings. Freddy helped to bring to book the murderer in Whose Body?
        Unlike so many fictional detectives, Wimsey had a proper respect for the police. A fool detective, Inspector Sugg, did appear in Whose Body? and Clouds of Witness , and was telephoned in Unnatural Death , but was not heard of thereafter. The painstaking, unsurprisable Inspector Charles Parker – later promoted Chief Inspector – was an admirable foil for the mercurial Wimsey. Parker, who paid a pound a week for rooms in Great Ormond Street, was educated at Barrow-in-Furness Grammar School, and his only hobby was reading Biblical commentaries. If Miss Sayers had only invented Parker and left Wimsey out of things, we should still have a valuable asset in the detective fiction market. For Parker is a fully rounded character. His hobby, which sounds on the surface so outlandish, is in keeping. Any senior policeman who wants to keep sane takes up some kind of hobby remote from his daily round, painting, gliding, violin making, or, like Parker, some esoteric form of scholarship. They usually, however, keep their hobbies very quiet even from their colleagues, so it would seem that Miss Sayers must have got to know the police, or at least one policeman, very well indeed. It was a great convenience to marry Parker to Wimsey’s sister, and thus have a Chief Inspector always on tap.
        Being a lord, naturally Wimsey would have access to the finest K.C. in the country, Sir Impey Biggs, handsome Member of Parliament and well known canary breeder. And the great pathologist Sir James Lubbock was always accessible to him. One thing all freelance investigators must have is unlimited wealth. The moderns, like Bond, draw on the state or an agency like U.N.C.L.E. Wimsey was wealthy in his own right. He was able, in an age of Depression and slumps to buy whatever he wanted. He could pay Bunter the fantastic wage of £200 a year, an unparalleled sum for an ‘all found’ situation in 1923. In 1938 he could afford to set up house in the West End with a staff of eight servants besides Bunter and a housekeeper. His money, we are told, did not come from the Denver estates, which were run at a loss, but from London property. Wimsey could not only buy anything, but anybody. He had only to crackle a banknote for hidden files and secrets to be instantly revealed to him and the glint of silver bought him the devotion of small children, char-women, porters and all the lower orders.
        It has been said that contemporary fiction gives a better idea of the social life of a period than any learned treatise written in retrospect. Wimsey is now a period piece and if we had no other record of the years 1923–38 than the dozen or so books featuring him, what could we learn from them of that era? It is surprising, taking them altogether, how much social history is, accidentally as it were, packed into them. Oddly enough, much of what we think of today as new, has been about for half a century. This applies both to things and to attitudes. In 1923 Bunter was using a wide angled lens in his photographic work, and travelling on the underground with tickets bought from a machine. The young were spending hours in cafes discussing ‘free love, the prurience of prudery, D. H. Lawrence, and the immoral significance of long skirts’.* A character asks ‘have you heard Robert Snoates recite his own verse to the tom-tom and pennywhistle?’*
    * Clouds of Witness , p. 103.
        It is unlikely that Miss Sayers heard such a recital; she was satirising the Bloomsbury fringe of the twenties, which has been done, alas all too often. It is amazing what she got away with. Her descriptions of the Chelsea goings-on in Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club would have