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feather_ghyll) wrote2023-01-22 04:25 pm
feather_ghyll) wrote2023-01-22 04:25 pm
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REVIEW: The Documents in the Case
The Documents in the Case: Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace, Hodder & Stoughton, 2016
I got it into my head that I should reread all the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries in order. You see, I stumbled across ‘Whose Body?’, I think, at university and read them as I came across copes thereafter. This meant I was disappointed by the non-appearance of Harriet Vane in several. Before proceeding to do that, because I’m a completist, I decided to read ‘The Documents in the Case’ (for the first time), which does not feature Wimsey and is in a somewhat different style.
First, I should say I got a modern reprint with an introduction by Libby Purves, which I suspect I shouldn’t have read before the story proper, as it guides you towards what will happen. Although this isn’t a conventional whodunnit, as you get to have a good idea of who and why well before the end, so it’s more a question of whether it can be proved. The conceit is that this is a dossier, mainly of letters, but with some statements sent by the son of the deceased to the director of public prosecutions, asking for the murderer to be convicted. The murder victim’s name is George Harrison, which has probably elicited a snigger from every new reader since the Beatles made it big, but Sayers couldn’t have known that. (Robert Eustace is apparently a pseudonym for a scientist who made useful suggestions for the plot, quite an acknowledgement.)
I wasn’t convinced that the epistolary form is always that successful – we get a bit of narrative about the DPP’s reaction when he’s finished reading it, and even in the dossier, we have statements from Paul Harrison, the son, who simply can’t believe the verdict of accidental death, and his somewhat unwilling helper, filling in the gaps. It had occurred to me to wonder how the younger Harrison had got hold of certain very incriminatory letters, and we do learn how. But it’s as if Sayers strains to tell the story wholly through those letters.
The book was published in 1930. The story starts in 1929, when two young men, the artist Lathom and the writer Munting, take up a maisonette at Bayswater, a very respectable and middle-class part of London at the time. The owner of the property is Mr Harrison, who has a responsible job in electricity and is in his fifties, having remarried a much younger woman, Margaret. Mrs Harrison has a companion, Miss Milsom, who helps with the cooking, although, along with watercolours, cooking is one of Harrison’s interests.
The scene is set by letters from two characters who take an opposing view on almost everything. As the two creatives, who decided to rent jointly because they went to the same public school, get more involved with the downstairs people, it becomes clear that it is not a happy household. Both men are successful at their work, with Lathom’s brilliant portrait of Mrs Harrison earning acclaim, and a novel that had been previously rejected becoming a hit for Munting. This allows him to get married sooner rather than later to his fiancée Elizabeth (arguably a precursor to Harriet Vane), and clear out, shortly followed by Lathom. But by October 1929, both men arrive in Devon, where Harrison has gone for a bachelor-like holiday, to find him dead.
The dossier is set out chronologically, so the reader knows more than any one character did at the time. I felt vindicated, because a detail had stuck out to me from when I first read it, and it took Paul Harrison much longer to pick up on it, that turned out to be crucial. Sayers has fun at the expense of her profession – Harrison is disparaging of Munting’s more waffly passages, and I had some sympathy with him, because, boy, does it get metaphysical.
It’s also striking that the rising generation is obsessed with not being Victorian, whatever that means, while I, with my own sense of morality and from a very different background, would argue that it is fine to take a stance against murder, really. There’s a reference to the ‘eighties’ and it was with a bit of a shock that I realised that that was the 1880s, while this book is about events very nearly a century ago, and yet, with every use of the word ‘modern’, I was aware there was another world war, a lot of scientific developments and wave after wave of female graduates between me and the period in which the book is set. (The trains seem to have run better then, though.)
But Sayers is also very adept at showing that Paul Harrison, an engineer, and obviously driven by great love for his father, is, like his father, a man of little imagination, with his own prejudices, whereas we, having had a sight of his love letters, have more sympathy for Jack Munting. I even had a bit more sympathy for the female characters than Harrison junior, or at least I felt some more equivocation. Yes, Margaret Harrison and Aggie Milsom can be contrasted with Elizabeth Munting, who is shown to have common sense and, as she too is a writer, will continue working after getting married. It’s not a flattering contrast. But there is just a bit of blinkered privilege from the male characters about women, married or single. Having said that, my sympathies were broadly where they should be, and, as ever, Sayers never shirks the fact that in that era, conviction for murder meant hanging. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed this much more than ‘Portrait of a Murderer’ by Anne Meredith and ‘The Santa Klaus Murder’ by Muriel Doriel Hay, the most recent Golden Age mysteries I’ve read.
Finally, if you’re doing a reprint in the twenty-first century, you might usefully fix the typos, publishers. (Which means that, despite my best efforts, there’ll be a few in this review, although I've tried to edit them out on 2/1/24.)
I got it into my head that I should reread all the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries in order. You see, I stumbled across ‘Whose Body?’, I think, at university and read them as I came across copes thereafter. This meant I was disappointed by the non-appearance of Harriet Vane in several. Before proceeding to do that, because I’m a completist, I decided to read ‘The Documents in the Case’ (for the first time), which does not feature Wimsey and is in a somewhat different style.
First, I should say I got a modern reprint with an introduction by Libby Purves, which I suspect I shouldn’t have read before the story proper, as it guides you towards what will happen. Although this isn’t a conventional whodunnit, as you get to have a good idea of who and why well before the end, so it’s more a question of whether it can be proved. The conceit is that this is a dossier, mainly of letters, but with some statements sent by the son of the deceased to the director of public prosecutions, asking for the murderer to be convicted. The murder victim’s name is George Harrison, which has probably elicited a snigger from every new reader since the Beatles made it big, but Sayers couldn’t have known that. (Robert Eustace is apparently a pseudonym for a scientist who made useful suggestions for the plot, quite an acknowledgement.)
I wasn’t convinced that the epistolary form is always that successful – we get a bit of narrative about the DPP’s reaction when he’s finished reading it, and even in the dossier, we have statements from Paul Harrison, the son, who simply can’t believe the verdict of accidental death, and his somewhat unwilling helper, filling in the gaps. It had occurred to me to wonder how the younger Harrison had got hold of certain very incriminatory letters, and we do learn how. But it’s as if Sayers strains to tell the story wholly through those letters.
The book was published in 1930. The story starts in 1929, when two young men, the artist Lathom and the writer Munting, take up a maisonette at Bayswater, a very respectable and middle-class part of London at the time. The owner of the property is Mr Harrison, who has a responsible job in electricity and is in his fifties, having remarried a much younger woman, Margaret. Mrs Harrison has a companion, Miss Milsom, who helps with the cooking, although, along with watercolours, cooking is one of Harrison’s interests.
The scene is set by letters from two characters who take an opposing view on almost everything. As the two creatives, who decided to rent jointly because they went to the same public school, get more involved with the downstairs people, it becomes clear that it is not a happy household. Both men are successful at their work, with Lathom’s brilliant portrait of Mrs Harrison earning acclaim, and a novel that had been previously rejected becoming a hit for Munting. This allows him to get married sooner rather than later to his fiancée Elizabeth (arguably a precursor to Harriet Vane), and clear out, shortly followed by Lathom. But by October 1929, both men arrive in Devon, where Harrison has gone for a bachelor-like holiday, to find him dead.
The dossier is set out chronologically, so the reader knows more than any one character did at the time. I felt vindicated, because a detail had stuck out to me from when I first read it, and it took Paul Harrison much longer to pick up on it, that turned out to be crucial. Sayers has fun at the expense of her profession – Harrison is disparaging of Munting’s more waffly passages, and I had some sympathy with him, because, boy, does it get metaphysical.
It’s also striking that the rising generation is obsessed with not being Victorian, whatever that means, while I, with my own sense of morality and from a very different background, would argue that it is fine to take a stance against murder, really. There’s a reference to the ‘eighties’ and it was with a bit of a shock that I realised that that was the 1880s, while this book is about events very nearly a century ago, and yet, with every use of the word ‘modern’, I was aware there was another world war, a lot of scientific developments and wave after wave of female graduates between me and the period in which the book is set. (The trains seem to have run better then, though.)
But Sayers is also very adept at showing that Paul Harrison, an engineer, and obviously driven by great love for his father, is, like his father, a man of little imagination, with his own prejudices, whereas we, having had a sight of his love letters, have more sympathy for Jack Munting. I even had a bit more sympathy for the female characters than Harrison junior, or at least I felt some more equivocation. Yes, Margaret Harrison and Aggie Milsom can be contrasted with Elizabeth Munting, who is shown to have common sense and, as she too is a writer, will continue working after getting married. It’s not a flattering contrast. But there is just a bit of blinkered privilege from the male characters about women, married or single. Having said that, my sympathies were broadly where they should be, and, as ever, Sayers never shirks the fact that in that era, conviction for murder meant hanging. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed this much more than ‘Portrait of a Murderer’ by Anne Meredith and ‘The Santa Klaus Murder’ by Muriel Doriel Hay, the most recent Golden Age mysteries I’ve read.
Finally, if you’re doing a reprint in the twenty-first century, you might usefully fix the typos, publishers. (Which means that, despite my best efforts, there’ll be a few in this review, although I've tried to edit them out on 2/1/24.)