The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers, 1934 ★★★

Ask Not for Whom the Bells Toll...

Classic English murder novels of the early 20^th century are sometimes called “mystery cozies,” conjuring up notions of tea at a warm fireplace, damask upholstery, and a pair of turned-up boots politely protruding from the farthest corner.

I’d like to call The Nine Tailors a “cozy,” in that it is an utterly English novel of strict social conventions and consummate discretion, except I was hardly cozy while reading it.

The problem wasn’t the goriness of the main crime, though a dead man found in someone else’s grave with his hands lopped off and his face bashed in is pretty gory territory, however discretely described. Nor was it the uneasiness of the setting, a small church in the English fenlands peopled by a community with dirty secrets to hide.

No, for me it was the bells. Those bells! Oh, but Dorothy does go on about those bells. They got to me like Quasimodo!

The bells are the central symbolic element and thematic motif of The Nine Tailors. Eight bells occupy the steeple in Fenchurch St. Paul, and they form a kind of social telegraph ringing in local events, like deaths. The bells also are what connect Lord Peter Wimsey to Fenchurch St. Paul.

One snowy night Wimsey is being driven by his faithful manservant, Bunter, when the car runs into a ditch near the town. Seeking help on foot, he meets the friendly local rector and is invited to participate in a nine-hour bell-ringing blowout commemorating New Year's Eve. It so happens, among his many other talents, Wimsey is an experienced hand with the bell rope. He agrees, and a friendship is formed. When the aforementioned body turns up months later in the church graveyard, the rector is reminded of Wimsey's notoriety for solving crimes, and asks he come back to lend a hand. The obliging lord agrees.

“I’m a terrific success at puttering round asking sloppy questions,” he says. “And I can put away quite a lot of beer in a good cause.”

Sayers did a lot of research into the arcane art of bell-ringing, or campanology, and she lets you know it. The opening section, of Wimsey being drafted into service for that nine-hour ding-dong, features Wimsey talking shop with the enthusiastic rector, Venables, and the seven regular ringers whom Wimsey joins for the occasion. Terms like “dodges,” “changes,” “bobs,” and “courses” are employed with casual familiarity. The book is subtitled Changes Rung on an Old Theme In Two Short Touches and Two Full Peals, and a kind of ritualized veneration of the art and craft of ringing bells in rigid sequence is quickly established and continued all the way through to the end. The bells even have special individual names: The largest, a tenor bell, is called “Tailor Paul,” “two mortal tons of bawling bronze,” and is rung nine times whenever a man of the town dies, hence supplying the book’s offbeat title.

All of this would seem daft and easy to dismiss if not for Sayers’ brilliant construction. The bells of Fenchurch St. Paul provide not only atmosphere and conversation but the key to solving the murder, in two different ways. The subtle intricacy of Sayers’ design here is something to behold, however hard to explain. I found myself as much in awe of her writing skills as I was bored with the crime itself.

It’s a long time getting to the murder, some fifty pages packed with bell talk as well as long passages of conversational exposition. Sayers does this thing I found annoying, where instead of describing a situation she has one speaker talk on and on, answering questions which are not written out and providing running commentary on the action so readers can know what is happening without narrative intrusion:

“Yes, Miss Hilary. We’re going to have a try at Stedman’s. They’re difficult to ring, are Stedman’s, but very fine music when you get them going proper. Mind your head, Miss Hilary. A full peal of 5,040 we’re going to give them – that’s three hours. It’s a fortnit thing as Will Thoday’s all right again, because neither Tom Tebbutt nor young George Wilderspin is what you might call reliable in Stedman’s, and of course, Wally Prat’s no good at all. Excuse me one minute, Miss Hilary, while I gathers up my traps…”

This sort of prose has its charm, but for a reader like me entering the world of Peter Wimsey for the first time, it feels like a lot of fat-chewing in place of a plot. Not that Nine Tailors lacks a plot – it just takes its time arriving, and when it finally does, it meanders while Wimsey strolls Fenchurch St. Paul as well as London and France in search of clues. Most of the action we read of consists of Wimsey and his associates hypothesizing over what possible courses of action might have led to the matter under investigation. As mystery cozies go, I found this one a bit damp.

Dorothy L. Sayers lived until 1957 and stayed active as a writer up to the end of her life, producing plays, literary criticisms and scholarly examinations of Christianity and feminism. But she stopped producing her famous Wimsey novels after 1937.
Image from https://www.rowohlt.de/autorin/dorothy-l-sayers-1462

Sayers’ brilliance comes through in other ways. The riddle of the bells is revealed at the end with bracing elan, and until then you have other elements of quality to consider. The town of Fenchurch St. Paul takes on a character all its own that is far more interesting than that extra corpse in the graveyard, or an emerald necklace which disappeared after a burglary years ago. In the Rev. Venables, Sayers develops an amusingly windy curate of estimable character, a sturdy social cornerstone despite himself.

There’s also young Hilary, the daughter of a nobleman who dreams of going to college at a time when women were expected to stop their schooling at 18 and find husbands. Hilary fancies the idea of becoming a novelist someday, figuring she can do as well at it as any man.

“You don’t want experience for writing novels,” she explains. “People write them at Oxford and they sell like billy-ho. All about how awful everything was at school.” Take that, Evelyn Waugh!

Sayers was a woman of many parts. According to her Wikipedia entry, she was both an active feminist and a Christian humanist who authored scholarly treatises on Anglican doctrine. In addition to her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels, she wrote poetry and translated works like Dante’s Divine Comedy. She even had a successful career as an advertising copywriter, which was incorporated into an earlier Wimsey book, Murder Must Advertise.

The Nine Tailors picks up considerable steam toward the end, as the mystery comes into sharper focus thanks to such fresh elements as a post restante letter Wimsey’s manservant snatches with some sleight of hand, and an amusing scoundrel suspected of the necklace heist who complains when caught: “I think it’s damned slack of you flatties not to have dug me out earlier. What we pay rates and taxes for I don’t know.”

Wimsey has an annoying habit of saying he has everything figured out without explaining what or how, about the only time he doesn’t go on and on about something, but the mystery is one that does make sense looked at from either end, something you can’t say for all mystery cozies, even many good ones.

Most impressively, there is a metaphysical quality to the steeple bells, a looming ominousness as they are considered in turn by various characters throughout the book. They take on a dreadful, living quality, making a noise described as “terribly sweet and threatening.”

Even when they aren’t ringing, the bells carry the aura of menace. One man describes a momentary experience up in the belfry as feeling “as if there might be people standing round.”

“And I felt as if there was hundreds of eyes watching me. Talk about the heebee-jeebees!”

Sayers often makes the point that the church at Fenchurch St. Paul connects the people of the town not only to each other but those who have come and gone before. With that in mind, the bells seem to represent a kind of divine, all-seeing presence capable not only of sound and sight but, as we come to discover, harsh and terrible retribution. It’s an unsettling note on which to end things, hardly the stuff of conventional mystery cozies, and sticks with you after the more plodding parts of Nine Tailors are forgotten.