The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

First published: 1934

Type of work: Mystery

Time of work: 1930

Locale: Fenchurch St. Paul and the surrounding fen country of East Anglia, England

Principal Characters:

• Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey, an aristocratic amateur sleuth
• Bunter, his valet
• The Reverend Theodore Venables, the rector of Fenchurch St. Paul
• Agnes Venables, his wife
• William Thoday, a farmer in Fenchurch St. Paul
• Geoffrey Deacon, William Thoday’s onetime butler and Mary Thoday’s first husband, now deceased
• Mary Thoday, the widow of Geoffrey Deacon and wife of William Thoday
• James Thoday, William Thoday’s brother, a member of the merchant marine
• Potty Peake, the village idiot
• Sir Henry Thorpe, an ailing and impoverished knight of the shire
• Lady Thorpe, his wife
• Hilary Thorpe, the fifteen-year-old daughter of Sir Henry and Lady Thorpe
• Nobby Cranton, a London jewel thief

The Novel

Returning to London on New Year’s Eve after a Christmas visit to his brother, Gerald, Duke of Denver, Lord Peter Wimsey drives his Daimler into a ditch. He and his valet, Bunter, take refuge in the nearby East Anglian village of Fenchurch St. Paul, where they are welcomed by the rector, Theodore Venables, and his wife, Agnes.

Agnes and Theodore tell Lord Peter that he has arrived at a historic moment, for the rector plans to ring in the new year with 15,840 peals of Kent Treble Bob Major, thus equaling the performance of the College Youths in 1868. When William Thoday succumbs to influenza, Venables thinks that he must abandon this ambitious scheme, but Lord Peter volunteers to substitute for the ailing ringer and performs admirably.

Once Lord Peter’s car is repaired, he and Bunter leave the village with no plans ever to return—until Venables sends them a note about a curious development. Lady Thorpe had died on January 1 and was buried in the churchyard. Her husband had died the following spring, and when the grave was opened so that Sir Henry could be placed beside his wife, another corpse was found there. Even more mysterious, the face had been smashed and the hands cut off to prevent identification.

As Lord Peter and Superintendent Blundell try to determine the identity of the corpse, the method of death (there are no signs that the body was subjected to violence before its demise), and the motive for the murder and the mutilation, they discover that another mystery is connected with this one. In 1914, at the wedding of Sir Henry Thorpe, a wealthy relative was robbed of a valuable emerald necklace. Among those implicated were Geoffrey Deacon, his wife, Mary, and Cranton, a London jewel thief. Deacon and Cranton were sent to jail, but the jewels were never recovered. Because Deacon was the Thorpes’ butler, Sir Henry impoverished himself to pay for the necklace.

Deacon escaped from prison in 1918, but his body was discovered in a stone quarry in 1920. The year of his death was thought to be 1918. Mary and her family had moved away because of the scandal, but after Deacon’s death, she married William Thoday and returned to Fenchurch St. Paul.

In fact, though, Deacon had not died in 1918. Instead, after escaping from jail, he killed a soldier home on leave and then, mistaken for that man, was sent back to the Western Front. Wounded, he had been nursed by a Frenchwoman, whom he later married. Fearing arrest for theft, jailbreaking, and murder, he had never returned to England to retrieve the necklace.

When Deacon was pressed for money, he arranged with Cranton to go to Fenchurch St. Paul. Shortly before New Year’s Day, he reached the village, but he never got the jewels. William Thoday found him in the church and recognized him. If anyone else were to see Deacon, Thoday knew that his own marriage to Mary would be annulled and their two daughters declared bastards. He therefore tied Deacon to a post in the church belfry, promising to give him two hundred pounds and send him back to France.

Then Thoday was incapacitated by the flu. Trapped in the belfry during the nine-hour ringing of the bells, Deacon died of a stroke; Thoday’s brother James found the body when he went to release Deacon, mutilated it to prevent recognition, and disposed of it in the least conspicuous and most convenient spot, the new grave in the churchyard.

Since only a few people know the whole story, William and Mary can quietly remarry without scandalizing the village. Lord Peter deciphers the cryptogram that Deacon gave Cranton and so retrieves the missing emeralds. Mrs. Wilbraham, a member of the community, buys them back from Sir Henry’s daughter Hilary and later leaves the rest of her estate to the girl, too. Hilary now can fulfill her dreams of attending Oxford and becoming a writer.

The Characters

Dorothy L. Sayers gives Lord Peter Wimsey a less prominent role in this novel than she does in her other detective fiction. Hilary Thorpe finds the cryptogram that leads to the discovery of the jewels, Venables helps decode it, and members of the regular British and French police forces provide vital information.

Still, Lord Peter is the first to recognize the significance of the cryptogram’s message and the first to realize that Deacon did not die in 1918. His typically brilliant intuition is matched by his arcane knowledge, in this novel of campanology and the history of the draining of the fens in East Anglia. He also remains indifferent to religion and more interested in the life of the common people than in his aristocratic relatives at Denver.

Bunter, his valet, is also his usually resourceful self. He pilfers a crucial letter from the post office, and he obliges his master in less dramatic ways as well. He supplies a wreath in Lord Peter’s name for Lady Thorpe’s funeral and has the prayer books ready for Sunday service.

In addition to meeting these two regulars of Sayers’ mysteries, the reader encounters a number of fascinating villagers. There are only about three hundred people living in Fenchurch St. Paul, and the reader feels he has met most of them by the end of the book. Each of the bell-ringers has his own personality, from the seventy-five-year-old Hezekiah Lavendar down to the young, nervous Walter Pratt. The Reverend Theodore Venables, modeled after Sayers’ father, Reverend Henry Sayers, is scholarly, absentminded, and unconcerned with his own comfort when a parishioner needs help. Even the secular Lord Peter admires Venables’ zeal.

Just as Sayers used her father to create the rector of Fenchurch St. Paul, she uses her adolescent self as a model for Hilary Thorpe. Like Sayers at fifteen, Hilary wants to attend Oxford and become a writer. She speaks out for women’s rights and demonstrates much sense and ability.

Other characters provide the novel with suspects and humor. Cranton is a genteel, cowardly, witty thief who has good reason to kill Deacon. Deacon never delivered the diamonds, so Cranton was imprisoned for a theft that Deacon committed. William Thoday, a hardworking farmer, also has a motive, and his house is the closest to the church and graveyard. His brother, James, arrives just before New Year’s and leaves mysteriously just after the burial of the corpse. Potty Peake, who sounds very much like Robert Browning’s half-civilized Caliban, appears at strange moments and offers suspicious comments about ropes, strangers, and hangings.

Critical Context

For Edmund Wilson and some other readers, The Nine Tailors is “that book about campanology.” Sayers became an expert on the subject while working on the novel, and after its publication she was made an honorary member of several bell-ringers’ groups as well as a vice president of the Campanological Society of Great Britain. Her notebooks, filled with notations of various changes, attest her meticulous concern for accuracy, and she prided herself that even longtime practitioners detected only three minor errors. Readers less captious than Wilson either enjoyed or ignored the technicalities of campanology; the book sold 100,000 copies in Great Britain within two months and was quickly translated into half a dozen languages.

More innovative than Sayers’ use of campanology is her treatment of the murder. After all, literary detectives have always possessed specialized knowledge, whether of cigar ash or poison. Lord Peter’s use of his knowledge of bell-ringing to solve the cryptogram is thus a convention of the genre. Another convention is that the murderer be a villain who is apprehended and punished. The world of the mystery is essentially comic despite the presence of death. Its world is orderly; though the murder upsets that order, the violation is only temporary, and with the discovery and removal of the criminal, peace returns.

Here the tenor is closer to classical tragedy. Lord Peter sets out to solve the riddle of the murder, only to find that he is the man he has been seeking. Yet even that solution is complicated by the fact that no one individual is responsible. William Thoday tied Deacon to a post in the belfry, but he acted to protect Mary and had no evil intentions. Lord Peter, the rector, and the other bell-ringers killed Deacon, but, again, they acted in ignorance. The knowledge of his part in Deacon’s death drives William Thoday to kill himself, but what expiation remains for the others? The questions of the corpse and the emeralds are answered, but the ways of Providence remain mysterious and unsettling.

Bibliography

Brabazon, James. Dorothy Sayers: A Biography, 1981.

Durkin, Mary Brian. Dorothy L. Sayers, 1980.

Gaillard, Dawson. Dorothy L. Sayers, 1980.

Hannay, Margaret, ed. As Her Whimsey Took Her: Critical Essays on the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers, 1979.

Hone, Ralph E. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Literary Biography, 1979.

Tischler, Nancy M. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Pilgrim Soul, 1980.