Lord Peter Wimsey

Last semester, I had the beautiful luck of discovering the perfectly delightful Lord Peter Wimsey. Dorothy Sayers' detective novels have been on my to-read list for eons, but somehow I never got around to reading them. Until now.

Since I couldn't find Whose Body?, the first in the series, I got a book of short stories to peruse. Because of all that curricular reading, I wanted something that I could read in short bursts whenever I found a few smidgens of free time, or simply couldn't bear the thought of another reading from Aristotle's Categories (no matter how beautifully logical you are, Aristotle, you can be rather dry and dull from time to time).

And Lord Peter is simply the most wonderful non-existent person I have had the very great pleasure of meeting in a very long time (enough superlatives for you?). He reminds me a little of P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, but with a rather larger endowment of mental acumen. He even has an amazing butler sidekick who is the very model of discretion and loyalty. (For those of you who have not made the acquaintance of Bertie and his inimitable valet, Jeeves, I can but offer my most sincere sympathy. You have not lived.)

As well as the comic genius of Wooster and Jeeves, Wimsey also brought G. K. Chesterton's crime-solving priest Fr. Brown to mind as well. In The Blue Cross, Fr. Brown's child-like simplicity and world-view cloak an astounding understanding of the way in which the human mind and soul work. As Fr. Brown simply remarks, however, "Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?"

Wimsey often wears the same kind of abstracted expression on his face that Fr. Brown wears. In The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps That Ran, Wimsey has seen something that has to do with the mystery, but he cannot for the life of him recall what it was. Eventually he puzzles his way through it, an extraordinary mix of abstraction and brilliance.

Lord Peter has often been criticized as being "too perfect". He does have flaws (a fear of responsibility, shell-shock), but they are few, and his list of skills and talents grows as the stories go on. In some ways, Lord Peter does come across as a shallow character, made to meet the requirements of the story at hand without the depth that would be expected of a character in a full-length novel (true, these stories aren't full-length; nevertheless, Lord Peter's character is unusually thin in some stories, even for a genre where character development takes a back seat to plot.) In "The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba" , Lord Peter tackles the requisite secret ring of thieves in the necessary melodramatic fashion. A few of the other stories are equally spectacular, but equally enjoyable as well.

It is only when Lord Peter interacts with the various members of his family (nephew, wife, sons) that he seems more authentic. In most stories, Lord Peter is the detective extraordinaire, aided quite capably by his man, Bunter, but still intangible. With his family, Lord Peter is allowed to show more than his merely professional attitudes and abilities. Indeed, in Talboys, the last of the stories, Sayers paints a delightfully full-bodied picture of Lord Peter with his wife and sons, solving a mystery and fending off an over-zealous would-be child-rearing expert at one and the same time. Talboys sealed my fate as a Wimsey fangirl. While reading it, I caught distinct echoes of the often-chaotic events that accompany a family of any size, including my own. Perhaps because this is the scenario with which I am most familiar, Talboys seemed to me the most real of these tales. However exciting and glamorous Lord Peter's previous life as a detective was, the truest adventures are those which take place in the harum-scarum reality of family life.