The Imperial Detective:

Empire and Englishness in the Detective Fiction of

Dorothy L. Sayers and P. D. James.

Lynette Gaye Field

Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours in English.
Graduate Diploma in English.

This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University
of Western Australia, School of Social and Cultural Studies, Discipline of
English and Cultural Studies.
2011
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
STATEMENT OF CONTRIBUTION v

ABSTRACT vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE 27
This England

CHAPTER TWO 70
At War

CHAPTER THREE 110

Imperial Adventures

CHAPTER FOUR 151

At Home

AFTERWORD 194

WORKS CITED 199

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STATEMENT OF CANDIDATE CONTRIBUTION

I declare that the thesis is my own composition with all sources acknowledged and my
contribution clearly identified. The thesis has been completed during the course of
enrolment in this degree at The University of Western Australia and has not previously
been accepted for a degree at this or any other institution.

This bibliographical style for this thesis is MLA (Parenthetical).

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ABSTRACT

Dorothy L. Sayers and P. D. James are writers of classical detective fiction whose work
is firmly anchored to a recognisably English culture, yet little attention has been given
to this aspect of their work. I seek to redress this. Using Simon Gikandi’s concept of
“the incomplete project of colonisation” (Maps of Englishness 9) I argue that within the
works of Sayers and James the British Empire informs and complicates notions of
Englishness. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and James’s Adam Dalgliesh share, with
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, both detecting expertise and the character of
the “imperial detective”. Building on Caroline Reitz’s notion of the “heroic imperial
detective” (Detecting the Nation 78) who appeared in literary works at the end of the
nineteenth century, I argue that both Lord Peter Wimsey and Adam Dalgliesh continue
this tradition. The appearance of the “imperial detective” is linked to high points of
anxiety about the state of the British Empire. Wimsey’s principal detective endeavours
date from 1923–1937 while Adam Dalgliesh first appeared in 1962 and his latest case,
The Private Patient was published in 2008. Throughout the narratives both detectives
endorse and practise a code of behaviour firmly yoked to ideologies of masculine
capability current in late nineteenth-century Imperial England, including an ideology of
chivalric gentlemanliness. As “imperial detectives”, Wimsey and Dalgliesh enforce
their version of Englishness. They practise imperial domesticity during their detective
work, assessing and investigating English homes; they register the cultural and personal
distress of both World Wars; they re-create colonial adventures within the shores of
England and in so doing they reinforce and create a catalogue of idealised English
values. At all times, my thesis seeks to read the figure of the “imperial detective” as a
method of negotiating anxieties about a dwindling Empire, during the inter-war years in
Wimsey’s case and of the post 1960 era for Dalgliesh. In doing so, I will argue, the
detective series, separately and together, form a continuum with late nineteenth-century
imperial ideologies, well after that era has drawn to a close.
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ACKNOWLEDEGMENTS
To Winthrop Professor Brenda Walker I offer my sincere thanks for her enthusiasm and
for her mentoring throughout what was, in the end, a very long project.

Professor Judith Johnston has given generously of her time, knowledge and unique
nurturing, which I value greatly. Associate Professor Kieran Dolin’s calm, incisive
reading of my work has been invaluable. Professor Michael Levine has always
provided helpful advice and assistance.

The English Department at The University of Western Australia have supported me

throughout. Associate Professor Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Professor Van Ikin, Professor
Andrew Lynch and Associate Professor Delys Bird have all assisted and encouraged me
along the way. The collegial and inclusive environment of the department made my
postgraduate experience a truly special one.

To The University of Western Australia I offer my sincere gratitude in awarding me an

Australian Postgraduate Award. I also thank the University for providing a
Postgraduate Travel Award which allowed me to carry out research into the P. D. James
manuscript collection at Girton College, Cambridge. Kate Perry, the archivist at Girton
was generous with her assistance.

To the Nineteenth-Century group, especially Monica Anderson and Delphine

McFarlane, thank you for your wisdom and friendship. Kelly Shepherd, Juliet Wege,
Margo Darbyshire and Michele Blacklock were friends who wanted to listen. Andrew
Blacklock and Tracey Lewis generously read the final drafts. Thank you.

Thank you to my parents Heather and Kevin Jones for giving me the love of learning.
To Nigel, Toby and Bea Field, you are the reason for completing this project, it is your
love that got me through to the end.
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INTRODUCTION

“England with all thy faults, I love thee still.”

Dorothy. L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors (235)

“Most of us, whatever our discontents, know that we are exceptionally

privileged to be citizens of this United Kingdom.”
P. D. James, “Address to the BBC Governors” (241)

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) and P. D. James (1920-) are writers of detective fiction
whose work is firmly anchored to a recognisably English culture, yet little critical
attention has been paid to the question of Englishness within their work. Indeed, in
James’s case, as Louise Harrington has noted, surprisingly little critical attention of any
kind has been devoted to her writing (495). Yet the contribution of both authors to the
genre of detective fiction is substantial in both fictional and critical terms. Sayers,
between 1923 and 1937, published twelve novels, eleven of which feature her
aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey.1 She also wrote numerous short stories, many
of which feature Wimsey, but also include a variety of “non-Wimsey” tales. In addition
Sayers wrote a number of critical works, of which her 1928 introductory essay to The
Omnibus of Crime is most notable.2 P. D. James, whose first novel Cover Her Face
was published in 1962, has written eighteen novels to date, fourteen of which feature
the introspective policeman, Adam Dalgliesh, the most recent being The Private Patient
in 2008. The Maul and the Pear Tree (1971), written with T. A. Critchley, is James’s
examination of the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway murders. In 2009 James published her
second non-fiction work, Talking about Detective Fiction which presents her views on
the genre. The literary connection between Sayers and James is profound in their
formation of an understanding of Englishness and, in particular, in their creation of a
detective who imbues and enacts an idealised form of an English identity which is
acutely concerned with the imperial position of England.
Both Sayers and James work within the conventions of what Charles Rzepka
terms “classic” or “analytic” stories of detection (Detective Fiction 13).3 Sayers and
James are both alumni of the Detection Club, the association of crime writers whose

1
The “non-Wimsey” book is the epistolary novel The Documents in the Case, published in 1930.
2
This collection was also published under the title Great Stories of Mystery, Detection, and Horror.
3
The terms “classic” and “classical” are seemingly interchangeable in criticism of detective fiction. For
the sake of consistency I will use the term “classical” throughout.
2

members first devised a mock serious charter of rules for detective fiction.4 Sayers, a
founding member, also served as President of the Detection Club from 1949 until her
death in 1957. Both authors take seriously the “rules” of classical detective fiction, a
form which reached its peak during the “Golden Age”, a period described by Rzepka as
the “glory days of rule-bound literary detection” (13). 5 Sally Munt locates the “Golden
Age” as the span between the first Agatha Christie novel, The Mysterious Affair at
Styles, in 1920 and the final novel by Dorothy Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon in 1937
(7).6 David Glover extends the chronology from 1913-36, but also posits Sayers as a
major figure within this time (36). The “Golden Age” detective novels and short stories
feature a detective who is well bred or well-connected socially and carries out his or her
investigations within a closed community. The rural village, country manor, private
club, university or similarly stratified society is temporarily disrupted by murder until
the intelligent and tactful sleuth restores order. The detective interrogates not only the
suspects, but the details of their English, often rural, lives creating a narrative of
Englishness.
W. H. Auden, in his 1948 essay “The Guilty Vicarage,” after admitting his
addiction to the classical detective story, states that he finds it difficult, “to read one that
is not set in rural England” (146). This association of classical detective fiction with
English identity is the basis of this project. P. D. James, in her discussion of “Golden
Age” detection, chooses a quintessentially English poem as a metaphor for a
4
Simon Brett provides a summary of the first seventy-five years of the Detection Club in his introduction
to The Detection Collection. The club began in the early 1930s, although, as Brett points out, the exact
date is uncertain. The early members of the club included G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Agatha
Christie and Anthony Berkeley, along with Dorothy Sayers.
5
Critical studies of detective fiction are many and various. Much of the critical attention directed
towards Sayers has seen her work read in terms of her later theological scholarship, or through a
biographical slant. McGregor and Lewis give an historical reading of her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey,
in Conundrums for the Long Weekend (2000), but do not read Sayers’s work in the wider context of
detective fiction. Catherine Kenney’s The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers (1990), while
containing close readings of the novels, writes in adoring rather than critical terms of the work of Sayers.
Sally R. Munt’s Murder by the Book (1994) provides a thoughtful summary of feminist critical
approaches to both Sayers and James. Susan Rowland’s From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell is an
incisive study of these two writers, which also reads the work in terms of English national identity. The
critical attention received by P. D. James has largely been from feminist scholars, including Munt, but
also notably by Nicola Nixon in “Gray Areas: P. D. James’s Unsuiting of Cordelia” and SueEllen
Campbell in “The Detective Heroine and the Death of her Hero: Dorothy Sayers to P. D. James. The
book length studies by American scholars Norma Siebenheller (P. D. James, 1981) and Richard B. Gidez
(P. D. James, 1986) provide biographical details and plot description rather than rigorous critical
discussion. While I draw upon Dennis Porter’s work on James, along with that of Susan Rowland, much
of my work treads upon relatively uncharted critical waters.
6
Edmund Wilson in his 1945 article “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” was famously scathing
about “Golden Age” detective fiction and Sayers’s The Nine Tailors in particular. Julian Symons, in
Bloody Murder, while complimentary towards some of this period’s authors, describes Sayers’s books as
“pompous and boring” (109) and Lord Peter Wimsey as a “caricature” (110). Alison Light gives an
informed view on the era in Forever England and Susan Rowland’s From Agatha Christie to Ruth
Rendell provides a balanced summary of the major women writers of this era.
 3

comfortably predictable English world: “‘Stands the church clock at ten to three?’ And
is there arsenic still for tea?” (Talking About Detective Fiction 66). James’s rewording
of Rupert Brooke’s nostalgic poem “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” (the poem uses
“honey” rather than “arsenic”) portrays enduring motifs of Englishness such as taking
tea and the ordered routine of village life, symbolised by a clock attached to the local
church. Routine, worship and English tea are like a synecdoche for an ideology of
English stability and order. It is these symbols of English culture which recur and
resonate within the detective narratives of Sayers and James, creating a textual
repository of Englishness. As the series progress, and particularly as the Dalgliesh
narratives continue, the urgency with which this textual accrual occurs is amplified.
Throughout this discussion, I shall argue for a reading of the detective narratives
of Sayers and James as fictions of English identity. In particular I will examine the
ways in which the British Empire informs and is refracted upon a visibly English
identity within their detective novels. The character of the detective acts as a cultural
marker of Englishness throughout the narratives of both writers and is attended by
cultural objects and practices which, together, create a textual repository of endorsed
Englishness. The two separate detective series featuring Wimsey and Dalgliesh, I
contend, celebrate imperial Britain, while simultaneously mourning its disappearance.
The discrete eras in which the detectives operate necessarily result in the depiction of
contrasting versions of England, socially, politically and culturally, as Sayers’s Wimsey
series was produced in the inter-war years, from 1923 to 1937, whereas Dalgliesh,
James’s detective, spans the period from 1962 to the current day. Yet, despite this
chronological disparity, the character of the detective remains remarkably consistent
and registers an ongoing ideology of Englishness which began before the inter-war
years, and through the Dalgliesh novels, continues into the twenty-first century.
The critical approach of this project draws upon postcolonial theory, which only
relatively recently has focussed upon classical English detective fiction. Whereas the
nineteenth century has been fruitful territory for critical work on the links between
empire and detective fiction, the twentieth century remains relatively unexplored. Jon
Thompson’s Fiction, Crime and Empire (1993) is a detailed study of imperialism and
nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century crime fiction. Caroline Reitz in
Detecting the Nation interrogates the links between the study of the nineteenth-century
detective novel and its interrelation with the British Empire. Recent essay collections
addressing postcolonialism and detective fiction include Ed Christian’s The
Postcolonial Detective (2001), Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen’s Postcolonial
4

Post-Mortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective (2006) and Nels

Pearson and Marc Singer’s Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational
World (2009). However, most of the essays in these collections are concerned
(understandably) with detectives of non-white or non-English ancestry. Stephen
Knight’s 2003 publication Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity also
includes a survey of approaches to transcultural crime fiction. Julie H. Kim’s Race and
Religion in the Postcolonial British Detective Story (2005) collection offers readings of
works by English writers including Ruth Rendell and Caroline Graham, but not P. D.
James, or Dorothy Sayers. My project seeks to extend the work of postcolonial
theorists thus far, by applying this critical framework to two identifiably English writers
working in, what I shall contend, is a recognisably English literary tradition.
A central tenet of my argument rests upon the interlacing of English identity with
the British Empire and the complications raised by what Simon Gikandi in Maps of
Englishness terms “the incomplete project of colonialism.” Gikandi states that the
empire affects both coloniser and colonised and that their histories and national
identities cannot be divorced from one another, or from their imperial past:
. . . the crisis of Englishness in the present period is symptomatic of the
incomplete project of colonialism, for it calls attention to the fate of
powerful cultural categories forced—by decolonization and the demise of
empire—to exist outside the historical conditions that made them possible.
Indeed one of the central claims of my book is that the persistence and
enforcement of colonial categories in their moment of disappearance points
us in two related directions: in the formerly colonized space itself, we
encounter the foremost insignias of colonial culture overdetermining the
making of what were supposed to be decolonized identities; in the
metropolis itself, we see these same categories returning, in their
phenomenality and ghostliness, to call into question the axioms of
Englishness. (9)

Gikandi’s argument is as concerned with the effects upon the colonies as it is upon the
so-called mother country. However, I wish to take up this argument and apply it to the
detective fiction of Sayers and James, narratives set solely within the borders of
England. Of particular interest, in the Wimsey and Dalgliesh novels, is the return of the
“cultural categories” outlined by Gikandi. Gikandi cites cricket as an exemplary
cultural category, a term which I take to mean an icon of English culture. Using the
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term in this sense, I will discuss the primacy of the Church of England, the country
house and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge as “cultural categories” which
most cogently represent Englishness in the narratives of Sayers and James. In doing so,
I am not excluding other manifestations of Englishness, but will foreground this trio of
icons of English culture as representative of the re-creation of a textual version of
England which is both yearned for and mourned in these narratives.

Englishness and Britishness

Any discussion about Englishness requires a definition of terms. “British” and
“English” are terms often used interchangeably, based on the underlying assumption
that England, politically and financially, is the centre of Britain. Eric Evans points out
that “since the eighteenth century, when national identity can be identified as an
increasingly significant concept in Europe, England has been demographically,
economically and politically the dominant partner in ‘Great Britain’” (233). The
difficulty in marking distinct outlines between these identities is further signalled by
Evans when he writes, “It is clear, therefore, that neither ‘Englishness’ nor ‘Britishness’
is a separately identifiable phenomenon. Instead, they are the product of complicated
cross-cultural developments” (243). Evans makes the salient point that the English, due
to their superior population and wealth, were not concerned about an English identity
when a British one allowed them the best the entire kingdom had to offer. The Scottish,
Welsh and Irish nationalities on the other hand are identities forged through conflict,
and as a consequence these identities are firmly established in their own nations’
mythology and literature, often in opposition to the English against whom they fought.
Being English involves being British, in that one is a subset of the other, but the
reverse is not necessarily true. Being English also, in the Wimsey and Dalgliesh
narratives, involves an exemplary kind of Britishness to which the occasional Scottish,
Welsh and Irish characters rarely have access. As Ian Baucom has stated,
“Anglocentric constructions of Britishness erase the cultural identity of those Britons
who are not English . . . ” (14).7 Characters from the rest of Britain do occur in the
Wimsey and Dalgliesh stories, but they are minor characters, and are almost always
identified by their non-English status. The purpose of this argument, therefore, is to

7
Baucom in his introductory chapter “Locating English Identity” in Out of Place (3-40) gives a detailed
historical account of the formation and control of British identities at home and in the colonies. He
argues that imperialism confuses and complicates English identity when he states that the empire “is the
place onto which the island kingdom arrogantly displaces itself and from which a puzzled England returns
as a stranger to itself” (3).
6

focus on the national identity of Wimsey and Dalgliesh. For both detectives this is
unmistakeably English. As my broader argument is concerned with British
Imperialism, Englishness is connected with ideas of national character which came to
prominence in the nineteenth century. These principles of the English character are
upheld by both Wimsey and Dalgliesh well into the twentieth century and, by Dalgliesh,
into the twenty-first. The way in which Wimsey and Dalgliesh are aligned with late
Victorian notions of gentlemanliness, domesticity and patriotism raises questions about
the continuation of seemingly anachronistic values within the genre of classical
detective fiction.

Cultural Reconstruction
Throughout the Wimsey and Dalgliesh novels “cultural categories” used to define the
English nation are created and re-created in very specific ways. Ian Baucom has argued
for the significance of cultural reconstruction using Ruskin’s writings as a starting point.
He states that:
If . . . identity is in many ways a function of those cultural objects by which
we are surrounded, then, he [Ruskin] repeatedly argued, the nation could
perhaps be saved by the reconstruction of its cultural landscape. To redeem
England from the wild course of modernity, it was necessary, Ruskin
insisted, to return the nation to its Gothic past, to re-form the island’s
subjects by ushering them into the vaulted corridors of a Gothic habitus.
(78)

I wish to argue that a similar process takes place in the novels of Sayers and James and
that there is, within these novels, a mapping of an idealised England over that which
already exists. For Ruskin, Gothic architecture could alter the national consciousness
and remind the English of their cultural heritage. For Sayers and James, I contend, the
privileging of traditional forms of Englishness, in terms of personal identity and
surrounding artefacts, enacts a form of cultural reconstruction.
For reconstruction to be required, the current state of the nation must be
unsatisfactory. Sayers’s first novel, Whose Body? (1923) was published at a time many
commentators locate as the beginning of the end of the British Empire. Historian Niall
Ferguson posits the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, held at the newly built Wembley
Stadium, as a measure of the movement away from imperialism among the “traditional
imperial elite” (323). A. N. Wilson too notes that the financially unsuccessful
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propaganda exercise for the British Empire “happened against a background of Indian
discontent” (276). The end of Empire, as is now obvious in hindsight, was nigh. While
the hoi polloi “wembled” in astonishing numbers (Ferguson 319), those who had
previously served the empire without question were experiencing grave doubts indeed,
among them George Orwell and Leonard Woolf (Ferguson 323). It is within this milieu
that Sayers’s war veteran Wimsey first appears, and he too is prone to doubts about the
state of the Empire. As the series continues Wimsey’s trepidation grows and, as the
situation in Europe darkens during the 1930s, it becomes intense. In Gaudy Night
(1935) Wimsey returns from his work for the Foreign Office full of despair, and
concern that it might be “back to the Army again” (268), a premonition of disaster that
was realised just four years later with the advent of World War Two.
The Wimsey series of novels ends in 1937, with the final Wimsey short story
“Talboys” published after Sayers death.8 At the time of Adam Dalgliesh’s first
appearance in 1962 the doubts connected with the 1924 Exhibition had been realised in
full with the Empire’s fragmentation into a Commonwealth of remaining allied states.
Anxiety about the state of the nation (and its Empire) in the Wimsey narratives becomes
increasingly amplified throughout the Dalgliesh novels, reaching a crescendo by the
advent of the twenty-first century. John MacKenzie argues that popular culture
conceded the end of empire in the 1960s, the time James’s first novel was published:
It was only then that it became cruelly apparent that the British could no
longer trade off (in both literal and metaphorical terms) a richly powerful
imperial past. Thus it seems to me that both popular and intellectual culture
only became fully aware of the underlying realities of power, of the extent
to which empire was over in economic, political, military and conceptual
terms, once the third implosion of the British Empire had occurred. (32)

MacKenzie’s claim is supported by Stuart Ward who states that in the late 1950s a great
deal of journalism was directed at “the all-important question: ‘What’s wrong with
Britain?’” (9). There is, as I shall demonstrate, a great deal wrong with Britain in the
Dalgliesh narratives. His appearance, at a time of acute concern about the end of the
British Empire, is part of a wider cultural response to this set of historical

8
I note here that Jill Paton Walsh has published three “Wimsey” novels. The first, Thrones, Dominations
(1998) is based on an unfinished Sayers manuscript. The second A Presumption of Death (2002) drew
partly on the 1939-1940 “Wimsey Papers”. The Attenbury Emeralds (2010) takes its inspiration from
Wimsey’s first, but unchronicled (by Sayers), case of the same name.
8

circumstances. The cultural work performed by both Lord Peter Wimsey and Adam
Dalgliesh within the narratives is a reconstruction and reinforcement of imperial values
at the very moment those values are in crisis.

The “Imperial Detective”

This crisis of imperial confidence can be seen to summon forth the character of the
“imperial detective”, a term I apply to Lord Peter Wimsey and Adam Dalgliesh. I
define an “imperial detective” as an heroic figure who, in his detective work, prescribes,
imbues and endorses the values of the British Empire, even when that empire is no
longer politically viable or active. I have taken the term from Caroline Reitz, who
employs it at the end of Detecting the Nation, her study of British detective fiction and
empire in the nineteenth century. Reitz has argued convincingly for the relationship
between detective fiction and the British imperial project. She states that:
It took a long time for detective narratives to reimagine the un-English
paramilitary figure of the late-eighteenth century as the heroic imperial
detective represented here. But in reimagining this figure over the course of
a long nineteenth century, writers from Godwin and Mill to Kipling and
Doyle did no less than reimagine English identity in an age of Empire. (78)
(italics added)

It is this imaginative link I wish to concentrate upon when taking up Reitz’s point about
reconfiguring an English identity through detective fiction. In doing so, I argue that the
“imperial detective” is the conduit to re-creations and reinforcements of an imperial
English identity in the twentieth century. Eric Nelson signals this behaviour in Adam
Dalgliesh when he suggests that Dalgliesh continues his detective work “because that is
what the British do in these latter days of imperial decline: they carry on” (65).
Carrying on, I will contend, also entails carrying out specific English behaviours.
Dalgliesh is emblematic in his Englishness.
Imperial decline was a concern in late nineteenth-century Britain. Robert Dixon
argues that English society was prey to doubts and trepidation regarding the state of the
nation and its empire. These anxieties included “worries about national efficiency, and
fears of racial decline and cultural decadence” (2). Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock
Holmes, the first and the most famous of the “imperial detectives”, is in part a response
to this anxiety. As Joseph Kestner argues, the “persistent querying of the Empire in the
Sherlock Holmes canon, from The Sign of Four (1890) onwards, indicates Doyle’s
 9

awareness of the ambiguous consequences of imperialism for the country . . .”

(Sherlock’s Men 7). Both Sayers and James, in their dual roles as critic and writer, have
paid homage to Holmes’s momentous role in English detective fiction. Sayers was a
founding member of the Sherlock Holmes Society (Reynolds, Life 275) and she scatters
references to the Baker Street sleuth throughout her Wimsey novels. Sayers describes A
Study in Scarlet as “flung like a bombshell” (“Omnibus” 92) into the arena of detective
fiction and goes on to describe the Holmes stories as “marvellous” and “electric” (92). 9
In her essay Sayers, like Caroline Reitz, associates the advent of an organised police
force with the development of the detective story when she argues that, given the rise of
science and decrease of superstition “the detective steps into his right place as the
protector of the weak—the latest of the popular heroes, the true successor of Roland and
Lancelot” (76). The term “hero” is integral to the character of the “imperial detective”,
whose emergence is occasioned by anxiety regarding English national identity, and
specifically by the weakening of its empire. P. D. James echoes Sayers in Talking
about Detective Fiction when she states that Conan Doyle created a “hero” who “met
the needs and expectations of his age” (36). Stephen Knight, in turn, describes Adam
Dalgliesh as a “reconfigured heroic detective”, a character who “makes clear both his
relation to and difference from the tradition of the golden age” (Crime Fiction 1800-
2000 136). I intend to argue that James’s “heroic” creation, Adam Dalgliesh, meets the
needs and expectations of his very distinctive era, because he resembles the original
“imperial detective”, Sherlock Holmes in his enacting and preserving of a recognisably
English identity, during a period of cultural change caused by mass immigration from
the former British colonies.
Holmes was not the first fictional detective. Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin
predates him by over four decades. The lineage of the “imperial detective” is relevant
as a background to this discussion, however it is beyond the scope of my argument to
engage in the debate as to the identity of the original fictional detective. Judith Flanders
succinctly points out the difficulty in pinning down the primogeniture of any literary
genus. She states, “pretty well all ‘firsts’ are nothing of the kind—Inspector Bucket as
the ‘first’ detective was preceded by the stories of Thomas Waters; The Moonstone as
the ‘first’ detective novel was preceded by Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent” (294).
Both P. D. James in Talking about Detective Fiction and Dorothy Sayers in her 1928
introduction to “The Omnibus of Crime”, give their own versions of the origins of the

9
This collection was also published in the United Kingdom as Great Stories of Mystery, Detection, and
Horror.
10

form and both, as I have explained, give primacy to Sherlock Holmes as the model for
the detectives who followed him. This is an instance of instantiating the English over
the foreign, which will appear in other events and contexts in the course of my
discussion.
The detectives of Sayers and James also act, I suggest, as templates for those who
follow. Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion (1929) and Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick
Alleyn (1934) owe a great deal to Wimsey, with their aristocratic pedigrees and their
suave demeanour. Inspector Alan Grant, created in 1929 by Josephine Tey (the
pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh) does not share the elevated ancestry of the others
listed, but he, like the others, is a World War One veteran who is both intelligent and
“refined” in his manners. Mary Evans recognises the importance of Wimsey as a
fictional model when she suggests a phenomenon she calls “The Wimsey Effect,” that is
the production of fictional male detectives who are sensitive, intelligent and heroic
(117). Evans also makes the link between Adam Dalgliesh and the much later creation
by the American writer Elizabeth George of the sensitive, aristocratic policeman,
Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, Eighth Earl of Asherton who, like Dalgliesh,
becomes a widower (164). One could also add the saturnine crossword expert,
Inspector Morse, created by Colin Dexter in 1975 to this list of fictional detectives who
exhibit the Wimsey, and in this case, the Dalgliesh “effect”.
Sensitivity and intelligence alone are not enough to conform to the role of the
“imperial detective”. Fundamental to this notion is the embodiment and endorsement of
the values of the British Empire. Certain ideologically significant values came to
prominence in nineteenth-century Britain, a time, as Robert MacDonald explains, when
empire was a “pivotal facet of late Victorian and Edwardian” England. At the heart of
this idea of empire he further argues, was the belief “that British government was good
government, and that the rest of the world would be better under British rule” (4).
Among these was idea of the “civilizing” mission of the British Empire. Promulgated
by Christian organisations such as the Anglican Church Missionary Society,
missionaries often proselytized among people of other nations, particularly those on the
African continent. Niall Ferguson writes about the dual roles of the missionary:
Their goal was not so much colonization as ‘civilization’: introducing a
way of life that was first and foremost Christian, but was also distinctly
North European in its reverence for industry and abstinence. (114)
 11

This combination of Christian teachings, productive employment and self-restraint lies

at the heart of the British civilizing mission. It is an idealised form of this ethos upon
which the imperial institutions of the public school, university and public service were
based. The church provided the arena for imperial training as did the sporting ground.
The qualities of physical courage and corporeal strength were promoted on the playing
fields of the public schools and universities of the late nineteenth century. As John
Tosh argues, the gymnasium and the playing field attempted to produce “character
building qualities of courage, self-control, stoical endurance and the subordination of
the ego to the team” (189).10 The values perpetuated by the “imperial detective” are
therefore drawn from a number of nineteenth-century imperial institutions including the
church and the public school but also the sporting arena. These training grounds
produced the elevated class who governed the empire, an idea made explicit in the 1905
novel, The Hill. Egerton, a young Harrovian remarks: “We’re not sent here at enormous
expense to learn only Latin and Greek. At Harrow and Eton one is licked into shape for
the big things: diplomacy, politics, the Services. One is taught manners, what?”
(Vachell 69). The “imperial detective” is therefore a member of a coterie whose
qualities of bravery, restraint, public service and good manners are displayed through
his work and his character.
Sherlock Holmes, one can assume, was a member of this class. Although Conan
Doyle was sketchy about Holmes’s education, we do know that he is an alumnus of a
university (“Gloria Scott” 342). 11 His heritage confirms his elevated status. Descended
from country squires (“Greek Interpreter” 399), he is part of the landed class. Along
with these seemingly necessary pre-requisites for imperial leadership, Holmes also
displays physical bravery and patriotism. The self-described “consulting detective” (A
Study in Scarlet 21) needs little encouragement to undertake risky enterprises on his
country’s behalf, especially when called upon by his brother Mycroft. Mycroft,
ostensibly a government auditor, (“Greek Interpreter” 400) is in fact the repository of all
knowledge of the British government and “the most indispensable man in the country”
(“Bruce-Partington Plans” 99). In the same story, Holmes declares after accepting a
particularly dangerous task: “For England, home and beauty—eh Watson? Martyrs on

10
The subject of sport and empire has been comprehensively explored by J.A. Mangan in The Games
Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal and more recently by Patrick F. McDevitt in
“May the Best Man Win”: Sport, Masculinity, and Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, 1880-
1935.
11
Dorothy Sayers put forward a case for Holmes being a Cambridge man of Sidney Sussex College, in
her whimsical essay “Holmes’ College Career”, first published in Baker Street Studies in 1934
(Lellenberg and Nieminski 325).
12

the altar of our country” (129). Holmes is making light of what he knows is a
precarious venture, displaying the insouciance which marks imperial heroes from Henry
Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain to John Buchan’s Richard Hannay. These
characteristics are derived from the historical figures, Robert MacDonald argues, of
Richard Burton, William Butler and Fred Burnaby and are “a compound of confidence,
superiority and bravado, self-confidence, pride in their own strength, a delight in life,
and an occasional sympathy with the indigenous peoples they so cheerfully patronised”
(13). Wimsey and Dalgliesh share these qualities, with the exception, it must be noted,
of confidence. This self-assurance is denied to the later “imperial detective” because
the fixed point of empire from which he draws his confidence has diminished and, in
the case of Dalgliesh, has disappeared altogether.
Holmes however, like his adventurous nineteenth-century countrymen, is not only
equipped with self-confidence, but is also well-suited to daring pursuits. He is a keen
sportsman who excels in “baritsu” or Japanese wrestling (“The Empty House” 8),
boxing (“The Solitary Cyclist” 104) and swordsmanship (Study in Scarlet 17). He is
also prodigiously intelligent, if highly specialised in his education, having no
knowledge of philosophy, astronomy or literature (apart from sensational literature), but
being extremely conversant with chemistry and poisons (Study in Scarlet 17). Holmes
is therefore eminently capable of carrying out difficult and dangerous work for the
Empire, and during the course of fifty-six short stories and four novels, resolves
numerous awkward diplomatic situations resulting in fulsome gratitude from those in
high office.12
Lord Peter Wimsey, an Eton and Balliol graduate, is more than adequately
furnished with the requirements of imperial heroism, especially through his choice of
Oxford college. John Tosh notes that between “1875 and 1914, 27 per cent of men
who entered Balliol College, Oxford, went on to work in the empire, half of them in
India . . .” (176). Wimsey, who falls within this time scale, can be read as one of those
servants of empire, his capabilities dictated not only by education but also by
inclination. Second son of the Duke of Denver, Wimsey is said to have served as a
Major of the Rifle Brigade for the duration of World War One. Amongst his many
other accomplishments he is an expert in toxicology and his recreations include
“criminology, bibliophily, music, [and] cricket” (Whose Body? 7). Wimsey, like

12
“The Naval Treaty”, “The Bruce-Partington Plans” and “The Second Stain” depict Holmes saving the
government from embarrassment, or worse, war. In “The Bruce-Partington Plans”, set in 1895, Holmes is
rewarded with an emerald tie-pin from “a certain gracious lady” (135) at Windsor, presumably Queen
Victoria.
 13

Holmes, is a swordsman (Gaudy Night 373) and although he prefers cricket to boxing,
he can defend himself ably, as he demonstrates convincingly in Clouds of Witness (92)
and Gaudy Night (370). He is an expert horseman, a skill he displays in Have His
Carcase (343-44), and he is possessed of quite astonishing athleticism (Murder Must
Advertise 64). His clubs include the Marlborough, Egotists and Bellona, and he resides
at 110A Piccadilly, in the fashionable heart of London. Wimsey’s membership of the
fictitious Bellona Club, based on the Army and Navy club, reflects his military service
whereas the Egotists Club speaks of his eccentricity and the Marlborough (which is an
actual club) denotes his place in the upper echelons of English society. Wimsey’s
curriculum vitae is carefully constructed to include only the “best” of imperial
manliness, framing him as an exemplar of the ruling class.
Adam Dalgliesh, by contrast, is the son of a Norfolk rector. Although from
apparently humbler beginnings than Wimsey or Holmes, Dalgliesh nevertheless enjoyed
“privileged years of public school and Oxford” before joining the Metropolitan Police
(Murder Room 285). As distinct from the bachelor “imperial detectives”, Dalgliesh is a
widower whose son died at birth. He is a poet of renown, unlike the un-literary Holmes,
but shares Holmes’s qualities of physical courage and acute intelligence. Dalgliesh,
although furnished with a sailing boat in the first novel, appears devoid of other sporting
credentials or interests, but he too can defend himself (The Black Tower 566) and others
(Unnatural Causes 193) when required. Dalgliesh’s emotional restraint and physical
courage are as much a part of his character as his introspective intelligence, linking him
back to Lord Peter Wimsey, and before him, to Sherlock Holmes.

The Imperial Code of Behaviour

Crucially, these three prototypical “imperial detectives” share the code of the English
gentleman, a code forged in the late nineteenth-century institutions of church, public
school and university. A combination of chivalry and evangelical Christianity, it is a
peculiarly English invention. According to Marcus Collins:
The gentleman adhered to a code of conduct that ennobled his every action
and established his right to rule. Gentlemanliness allegedly traced its
descent from medieval chivalry, which imbues it (with a little help from
evangelicalism and Thomas Arnold) with a strongly religious tone [. . . . ]
No less an authority than the dean of St. Paul’s, W. R. Inge, declared
gentlemanliness to be the ‘lay-religion of the English’ in that it embodied a
moral code possessing the same authority and treated with the same
14

reverence as saints in continental Catholic countries. Hence Paul was

pronounced a ‘sportsman’, Jesus a ‘Perfect Gentleman’ and God Himself
‘the greatest . . . gentleman’ of all. (93)

Collins’s summary of the qualities of a gentleman highlights the combination of

chivalry with respect for the Church. This ethos is central to the characters of both
Wimsey and Dalgliesh.
Wimsey, in Gaudy Night, admits to Harriet Vane that he always puts the interests
of the vulnerable before his own. When Harriet says, “Your instinct is to clap the
women and children under hatches”, Wimsey agrees, stating, “one can’t suppress one’s
natural instincts altogether; even if one’s reason and self-interest are all the other way”
(307). Wimsey, due to his aristocratic status, also operates under the code of noblesse
oblige, or the obligations which attend noble rank, a code which clearly informs his
behaviour throughout the series.
Dalgliesh adheres to his own code of behaviour which officers who serve with
him must acknowledge and abide by. It is a code drawn from his family background.
Dalgliesh accepts that his father, who regarded women as sensitive and civilising
creatures, has influenced his own views regarding gender:
The young Dalgliesh had been brought up to believe that these qualities
should be protected by chivalry and respect. In this as in other things his
clerical father could not have been less politically correct. But he had never
found it easy in a very different and more aggressive age to shake off this
early indoctrination, nor in his heart did he really wish to. (Certain Justice
340)

The conjunction of the church and chivalry reiterates a code which is now, in
Dalgliesh’s time, less fashionable and less consonant with modern values of equality. It
also associates Dalgliesh with the chivalric code of Wimsey’s era, and to the imperial
ethos which sustained it.
The blending of gentlemanly behaviour with detection is most explicitly displayed
in the handbook of the Scouting movement, Scouting for Boys.13 Although Lord Baden-
Powell presumably would not have condoned some aspects of Sherlock Holmes’s

13
Simon Featherstone provides an instructive reading of the eccentric and uneven nature of Baden-
Powell’s Scouting for Boys in Englishness: Twentieth-Century Popular Culture and the Forming of
English Identity (28-36).
 15

lifestyle (using cocaine for example), he nevertheless admired his powers of deduction.
Scouting for Boys contains several references to Holmes’s abilities and scouts were
exhorted to take note of the original “imperial detective”, and to follow his example of
keen observation and of the reading of clues (Baden-Powell 89). As Joseph Kestner
notes, “the effective purpose of this training is to become a practitioner of The Great
Game, that is, spying for the British Empire” (Sherlock’s Men 1). It is no coincidence
that the first Wimsey novel describes the detective’s walking cane as “the gentleman-
scout’s vade-mecum” (Whose Body? 55), firmly binding the detective with the
imperialist enterprise of the scouting movement. In the third novel, Unnatural Death,
Chief Inspector Parker chooses to rely upon the evidence of a Boy Scout, presumably
because of the accuracy of the scout’s observations. The scout accompanies the police
on the hunt for a missing car, and is “filled with delight” (228) when Parker praises his
efforts. Dalgliesh, whose “solitary and lonely” boyhood did not include such communal
activities, does have an assistant who is a former Boy Scout (Shroud for a Nightingale
261). Sergeant Masterson extols the joy of being Patrol Leader to his superior officer, a
role he says which afforded him “more power and glory than you’re ever likely to feel
again” (Shroud for a Nightingale 261). Scout training, the text implies, prepares a man
to take his place in another literally imperial service.

Sensitive Matters
The “imperial detective” serves England, whenever called upon to do so. Like Edgar
Allan Poe’s French detective C. Auguste Dupin, who retrieves a stolen royal billet doux
in “The Purloined Letter”, both Wimsey and Dalgliesh are required to act in politically
delicate cases. Wimsey works for the Foreign Office on a strictly informal basis. His
speciality is diplomacy, as his friend Freddy Arbuthnot explains when he says: “they
sometimes push him out when they think he’s wanted. He gets on with people” (Gaudy
Night 212). Dalgliesh is a servant of the Crown, a career policeman who is eventually
promoted to the role of Commander of the Metropolitan Police. By 1986, twenty-four
years into the series, Dalgliesh is heading up a new squad “to investigate serious crimes
that, for political or other reasons, needed particularly sensitive handling” (Taste for
Death 16). Wimsey and Dalgliesh are both entrusted to do delicate work for the State
because of their loyalty and their unique talents. Like Sherlock Holmes, their discretion
is as well-known as their detecting ability (“The Three Students” 234). When Wimsey
tells Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night “Don’t get it into your head that I’m the man who
saved the Empire” (268) the text suggests that he is just the man who did.
16

The Church of England

Considering the Anglican Church through Gikandi’s notion of the “cultural category”,
cited earlier, demonstrates the importance of this institution as a marker of English
society in the Wimsey and Dalgliesh narratives. The decline from the majesty with
which the church is depicted in Sayers’s The Nine Tailors (1934) to its faded grandeur
in James’s A Taste for Death (1986) indicates a downward trajectory of what is, for
both authors, an integral element of English society. In the Wimsey novels, the
Anglican Church is a fixed point from which moral authority radiates. It is a sanctuary
of calm, reason and goodness. This is transparently registered in The Nine Tailors,
throughout which the rector, Theodore Venables, is the mainstay of village life and its
unofficial leader. When the village of Fenchurch St Paul is threatened by rising flood
waters, the rector takes charge, maintaining calm and also directing the practical
arrangements for the housing of the entire village within the church. In the midst of the
crisis he is “robed and stoled, and his anxious old face had taken on a look of great
pastoral dignity and serenity” (292). He calls the roll of the parish, villagers and
farmers who are now literally saved by the church. The Church of England provides a
fixed point of identity and security for the entire village, a levée which the flood-tide of
change cannot break.
The power of the Church, as depicted in James’s Dalgliesh novels, is threatened
by contemporary values. This is abundantly illustrated in the heated discussion between
Archdeacon Crampton and Father Sebastian Morrell in Death in Holy Orders when
Morrell asks Crampton (who is later murdered) if he wishes to promote church services
with “banal hymns, a debased liturgy and the Eucharist conducted as if it were a parish
bean-feast? A Church for Cool Britannia?” (128). Given that James, in her role as
Baroness James of Holland Park, sits on the Conservative benches in the House of
Lords, the final reference to Tony Blair’s “New Labour” movement of the 1990s is
scathing indeed.14 The stripping away of ritual and history from English institutions is a
repeated concern in James’s work. Against these apparently worrying trends,
Dalgliesh’s understanding of and affection for the church in which he was brought up
offers an ameliorative narrative.

14
Anthony Seldon describes Tony Blair’s reinvention of the British Labour Party: “New Labour was
streamlined, modern in outlook and method, participatory and loyal” (247). The phrase “Cool Britannia”
was linked to this phenomenon in 1990s England.
 17

Although his lineage as the son of a parson is repeated throughout the novels,
Dalgliesh is specifically depicted as a non-practising Anglican. Instead his exile from
faith is emphasised on numerous occasions. This discomforts him at times (Taste for
Death 78). He visits churches as a form of leisure, inspecting the architecture and
drawing solace from the ambience of a resplendent building. Dalgliesh’s associations
with the Church hierarchy augment his ability to influence others, and to carry out his
work as a detective. His understanding of the Anglican Church is useful in his task of
policing England, a connection made in the following passage:
Before he concentrated on the actual scene of the crime, Dalgliesh always
liked to make a cursory survey of the surroundings to orientate himself, and,
as it were, to set the scene of murder. The exercise had its practical value,
but he recognised that, in some obscure way, it fulfilled a psychological
need, just as in boyhood he would explore a country church by first walking
slowly round it before, with a frisson of awe and excitement, pushing open
the door and beginning his planned progress of discovery to the central
mystery. (Taste for Death 36)

The association between the rituals of religion and those of police work is made overt in
this paragraph. The central mystery Dalgliesh approaches is more complex that just the
case with which he is engaged. Dalgliesh approaching a crime scene is likened to a
believer approaching an altar. He possesses a “Gothic habitus”, a knowledge of cultural
tradition and practice. His career as a detective, bound as it is with the church, is a
vocation, a concept which is reinforced by Dalgliesh’s stated desire to be “socially
useful” (Murder Room 285). Interestingly, this aligns him with Sayers’s policeman,
Charles Parker, who says of his work, “I know it to be useful” (Whose Body? 121).
Significantly, Parker is also a student of theology in his spare time.
The decay of the church as a source of authority in the Dalgliesh narratives is
summarised in the character and lodgings of the unfortunate Father Barnes of St
Matthew’s, Paddington in A Taste for Death. He is unfortunate, not only in having a
double murder occur in his church, but in the lack of authority he holds within the
church hierarchy. This is reflected in his vicarage, a maisonette in a group of grubby
flats, surrounded by transient tenants:
. . . the peripatetic young, sharing three to a room, unmarried mothers on
social security, foreign students; a racial mix which, like some human
18

kaleidoscope, was continually being shaken into new and brighter colours.
(87)

The windows of the vicarage are the only freshly painted ones, separating it from the
rest of the neglected building. It is as if this vicarage is the last bastion of the church’s
authority which will inevitably give way under the wave of the new England: the
foreigners, single mothers, and feckless young. The Catholic Church of St Anthony’s is
depicted as popular because of its “steel bands, carnival processions, and general
interracial bonhomie” (87). The periphery, the West Indies in this case symbolised by
the steel bands, has returned to the metropolis and altered the fabric, and indeed the
rubric, of English church services. In James’s work “interracial bonhomie” is not a
complimentary term, rather it signals a diffusing of authentic Englishness into a
disturbing heterogeneity of cultures. The Catholic Church, in its multicultural
approach, has become a “contact zone” between diverse cultures, a term coined by
Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes which signifies “the spatial and temporal
copresence of subjects previously spared by geographic and historical disjunctures, and
whose trajectories now intersect” (7). In the fiction of P. D. James, such contact zones
are troubling, signalling a threat to an authentically English identity. By contrast, the
Anglican Church of St Matthews remains pure, it would seem, in the midst of this
cultural maelstrom; less a bastion perhaps, than a crumbling citadel of Englishness.
The contact zone of multiculturalism in James’s novels indicates a weakening of
English institutions and is something lamented rather than celebrated. An almost
vitriolic example of this occurs in A Taste for Death where the ethos of Kate Miskin’s
comprehensive school is compared to a religion:
Ancroft Comprehensive had certainly had a religion all right, fashionable
and, in a school with twenty different nationalities, expedient. It was anti-
racism. You soon learned that you could get away with any amount of
insubordination, indolence or stupidity if you were sound on this essential
doctrine. (324)

Inspector Kate Miskin, who first appears in this 1986 novel, is the working-class,
housing estate raised subordinate of Adam Dalgliesh. While she is indubitably English,
her background is one of multi-faith, multicultural schooling and racially diverse
housing estates, none of which is celebrated in the text. Instead, the dilution of a single
English identity into a diffuse multiculturalism is affiliated with the weakening of
 19

society in which fashionable shibboleths replace historic doctrine. It is a concern which

is reiterated throughout the novels, increasing in intensity as the series progresses.
For both Sayers and James, the Anglican Church is an intrinsic element of English
identity and the cultural object held most sacred. Sayers, as the daughter of a minister
of the Church of England, grew up within the church. As an adult she was an advocate
for the Church of England and spent a great deal of time and effort defending its
dogma.15 In addition she wrote a series of religious plays for Canterbury Cathedral and
another series for the BBC. Her Anglican faith was a cornerstone of her life. James too
is an active member of the Church of England. She has been part of the Liturgical
Commission and her love of the traditional Anglican liturgy is reiterated throughout her
autobiography. Most telling, however, is her linking of the church with the nation when
James writes:
The Church of England in my childhood was the national church in a very
special sense, the visible symbol of the country’s moral and religious
aspirations, a country which, despite great differences of class, wealth and
privilege, was unified by generally accepted values and by a common
tradition, history and culture, just as the church was unified by Cranmer’s
magnificent liturgy. (Earnest 88)

For James, and Sayers too, the history, liturgy and literature of the Church of England
are essential elements in their notion of Englishness. Their depictions of this institution
should not be underestimated as a symbol of the nation itself. The “imperial detective”,
in paying homage to this institution, does so as a foundation of Englishness rather than
of Anglican spirituality. Wimsey claims that he is not a Christian (Gaudy Night 430,
436) and Dalgliesh, more conclusively, feels cut off from this faith (Holy Orders 149).
Yet their respect and reverence for the church and its history sustains the import of
Englishness throughout the novels. In Unnatural Death, Wimsey seeks the counsel of
Mr Tredgold, the vicar of St Onesimus, on a matter of morality. His regard not only for
Mr Venables in The Nine Tailors but also Mr Goodacre in Busman’s Honeymoon is
evident. Similarly, Adam Dalgliesh’s childhood ties to Father Baddeley in The Black
Tower and Father Martin in Death in Holy Orders speak of a deeply ingrained esteem
for these men, and for their self-sacrificing natures, illustrated by their unswerving
service to the national institution of the Church of England.

15
Sayers wrote numerous letters, plays, articles and books regarding Christian theology including The
Mind of the Maker (1941) and Creed or Chaos? (1940).
20

Imperialism and Culture

The attitude of Sayers and James towards the Church of England is an important part of
the cultural context of their work. While not attempting a literary reading of their lives,
I will include biographical, autobiographical and epistolary texts as a method of
exploring political and social ideologies discernible in the work of Sayers and James,
particularly in their views on the British Empire. In doing so, I acknowledge the
complex interrelations of empire, and the aftermath of empire, with English identity.
The manifestation of this phenomenon within English detective fiction is outlined by
Nels Pearson and Marc Singer in their introduction to Detective Fiction in a
Postcolonial and Transnational World. Their motivation for producing the collection
of essays is:
. . . driven by our increasing awareness of the fact that, from its inception,
the detective genre has been intrinsically engaged with epistemological
formations that are not simply those of “society” in the abstract—that is,
dominant cultural groups and their hegemonic discourse—but those
produced in encounters between nations, between races and cultures, and
especially between imperial powers and their colonial territories. (3)

The detective narratives of Sayers and James were written at a time when the
geographical boundaries of the British Empire were shrinking and the nature of British
society changing. The effect of these historical occurrences can be discerned in the
writing of these two conservative, patriotic women.
As I have argued, the ideal version of England in the work of Sayers and James is
one in which it is the heart of a powerful empire and it is against this version of England
that all others are measured. The early education of both Sayers and James, although
experienced in different eras, was one framed by an idea of empire, one which was
founded on political, military and economic superiority. Dorothy Leigh Sayers was
born in Oxford in 1893. She was the only child of the Reverend Henry and Helen Mary
Sayers. Early in her life her father left his position as headmaster of the Christ Church
Choir School in Oxford and took up the living at Bluntisham-cum-Earith in East Anglia.
Sayers lived here until, in 1909, she attended the Godolphin School in Wiltshire. She
later took a first class degree in Modern Languages at Somerville College, Oxford.
Phyllis Dorothy James (James is her maiden name) was born in 1920 into less
privileged circumstances. Her father was a civil servant who, James muses, “would
rather have been a teacher” (Earnest 36), had circumstances enabled him to do so.
 21

James’s formal schooling ended after high school because, as Richard B. Gidez points
out, the family’s finances were limited and “her father was not disposed to education for
girls” (1). Despite their contrasting educational experiences, both writers share a
passionate regard for the heritage of English literature, something which is apparent
both in the literary predilections of their detective and in the multitudinous literary
references in their work.
Although James was born twenty-seven years after Sayers, and in another century,
the world in which both women grew up was not so vastly different. James herself
claims that her childhood was much closer to the Victorians than one might imagine
(Earnest 27). Her early education was entwined with imperialism, as James illustrates
in the following passage from her autobiography:
A map, permanently displayed in the largest double classroom, with its
splurges of red—Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand— its small islands
like splashes of blood in all the oceans of the world, enabled our teacher to
point out that this was, in truth as well as legend, an empire on which the
sun never set. Empire Day was a notable event celebrated with a march
round the playground and a salute to the flag. The teaching was not
jingoistic but we were imbued with a belief that the empire was beneficent,
and the rulers well-intentioned, a view which may have been simplistic but
was probably no more damaging than the present belief of some young
people I meet that everything that has gone wrong with the world in the past
century is the fault of Britain. (Earnest 24)

James’s rather terse final sentence indicates her view of the imperial project, and of the
superiority of the education she received, as opposed to that offered in a multicultural,
multi-faith contemporary Britain. It is an idea expressed in a number of Dalgliesh
novels, as well as in her autobiography. Niall Ferguson agrees with James when he
outlines the benefits of the British Empire:
Yet the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free
capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It
invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern
communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas.
Though it fought many small wars, the Empire maintained a global peace
unmatched before or since. In the twentieth century too it more than
justified its own existence, for the alternatives to British rule represented by
22

the German and Japanese empires were clearly far worse. And without its
Empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them. (366)

It is these achievements, I suggest, that drive James to memorialize the British Empire
in her writing. The empires of Germany and Japan are figured by episodes of horrific
brutality in James’s work, in her narratives relating to World War Two. The British
Empire, however, is embodied in the ongoing character of Adam Dalgliesh who
represents what James regards as the best of English culture. Commensurate with her
view of the British Empire too is the ethos and detective work of Dalgliesh which is
always “fastidious” and “controlled” (Shroud for a Nightingale 251), and carried out for
the greater good of England.
Like James, Sayers’s education also involved imperial celebrations. In October
1910 the Godolphin School went to the County Hall in Salisbury to hear a lecture by the
Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton entitled “Nearest the South Pole” (Hone 25).
Sayers describes this event in an effusive letter to her parents:
I must [relate] the event of the week—Shackleton’s lecture on Tuesday. It
was simply wonderful—I had never seen a hero before and it was rather a
thrilling experience. He is extraordinarily British—very quiet and drawly-
voiced and quite absolutely splendid. We are all in love with him, and
buying post-cards of him. (“To Henry and Helen Sayers” 1: 50)

So impressed was the then seventeen-year-old schoolgirl that she composed a sonnet
and sent it off to the Antarctic explorer. It is perhaps a measure of the man that he did
reply to Sayers, thanking her for the sonnet and stating “you are too kind to us in it”
(Reynolds, Life 52).16 Dorothy Sayers’s description of Shackleton as “extraordinarily
British” was evidently a compliment of the highest order. Her pride in her country did
not diminish in later life, indeed, if anything, it increased, as the voluminous
correspondence she produced during the war years indicates.17
A love of England is undeniably shared by both Sayers and James. Louise
Harrington has stated that James “has often been called the natural successor to Sayers”
(495), which is apparent in her continued production of classical detective fiction.

16
The poem begins, “Who shall dare say that England’s might is waning/And that her foes shall rule the
seas instead of her/Because no more heroic sons are bred of her?”(1-3). It can be found in Ralph E.
Hone’s Poetry of Dorothy L. Sayers.
17
See Barbara Reynolds, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers Volume Two 1937 1943: From Novelist to
Playwright, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers Volume Three 1944-1950: A Noble Daring.
 23

Sayers’s literary trustees obviously thought so when they offered James the opportunity
to complete Thrones, Dominations, a manuscript left unfinished when Sayers died in
1957. James declined the offer because she “didn’t think it could satisfactorily be done”
(Earnest 156). It was finished (to James’s satisfaction as it turns out) by Jill Paton
Walsh, whose “Imogen Quy” novels also qualify as classical English detective fiction.
James’s dislike of completing unfinished manuscripts was shared by Dorothy Sayers.
When Sayers was offered the opportunity to complete Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin
Drood she was vociferous in her reply. She advised her agent, Nancy Pearn, to tell
Hodder and Stoughton that she had no intention of so doing because the “beastly book
has been completed by at least a dozen people, and every attempt is more wearisome
than the last” (“Letter to Nancy Pearn” 1: 407). Sayers, like James, was fiercely
protective of her own work, and would not allow alterations to or interference with her
own writing, or to the characters she created. Sanction for a film version of Lord Peter
Wimsey was rescinded by her because the writer produced “a story and dialogue which
contrive[d] to be at the same time excessively vulgar and excessively dull” (“To Peter
Haddon” 1: 346). 18 Similarly James cut ties with Ecosse television productions in 1998
when the producers decided that Cordelia Gray, her female detective, would become a
single mother, a decision which infuriated James. After this experience James writes,
“The moral here is never let go of the rights to a character . . .” (Earnest 200). It was a
lesson she could have learned from Agatha Christie who similarly regretted selling the
rights of her characters to the film studio MGM. When the studio produced a film
featuring Miss Marple on a Royal Naval training ship, Christie was outraged. MGM’s
subsequent attempts to change Hercule Poirot’s character resulted in Christie finally
terminating the contract (Shaw and Vanacker 91-92). Her vehemence, matched by
Sayers and James in defending their creations, indicates the extent to which these
authors value their literary reputation. For Sayers and James it also suggests that these
same literary creations are fixed within a specific framework of Englishness, and
particularly, English morality.
The influence of Sayers upon James’s work, and their shared conservatism, is
worth briefly dwelling upon. James is an avowed admirer of Dorothy Sayers’s writing
and is the current patron of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society. Although they never met
(Sayers died before James had published her first novel) they share a conservative

18
Sayers wrote a short story specifically for the film, produced by Ealing studios. The film, The Silent
Passenger, featuring the character of Lord Peter Wimsey was released in 1935, directed by Reginald
Denham.
24

political viewpoint, a strong and active Anglican faith and a love for their country of
birth. James cites Sayers as one of her main influences, the others being Jane Austen,
Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh (Earnest 78). James has written the preface to the
four volumes of Sayers’s letters edited by Barbara Reynolds.19 She also wrote the
foreword to James Brabazon’s authorised biography of Sayers, published in 1981. Like
Sayers, James’s success as a crime writer has brought her into the public domain,
enabling her to be a part of some of her most cherished English institutions including
the BBC, a variety of universities and the Church of England. It also resulted in her life
peerage and her title, Baroness James of Holland Park. Sayers, as I shall establish in the
following chapters, was also an enthusiastic participant in public service. She gave
numerous public lectures, participated in political and theological discussions on many
levels, as well as contributing to propaganda work during the Second World War. The
extent to which these authors bind their identity to their English nationality cannot be
underestimated.
The concept of an English identity within the detective narratives of Sayers and
James is examined in Chapter One, along with questions of race, whiteness and English
culture, always with the precept that empire is key to understanding these constructs. A
crucial aspect of this argument is Ian Baucom’s theory of cultural reconstruction, cited
earlier, whereby primacy is afforded to selected aesthetic and ideological evocations of
Englishness. The work of Sayers and James can be read as a process of textual
reconstruction, or in other words, of a formation of an idealised Englishness within the
narrative. Dalgliesh and Wimsey admire (with superior eyes) the best of English
architecture, art and literature. These cultural categories, of which Gikandi writes, are
of particular interest in this chapter as I examine the way in which they take on greater
meaning as the empire gradually becomes more distant. In the James novels a textual
ark is created of the best of English culture, carefully selected and stored in the
narrative, as a palliative against the dissatisfaction created by contemporary England.
Chapter Two examines the complications and consolations of war in the Wimsey
and Dalgliesh narratives. If the defining principle of the British imperial mission rested
on its civilizing philosophy, the First World War marked the end of such an ideal. The
cataclysm, actual and impending, of both World Wars reverberates through the Wimsey
and Dalgliesh novels. Wimsey is mentally scarred by his service in World War One

19
The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist, The Letters of
Dorothy L. Sayers Volume Two 1937 1943: From Novelist to Playwright, The Letters of Dorothy L.
Sayers Volume Three 1944-1950: A Noble Daring, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: Volume Four1951 -
1957: In the Midst of Life.
 25

with his lingering neurasthenia, and he lives in the penumbra of the looming Second
World War. Dalgliesh, born after the Second World War, inherits complex moral
quandaries to do with justice and guilt. Often a trigger for nostalgia, war in the Wimsey
and Dalgliesh novels marks the end of empire while also providing monuments to its
passing.
Chapter Three discusses the “imperial detective” as an adventure hero. Placing
Wimsey and Dalgliesh alongside Henry Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain and John
Buchan’s Richard Hannay, I will argue that the detectives carry out similar activities to
these characters, but within the confines of England itself. During their detective
endeavours Wimsey and Dalgliesh remap, upon the domestic confines of England, the
possibility of adventure. In particular the mode of imperial gothic, in which the
detective finds himself in a foreign and threatening landscape, is repeated in these
narratives. Positing Wimsey and Dalgliesh as adventurous detectives conflates the two
genres of adventure and detective fiction, suggesting that the cultural work of these
detective novels has much in common with their imperial literary antecedents.
Wimsey and Dalgliesh spend a great deal of time at home, or more precisely in
other people’s homes. In Chapter Four I examine the linkages between empire,
Englishness and the idea of home. The “imperial detective” endorses and promotes a
particular form of English domesticity, borne out of late Victorian values. Yet these
values often cannot be reproduced or met. As a locus of Englishness, the home is
judged by the detective, and often found to be inadequate. Such occurrences, lead to
nostalgia, literally “homesickness” both in the personal sense, and in the longing for a
homogeneous, peaceful nation. Concurrently the smoothing over of domestic
disturbance (in the national and personal sense) can be read as a consolatory narrative
within the context of a fragmenting or fragmented empire.
In the following chapters the “imperial detectives”, Lord Peter Wimsey and Adam
Dalgliesh are read alongside a number of tropes of imperial writing. Empire is intrinsic
to the notions of Englishness displayed in these narratives, but it is an empire after the
fall. These narratives are among what Simon Gikandi calls, “the symptoms of a
disjunctive moment in which imperial legacies have come to haunt English and
postcolonial identities, their cultural formations, and their modes of representation”
(19). Empire in the Wimsey and Dalgliesh narratives, especially in the latter, is
experienced as that which has passed, and that which is longed for. The quintessentially
English form of fiction, the classical detective story, written by two unequivocally
English authors would seem to offer an appropriate vehicle for detecting ghosts of an
26

imperial past. Yet the empire in these narratives is both elusive and yearned for,
searched for yet never completely realised, a conundrum that even the extraordinary
detective powers of Lord Peter Wimsey and Adam Dalgliesh can never entirely resolve.
 27

CHAPTER ONE

This England.

I understood what a precious thing this little England

was, how old and kindly and comforting, how wholly
worth striving for. The freedom of an acre of her soil
was cheaply bought by the blood of the best of us.
(John Buchan, Mr Standfast 17 )

Dorothy L. Sayers always wrote “English” rather than “British” when required to
identify her nationality (Reynolds, Life 394). When, in the 1930s, German publishers
requested information regarding her ethnicity she was able, rather tartly, to point out
that her English ancestry could be traced back several centuries at least (“Letter to
David Higham” 1: 391). P. D. James, in her maiden speech in the House of Lords
spoke on “the subject of literature and the preservation of the English language”
(Earnest 128). Being English mattered to Dorothy L. Sayers and it matters to P. D.
James. Both Sayers’s hero Lord Peter Wimsey and Adam Dalgliesh in the James novels
are English by nationality and by ethnicity and these are by no means the same thing.
The question of an English racial identity is one which will be discussed in this chapter,
as will the links between Englishness and questions of alterity and belonging. The
potentially destabilising questions of Englishness and otherness in these narratives are
partly ameliorated by a concurrent narrative of cultural reconstruction, largely
concentrated upon architecture and painting. Reading the Wimsey and Dalgliesh
narratives against the framework of empire reveals the return of what Simon Gikandi
has termed “cultural categories” (9) haunting the text, and complicating questions of
English identity. These cultural matters accumulate in the course of the series to
produce what I term a textual museum of idealised Englishness, increasingly attended
by nostalgia, particularly in the later P. D. James novels. This version of Englishness is
rooted in the idea of England as the centre of a substantial empire over which English
values and practices are extended and through which individual and national identity is
created.
28

The National Character

The “imperial detectives”, Wimsey and Dalgliesh, are residents of London, and are
therefore located in the mercantile and administrative heart of the British Empire.
Wimsey and Dalgliesh are English detectives; all of the Dalgliesh novels are set in the
south of England, and Dalgliesh never travels beyond the bounds of English territory.
Wimsey, who is much more adventurous, does, on occasion, travel to America,
Scotland, Corsica and other European destinations but very little of the detective
narratives take place outside of England. In addition both Dalgliesh and Wimsey are by
birth and ancestry English, with Wimsey’s distant French heritage (something he shares
with Sherlock Holmes) merely a twig on his family tree. The detectives operate within
England and for England. Wimsey and Dalgliesh exhibit Englishness through their
code of conduct, but they also read Englishness in other people, objects and landscapes.
Not only do they epitomise the best of “English” but they are uniquely equipped to
measure national character, or lack of it, in others.
In these narratives both detectives practise a form of internal colonisation, defined
by Anne McClintock as a process which “occurs when the dominant part of a country
treats a group or region as it might a foreign colony” (“Angel of Progress” 257). In this
case the detective’s metropolitan values (from London) are imposed upon those at the
periphery (in this case the regions). This applies to people who are not only Welsh,
Scottish or Irish, but also from regions distant from London, such as Yorkshire or East
Anglia. Both detectives demonstrate their regional taxonomy with confidence.
Wimsey’s visit to the Yorkshire village of Stapley in Clouds of Witness is an exercise in
regional stereotyping. The locals, who communicate using expressions such as “eea”
and “ugh” (177), are surly and “oyster-like” (179). By comparison, the genial Mr
Timothy Watchett (a neat play on the cockney expression “Wotcher”) is “twinkling and
humorous” of eye, and “alert” (188). Wimsey sums him up immediately, asking, “when
did you last see Piccadilly Circus? ” (180) (author’s emphasis). Wimsey identifies him
as a fellow Londoner and states that on seeing Watchett he felt that he was on his
“native paving-stones” (181).1 Watchett’s cockney language is every bit as
stereotypical as his northern neighbours, something which Sayers continues in all her
novels, making parts of Five Red Herrings almost unreadable due to her quasi-phonetic
rendition of the Galloway accent.

1
Sayers, in her usual allusive fashion is referring to Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy, “My foot is on my native
heath, and my name is MacGregor” (ch. 24).
 29

Sayers’s use of the vernacular is typical of the genre in which she operates. As
Dennis Porter states:
. . . it is characteristic of the formal detective genre that it does not
incorporate any other level of speech into itself apart, occasionally, from the
country or cockney speech of odd lower-class characters. (“Language of
Detection” 85-86)

Such use of language, like the “pidgin English” ascribed to many colonised races,
implies that the speaker is infantile, uneducated or unintelligent. James’s fiction,
published several decades after Sayers’s work, is more careful in such matters, yet the
ability of Dalgliesh to identify regionalities is undiminished. In Death of an Expert
Witness, published in 1977, Dalgliesh catalogues a married couple, the Bidwells, when
he thinks: “She, he felt sure, was born a cockney; he a fenman. He was taciturn where
she was avid for gossip and excitement” (724). As late as 2000, Dalgliesh tells the dark
haired Welshman Sergeant Irfon Jones that he is “a long way from home” (Holy Orders
47), reinforcing the difference between an English and a Welsh identity. The taxonomy
of regionality provides a shorthand method of character assessment for the detective,
while simultaneously reinforcing his superior form of Englishness.
Wimsey and Dalgliesh, are thoroughly English men and, in addition, are
gentlemen, occupying the peak of the behavioural and ethnic hierarchy which evolved
in the late nineteenth century.2 Douglas Kerr argues that this period of English history
resulted in:
. . . the founding of institutions like the National Trust (1895), the National
Portrait Gallery (1896), and the Dictionary of National Biography (1885-
1900)—and also in popular culture, from an appreciation of the countryside
and pageantry to music hall songs to sport itself. Out of this self-
consciousness emerged a generally satisfying sense of the English national
spirit, with its individuality, sincerity, moderation, liberalism, love of
freedom and justice and incapacity for abstraction and system. (“The
Straight Left” 188)

2
In the late-nineteenth century, as Anne McClintock puts it “the English middle-class male was placed at
the pinnacle of evolutionary hierarchy” (Imperial Leather 55). McClintock examines the wider hierarchy
from which this is drawn, which posits women, the working class and all other races (particularly non-
white races) as far inferior to the English male.
30

Wimsey and Dalgliesh, as detectives, do have a capacity for abstraction and system, but
this in no way detracts from their English identity. Instead they apply themselves to
their detective work in an “English” manner; with consideration, courtesy and, as
discussed in the introductory chapter, an implicit belief that their work is for the
common good.
The English character, according to Dorothy L. Sayers, was exemplified in the
person of Winston Churchill. She attributed to him what she facetiously called “vulgar,
outmoded virtues” such as “patriotism, courage, honour, loyalty, cheerfulness and high
spirits.” To this she added “He was England” (Reynolds, Life 395). Certainly Wimsey
shares all of these Churchillian attributes. Dalgliesh, while exhibiting at least the first
four, never indulges in high spirits, and is more introspective than cheerful. However,
the willingness to fight for England is something shared by both Dalgliesh and Wimsey.
Englishness is a benefit conferred by birth and is regarded as precious. The obverse
side of Englishness is non-Englishness and to this realm is designated a great deal that is
undesirable. During their investigations, Wimsey and Dalgliesh are not just English
detectives, they are also detectors of Englishness.

Relinquishing Englishness
While the regions provide evidence of internal difference, however benign, it is against
foreigners that their English character is most sharply delineated. The English have
historically defined themselves against other nationalities. Linda Colley points out that
the French have provided a foil for the English for centuries. The threat of a Jacobite
invasion in the eighteenth century provided a genuine fear of the cross channel
neighbour, but it was an antipathy that lasted well past that historical event:
Right until the end of the nineteenth century, in fact most politicians,
military experts and popular pundits continued to see France as Britain’s
most dangerous and obvious enemy, and for good reason. (24-25)

The reasons, Colley goes on to explain, were to do with France’s superiority in land
mass, population and military might. Underlining this was the difference of religion,
with France’s Catholicism the historical enemy of England’s Protestantism. Colley
gives a detailed history of the origins of anti-Catholic sentiment in England and its
fuelling by the discourse of martyrdom. The grisly fates of Protestant martyrs luridly
detailed in books such as John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs contributed to the notion of
 31

Protestantism as integral to English identity and, in particular, to the notion that the
British were a blessed race (Colley 28).
Attitudes to Catholicism, even in the decidedly Protestant narratives of Wimsey
and Dalgliesh, are much milder and when Wimsey finds a copy of Foxe’s Martyrs in a
crumbling library, he views it with interest as a bibliophile, rather than an outraged
Protestant (“Bone of Contention”). Lower class characters, such as the Coblings, refer
to the Catholic Church as “the Scarlet Woman” (Unnatural Death 143) whereas High
Church Anglicans like Miss Climpson practise their faith in rituals remarkably similar
to the Roman Catholic Church without a qualm. Both Sayers and James are advocates
of High Church Anglican ritual, and in their writing overtly link these practices to
education and class. In The Nine Tailors the rector’s wife, the immensely capable Mrs
Venables, contrasts the villagers’ “pagan” practices with the high church alternatives
(59). Similarly in James’s The Black Tower Millicent Hammitt is depicted as ridiculous
in her “horatory fervour”, when she gives thanks that her brother Wilfred did not “go
over” to the Church of Rome, a display which the restrained Dalgliesh finds
disconcerting (429). In Death in Holy Orders Dalgliesh is posited as an authority on the
Church by the businessman Sir Alred Treeves who asks him probing questions about
the Anglican creeds. Dalgliesh, like Wimsey, does know about “smells and bells” (15)
as Treeves crudely puts it, due to his superior education, and clerical childhood. As a
consequence he can differentiate between the Anglican centre of the Church of England
and that of the Church of Rome without any difficulty at all.
The French nation was a traditional enemy of England, and apparently of English
values. Adopting the philosophy of the cross-channel neighbour therefore puts one at
the risk of a dilution of one’s Englishness. The dire consequences of such an
occurrence are illustrated in Sayers’s second novel Clouds of Witness. Wimsey’s
brother, the Duke of Denver, stands accused of the murder of his sister Mary’s fiancé,
Denis Cathcart. Wimsey discovers that in fact Denis Cathcart is both the victim and
perpetrator of the murder; in other words he took his own life. The way in which
Wimsey arrives at this conclusion creates a cautionary tale for those who wish to give
up their English birthright. Denis Cathcart was born in England, of English parents, but
spent his childhood in France. His formative years spent abroad resulted in an
acquisition of allegedly Gallic characteristics, most evidenced by his uneven
temperament. Wimsey’s friend and fellow military veteran, Colonel Marchbanks states
that Cathcart was “Not at all like a straightforward Englishman. Always up and down,
up and down!” (42). Marchbanks is an example of what Stephen Knight terms
32

“inarticulate Englishness” which affords “high credibility” within the text (Form and
Ideology 116). Knight is specifically referring to Major Blunt in Agatha Christie’s The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd. However, the same description can be transferred to
Sayers’s George Marchbanks, whose truncated speech is as indicative of his
Englishness as is his exemplary record of war service. Marchbanks is the embodiment
of “straightness”, a term often applied to the English character as it implies
trustworthiness and transparency of motive. Straightness, in this sense, does not
specifically refer to sexuality, but as James Eli Adams explains, “appeals to a familiar
norm of middle-class manhood, particularly that of the late Victorian public school—a
world richly evoked in the appeal, ‘for the sake of the game’” (229). A characteristic
associated with truthfulness and dependability, straightness is much admired in
Wimsey’s world and is the very quality which Cathcart lacks. He cheats at cards for
money, which, in Wimsey’s world is social suicide.3 Cathcart is driven to this
unforgivable act by his passion for his French mistress, a woman with the impressive
name of Simone Vonderaa. Cathcart, in his relationship with this woman, followed “the
strict, Continental code: complete devotion, complete discretion” (259). When she
leaves him for a wealthier man, he commits suicide, taking his own life in a particularly
gruesome way.
The hybrid status of Cathcart elucidates both the perceived differences between
the French and English nationalities, and the convergence thereof. Cathcart’s English
birth and university education (something not to be underestimated in Sayers’s world)
seems to have been undone by his schooldays spent in France. His aunt, Miss Lydia
Cathcart, an acerbic woman, is not surprised to hear of his cheating at cards, saying, “I
have heard that the persons he consorted with in Paris were most undesirable. I never
met any of them. I have never been in France” (27). Clearly she disapproves of his
French ways, and is quick to point out that when she, like Denis, inherited money after
the death of his parents, she converted it into “good, sound, British securities” (27).
Denis, by contrast, invested in Continental securities and lost almost all of it due to the
Great War. Miss Cathcart not only distances herself physically from France but also
verbally inoculates herself against the contagion of supposedly Gallic behaviour.
Cathcart’s terrible end is a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the stomach. He takes
his life upon hearing that his adored French mistress has left him for an astonishingly

3
Wimsey cheats at cards in the short story “The Unprincipled Affair of the Practical Joker” but does so in
order to bring a blackmailer to account. Blackmail, in Wimsey’s world, is even worse than cheating at
cards.
 33

rich American. Cathcart’s vanity and his obsession with his appearance are disapproved
of by Wimsey’s English friends, but it is these very characteristics which lead Wimsey
to deduce the manner of his death. Wimsey’s ability to read foreignness in the body of
Cathcart solves the mystery. Cathcart, he concludes, could not bear to destroy his face
with the gun, so opted for the shot to the abdomen, resulting in a more painful death but
a better looking corpse. Cathcart’s precise grooming, intense passion and unpredictable
moodiness reinscribe, in the text, the gulf between him and the truly English characters.
His un-English tendency to excess is his undoing. As the Coroner at the inquest in
Clouds of Witness points out, “Deceased had been educated in France, and French
notions of the honest thing were very different from British ones” (31). In this context,
once again, the best of British can be read as English. In Sayers’s terms the amplified
misfortune of being denied English values and being exposed to un-English ways at a
formative age meant that Denis Cathcart was doomed to a fate not befitting an
Englishman.
The coroner is used as “Everyman” on several occasions in the Wimsey
narratives. In Have His Carcase the coroner informs the court, during the inquest into
the death of Paul Alexis, of the nature of the Russian mind, which, he states, is inclined
to “feelings of melancholy and despair”. He goes on to say that he had gleaned this
knowledge from his reading of Russian literature and he could convincingly say:
. . . that suicide was of frequent occurrence among the members of that
unhappy nation. We who enjoyed the blessing of being British might find
that difficult to understand, but the jury could take it from him that it was so.
(277)

It is assumed that the audience in the courtroom share the joy of being blessedly British.
Such essentialism about other nationalities is a trademark of imperial writing, and is, in
effect, an abbreviated method of reinforcing English superiority. Throughout the
narrative in Have His Carcase, terms such as “dago” and “mongrel” are used freely.
The French dancer Antoine is just as stereotypically Gallic as the conductor, Luis da
Soto, is Latin (188). The certainty with which these stereotypes are invoked is based
upon the idea that nationality dictates character and that those born with an English
character are fortunate indeed.
Wimsey, like Cathcart, speaks fluent French, has kept French mistresses and is
particular in matters of dress. He also has French antecedents, on his mother’s side.
Wimsey’s honesty, however, is never questioned, nor is his Englishness. Wimsey’s
34

education in the formative years was carried out at Eton and Balliol, and this it seems is
enough to guard him against emotional self-indulgence, that peculiarly continental
affliction. Wimsey too is surrounded by thoroughly straight English fellows, not the
least of whom is Cathcart’s antithesis, the policeman Charles Parker. Like the financier
Freddy Arbuthnot and the upright Colonel Marchbanks, Parker shares the desirable
characteristic of straightness and the absence of an imagination. Parker, who often
plays the straight man in the comedic sense, to Wimsey’s fool, is depicted as having
sound judgement and being a necessary foil for Wimsey’s brilliant erudition. Parker
shares with Wimsey the values of honesty, courage and fortitude and his company
reinforces these qualities upon his more unpredictable friend.

Waves of Migration
The Englishness embodied by Parker and Wimsey is performed in the inter-war years.
By the time Adam Dalgliesh appears in 1962, England is a very different place. The
threats to England’s standards and values come not from Europe, but from further
afield, principally through surges of mass immigration from the former colonies of
Africa, the West Indies and Asia. When the first Dalgliesh novel appeared in 1962
Britain was recording its highest ever increase in immigrant numbers, and they were
overwhelmingly from these former colonies. Peter Clarke states that, “immediately
before the Commonwealth Immigrants Act came into force in 1962, no fewer than
230,000 immigrants had arrived from the New Commonwealth, virtually doubling the
immigrant population in the space of eighteen months” (326).4 Immigration and race
relations were contentious issues in the 1960s yet in her first three novels, spanning
1962 to 1967, James only features one non-white character, a West African cleaner who
appears in a solitary paragraph. Adam Dalgliesh operates in a very white England, not
only in the 1960s but continuously throughout the series.
Englishness and whiteness are seen to be mutually inclusive in the Dalgliesh
narratives and there is a discernible presence of anti-affirmative action and anti-
multicultural integration discourse. During the 1950s and 1960s, Simon Featherstone
argues, “Growing urban settlements of Caribbean and later South-East Asian migrants
posed a visible and emotive presence of imperial consequences to successive
governments at the very time that discourses of empire were being challenged or
suppressed” (108). James’s 1975 novel The Black Tower contains a description of

4
Peter Clarke gives the background to these statistics and discusses the attitudes to race prevalent at the
time in Hope and Glory (325 -329).
 35

migrants from the former colonies. It explicitly focuses upon their racial difference,
positioning them alongside a white girl Ursula Hollis, who relives this scene:
She saw the black women with their jutting buttocks and high barbaric
staccato chatter, heard their sudden deep-throated laughter, as they crowded
around the stall of huge unripe bananas and mangoes as large as footballs.
(323)

The sexualised description of the black women, which aligns their bodies with
enormous bananas and mangoes, seems more appropriate to a racist comedy sketch. In
addition, the black women are placed alongside “the local women” in their “flowered
overalls and carpet slippers.” Their complexion, however, is not described. Presenting
the scene as Ursula Hollis’s “private daydream” (322) constructs a layer of distance
between the contact zone and the reader, a textual strategy, perhaps, of containment.
The above scene, of cultures intermixing, is rare in the very white world of
James’s fiction. Throughout the Dalgliesh series, multiculturalism causes trauma to the
whites who feel discriminated against and threatened by these kinds of policies. Meg
Dennison in Devices and Desires is one of the earliest vehicles for addressing the threat
of an ethnically diverse society. A former school teacher, she is driven out of the
profession by the crusade of political correctness. The trauma of the departure from her
teaching career is recalled as she tries to sleep:
The head mistress had tried to insist that she go on a racial awareness
course, she who had taught children of different races for over twenty years.
There was one scene which for months she had tried resolutely to put out of
her mind, that last meeting in the staffroom, the circle of implacable faces,
brown, black and white, the accusing eyes, the insistent questions. And in
the end, worn down by bullying, she had found herself helplessly weeping.
(30)

Meg Dennison takes a position as a housekeeper for an elderly couple living on the
coast, a community noticeably free of any ethnic minorities. Her peace, it seems, is a
tenuous one, as she is unable to free herself from her past. There is an implication too,
that she has been forced out of her rightful role as a teacher, and as a consequence ended
up doing menial work. The character of Meg Dennison is one of the first to suffer
emotionally and financially from affirmative action policies, but she is not the last.
36

Venetia Aldridge, who occupies a much more powerful position than Meg
Dennison, is a barrister and a murder victim in A Certain Justice. She also rails against
the use of positive discrimination in the process of electing a new member of chambers.
Hubert Langton reminds Venetia, the only woman barrister in chambers, it had been
previously agreed that if there were two candidates of equal standing for a place they
would choose to take the woman:
‘Or the black, if we had a black pupil.’
This was too much. Venetia’s carefully controlled anger spilled out.
‘Woman? Black? How convenient to bracket us together. Pity we haven’t a
black, lesbian, unmarried mother with a disability. That way you could
satisfy four politically correct requirements at one go. And it’s bloody
condescending to me. Do you think successful women want to be made to
feel that we’ve got where we are because men were kind enough to give us
an unfair advantage?’ (74)

Venetia Aldridge’s outburst summarises the conservative reaction to affirmative action

policies with her clichéd scenario of the ideal ‘politically correct’ candidate for the job.
The world of the Middle Temple Chambers is one of the last enclaves of imperial
Englishness: white, male dominated and professional. This scene is one of the few
occasions in the narrative when a black person is directly referred to, and in this case he
or she is hypothetical only. The idea of a black barrister in Chambers is presented as
being so unlikely that it can safely be contained by a policy statement. The passage also
voices the argument that creating affirmative action policies is either condescending or
insulting, and is therefore fundamentally unsound.
The mechanics of affirmative action are outlined further on in A Certain Justice
when Inspector Kate Miskin and Sergeant Robbins question the young lawyer Catherine
Beddington. Beddington shares a flat with a friend, Trudy Manning, a co-founder of
Redress, an organisation dedicated to reminding companies of the necessity for positive
discrimination toward women. During the interview conducted by the police Manning
is portrayed as truculent and naive, while Catherine, the potential beneficiary of such a
policy in Aldridge’s chambers, is clearly defined as second rate. She holds a second
class honours degree and describes herself as lacking confidence and ability.
Beddington excuses Aldridge’s scathing treatment of her, not on the basis of her gender,
but of her competence, much to the disgust of Trudy Manning, who demands:
 37

‘Oh, yeah? And since when have women enjoyed equal terms? Come off
it, Cathy. We’ve had this argument before. She would have done
everything she could to stop you getting a tenancy.’
‘But, Trudy, she was right. I’m not as bright as the other two.’ (284)

The implication of this passage seems to be that positive discrimination results in

mediocrity, and that Venetia Aldridge is right to take up her anti-affirmative action
stance. Catherine Beddington, rather than supporting positive discrimination articulates
an argument against it. This process is later repeated by the mixed race Sergeant
Francis Benton-Smith, who once again reinforces the textual attitude to the questionable
nature of such policies, and by implication their damaging nature.
Whereas the teacher Meg Dennison and the barrister Venetia Aldridge disappear
(Aldridge is in fact murdered by a white male lawyer) at the end of the respective
novels, it is the serial character, Kate Miskin, who most strongly represents the fear of a
culturally dynamic England. Inspector Kate Miskin becomes part of the Dalgliesh team
in A Taste for Death, published in 1986. Her experience as a detective and her extended
tenure in the force is matched by an increasing disillusionment with the institution she
represents. The focus of this anxiety and disappointment is directly and explicitly
named as the Macpherson Report. The Macpherson Report was an enquiry into the
investigations by the Metropolitan Police following the brutal stabbing of a young black
Londoner, Stephen Lawrence. The story of Lawrence’s death, the mishandled
investigations, the inquiry(s) and the reports following this event acted as a lightning
rod in Britain for questions of race, racism and equity. The report found that the
investigation was:
. . . marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional
racism and a failure of leadership by senior officers. A flawed MPS review
failed to expose these inadequacies. The second investigation could not
salvage the faults of the first investigation. (UK, House of Commons Home
Affairs Committee)

Kate Miskin’s refers to this finding when she expresses anger at being branded racist by
association. She asks her colleague Piers Tarrant:
‘The report says that an act is racist if the victim perceives it as such. I
perceive this report as racist—racist against me as a white officer. So where
do I go to complain?’
38

‘You could try the race relations people, but I doubt you’ll get any joy.
Speak to AD about it.’ (Holy Orders 201)

Tarrant’s reply is noteworthy, positing Adam Dalgliesh as the court of last appeal in all
matters, even that of race relations. The threat to English identity reverberates through
this exchange of dialogue, a threat which not even the police force can negate.
Dalgliesh, it is important to note, is never directly involved in the expression of such
anxieties; his position is carefully neutral.
Kate Miskin is espousing a view which tacitly ignores the privileges with which
she as a white professional member of English society is endowed. Whiteness theory
seeks to dismantle such seemingly simplistic statements. As Victoria Burrows states,
whiteness “is a concept deeply riven and interwoven with racial prejudice, gender and
class privileges, and as such needs to be exposed to critical unveiling” (15). Burrows
however goes on to signal that one of the potential problems of such critical attention to
whiteness is that it:
. . . offers white people who feel disparaged by affirmative action, reverse
discrimination policies or what is incorrectly thought of as reverse racism,
an opportunity falsely to claim the position of the victim. (15)

Reverse racism seems to be exactly what Kate Miskin is claiming; that she is a victim
because she is white. Yet what she suffers seems to be an implied reputational slight in
that she belongs to an organisation found to be institutionally racist. This perceived
hardship, at worst, has the effect of blunting her enthusiasm for her career, a reaction
which her colleagues do not seem to have suffered.
Kate Miskin’s colleague, the urbane Oxford-educated Piers Tarrant, is
unconcerned by the Macpherson Report. He views the anti-terrorist branch as his goal
and does not see “why Macpherson should drive me out of my job” (Holy Orders 201).
By the time The Lighthouse is published in 2005, Tarrant’s lack of interest has become
derision as he says:
All official committees of inquiry know what they’re expected to find.
Some of the less intelligent do it a little over-enthusiastically. It’s ridiculous
to lose your job over it or to let it destroy your confidence or your peace.
 39

Following this statement, Tarrant is described as being more “cynical” and “more
politically sophisticated” (16) than Kate Miskin, which makes his summary of the
Macpherson Report even more telling.
The decision to include the actual name of the Macpherson Report and its
repeated appearance in the text is suggestive. James rarely makes such direct references
to contemporary events, which implies even more strongly that this is significant.
Indeed it is almost iconic in the text as a nexus of anxiety about cultural and ethnic
change in England. The Macpherson Report put on the public record that the
Metropolitan Police Service had exhibited institutional racism. The equity of the
Service was held up to judgement and found wanting. Kate Miskin refers to this finding
not just in Death in Holy Orders, published two years after the report, but also in the
novels which follow; The Murder Room (2003) and The Lighthouse (2005). By 2003,
her anger has become world-weariness as she notes:
The Met she served in today wasn’t the Force that she had joined. It had
changed, but so had England, so had the world. And she too had changed.
After the Macpherson Report she had become less idealistic, more cynical
about the machinations of the political world . . . (Murder Room 120)

Further on in the passage it is noted that “the Met still held her allegiance and Adam
Dalgliesh her passionate loyalty” (120). Politicians and the Police Force cannot be
trusted, the text implies, but Dalgliesh is posited as a beacon of decency and constancy,
whose behaviour and values are utterly reliable.

The Problem of Hybridity

Until The Lighthouse, published in 2005, the disdain for any equal opportunity or
affirmative action policies throughout the James novels is expressed by white,
professional characters. In this novel however, it is the character of Francis Benton-
Smith, a non-white character, who continues the argument, initially made by the docile
Catherine Beddington in A Certain Justice. Sergeant Benton-Smith lives in an
unremarkable block of flats near Shepherd’s Bush. His choice of home frames him, as
this quotation suggests:
None of the familiar landmarks lay beneath him—no glimpse of the river,
no painted floodlit bridges, no familiar towers or domes. But this carefully
chosen anonymity, even the landscape was what he wanted. He had put
down no roots, having no native soil. (Lighthouse 20)
40

Benton-Smith, this passage implies, is denied the authentic London, with its riverside
panorama, because he is not English. The last sentence clearly states that he has no
“native” soil, even though he was born and educated in England. The inference is that
his Indian heritage diminishes his Englishness, a claim which seems extraordinary in the
twenty-first century. Benton-Smith, it follows, cannot enjoy the quintessential London
because he knows he does not belong. Consequently he is driven to seek an anodyne
landscape which does not remind him of his non-Englishness or of his alterity. The
linking of the idea of home with a specifically English topography is something I
discuss in Chapter Four. However I will note that both Kate Miskin and Adam
Dalgliesh reside within a view of the all-important Thames, and that their authentic
Englishness goes unquestioned.
The barrier separating Benton-Smith from the churning monument of English
history, the River Thames, is what divorces him from the cultural identity it represents.
Benton-Smith, brought up in Kensington by wealthy professional parents, is of mixed
race. His English father and Indian mother, despite their happy marriage and obvious
material benefits, have produced a son who is characterized by his knowledge that “he
didn’t belong” (21). His liminal status is reiterated throughout Chapter Three in The
Lighthouse where he is variously described as having “legs, painfully stretched across a
spinning globe,” which “could find no secure footing in either continent”. He lives in a
“disjointed world” (21). Interestingly, he makes the observation that there are many
other people who live in his society “of mixed racial, religious and national
backgrounds” and adds that they “seemed to manage” (21). If one is not of wholly
English ethnicity, the text implies, living in England requires management. In The
Private Patient this sense of alienation is reiterated when Benton-Smith thinks that “his
own appearance was . . . misleading” (120) because although he has inherited his Indian
mother’s beauty, he has not inherited her love of India. The text, therefore, is unable to
accord Benton-Smith an English identity, because he has Indian ancestry. The imperial
inheritance of hybridity causes an irreconcilable quandary in the narrative.
The corollary to Benton-Smith’s difficult hybridity, in this series, is the
pointlessness of racial sensitivity. In what is part of a discourse of anti-positive
discrimination and anti-affirmative action, Benton-Smith operates as the mouthpiece for
the ethnic minorities living in a culturally diverse society. Benton-Smith finds others’
sensitivity to his race irritating and ridiculous:
 41

He felt himself to be surrounded by a variety of organizations, including the

criminal law, dedicated to protecting his racial sensitivities, as if he could be
as easily offended as a Victorian virgin confronted by a flasher. Did they
want to stigmatise minorities as over-sensitive, insecure and paranoid?
(Lighthouse 20)

It is difficult not to read the last sentence as authorial intrusion, given the consistency
with which this argument is expounded in the Dalgliesh novels. However Dalgliesh
never articulates these sentiments. The vituperative thrust of the argument only breaks
the narrative surface occasionally but within the politics of the text, it is clearly
endorsed.
Benton-Smith is presented as a liminal subject, rendered so because of his
incomplete Englishness. He seems to be a reluctant, but necessary, attempt to address
the issue of multi-cultural Britain which, it would appear, is anathema to P. D. James.
Susan Rowland makes the point that for James, cultural difference is a problematic
concept:
P. D. James’s characters are all properly non-racist in their attitudes, but her
novels reveal a passionate dislike of multicultural education which records a
nostalgia for a fantasy England, one without cultural difference. Never
condoning discrimination against the other as black, James is nevertheless
opposed to the integration of other cultures as the importation of difference
within England. (67) (author’s emphasis)

Rowland’s work was published in 2001 and includes a discussion of James’ novels up
to and including A Certain Justice published in 1997. In the four novels which follow
the anxiety about multicultural England increases markedly. The creation of Benton-
Smith in the 2003 novel The Murder Room, rather than assuaging doubts about
hybridity within England, brings these anxieties more sharply into relief.
Although Dalgliesh’s world is notable for its carefully governed language to do
with race, Wimsey operates at a time in which racist epithets and ideas were common,
and as a consequence, are troubling to latter day critics. Sayers’s 1931 novel Five Red
Herrings opens with the narrator blithely stating:
Waters was an Englishman of good yeoman stock, and, like all Englishmen,
was ready enough to admire and praise all foreigners except dagoes and
niggers, but, like all Englishmen, he did not like to hear them praise
42

themselves. To boast loudly in public of one’s own country seemed to him

indecent—like enlarging on the physical perfections of one’s own wife in a
smoking room. (8)

In this passage, the English quality of modesty is expressed along with that of racism, as
if each were equal components of the national character. It is difficult to apply
contemporary values retrospectively, and while one could label Sayers’s novels racist
on the strength of this passage, it would be an oversimplification of the case.
Examining the way in which racial stereotypes occur in the Wimsey narratives reveals
that although such tropes are used, as was common in the inter-war years, an assessment
of them in the light of today’s values is not straightforward.
Whereas P. D. James posits Benton-Smith as an example of difficult hybridity,
Sayers’s first novel Whose Body? illustrates a more successful meshing of disparate
cultures. Wimsey investigates the disappearance of the Jewish businessman Sir Reuben
Levy, a man who is not only a pillar of the business community, but the prospective
father-in-law of Wimsey’s pal Freddy Arbuthnot, a character who is decidedly English.
Levy’s wife too, is from a “county” (53) family, establishing her Englishness. This
novel also illustrates a tendency in Sayers’s writing for racist language to emanate from
less educated characters, while Wimsey, like his later counterpart Dalgliesh, usually
remains aloof from such direct use. Sir Reuben’s coarse valet Mr Graves says to the
more refined Bunter, “I don’t hold with Hebrews as a rule, Mr Bunter”, and goes on to
add that “no one could call Sir Reuben vulgar, and my lady at any rate is county . . .”
Bunter replies, “A good Jew can be a good man, that’s what I’ve always said” (53).
Sayers’s relationship with the Jewish faith is a complex one, something
overlooked by Charles Rzepka when he summarily accuses her of “tediously
conventional Anti-Semitism” caused by “an embarrassing narrowness of mind
reflecting the parochialism of Sayers’s life experiences” (Detective Fiction 168).
Rzepka, while choosing to read Sayers through her life experience, has ignored, or is
unaware of, two important points of that life, relating to the question of Judaism. The
first is that, at the time she began writing detective fiction, she was enmeshed in a
difficult love affair with the Jewish John Cournos. Cournos remained, if one reads her
letters, the great love of her life and, as has been well examined, their relationship
formed the basis of the Harriet Vane-Philip Boyes partnership in Strong Poison. As a
single Protestant woman involved in a love affair with a Jewish man in the 1920s, she
surely could not be construed as “tediously conventional”. Such a relationship does not
 43

necessarily spare one from Anti-Semitism but, when combined with her extensive
correspondence on Judaism and Christianity, Sayers’s attitude towards Judaism can be
better understood.
Dorothy Sayers, in her role as a public commentator on the Church of England
was prolific in her writing about Judaism and Christianity. Even a cursory glance
through the index of Volume Three of her letters reveals the extent to which this subject
exercised her. While she was often called upon to work in the cause of Jewish-Christian
understanding, Sayers felt strongly that the difference between the two faiths was so
fundamental in theological terms that it could not be overcome. In spite of this she
respected the right of Jewish people to practise their faith. Her feelings about Christians
sponsoring the Jewish cause are summarised in the following letter:
I did once start to write an article about all this, but I found that any attempt
to explain or account for Gentile feeling (as distinct from merely
denouncing it) gave so much offence to my Jewish friends, that I threw the
whole thing aside, and contented myself with subscribing to the support of
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, thinking that perhaps a gesture of good
will, however feeble, was more useful than pages of an argument or
exposition. (“To an Unknown Correspondent” 3:74)

The “middle-class limitations” (168) Rzepka ascribes to Sayers are obviously judged in
hindsight, but I would argue that they must be read and assessed in light of all the facts
of her life for an accurate picture to be portrayed.5
A more informed approach to the subject of race is taken by Susan Rowland who
states that the Golden Age writers worked in racist times, but for neither Sayers, nor her
contemporary Agatha Christie “is racism endorsed by the detective or the detecting
plot.” Rowland further describes their attitude to racism as “ambiguously depicted”
(66) and her point is a fair one, given the difficulty of retrospectively applying
contemporary values. Whereas the New Zealander Ngaio Marsh, as Rowland asserts,
does regard “racism as a stain on English character” (66), a comparison with other
contemporary writers suggests Sayers’s position is, at least, moderate. Race is never, as
Rowland has stated, essential to the detecting plot. This is in stark contrast to a
contemporary novel Enter Sir John (1928), written by Sayers’s friend and fellow

5
Rzepka also makes the error of stating that Sayers sent her son to be brought up by a “distant relative”
(163) which once again is a misreading of the facts. Ivy Shrimpton, John’s guardian, was Sayers’s
cousin, and had been a friend since childhood. Sayers also provided for John financially all her life and
he inherited her estate upon her death.
44

Detection Club member Helen Simpson in conjunction with Clemence Dane (the
pseudonym of Winifred Ashton). It is worth pondering this example of English
detective fiction briefly as an example of racial essentialism which existed in 1920s
England.
The plot of Enter Sir John, a now largely forgotten, and highly forgettable, entry
in the catalogue of detective fiction, rests on the fact of the murderer, Handell Fane’s,
mixed race origin.6 His fellow actor Martella Baring, in her attempt to keep his
ethnicity a secret, describes him as having a “disability” (225). However, when she is
accused of being in love with Fane, she is so horrified that she exclaims, “But the man’s
chi-chi”, which Sir John Saumarez, the theatre impresario-detective, translates as “Half-
caste—an Eurasian” (227). The other characters are shocked by this revelation,
knowing it would damage Fane’s acting career irreparably. Fane is so determined to
keep his Eurasian descent hidden that he bludgeons his blackmailer to death with a
poker. Ashamed of his family history, Fane describes himself as “Half-caste, that’s
what I am—neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor—” and goes on to state that he cannot stay
calm in the face of adversity because, “I’m not white” (256). The character of Handell
Fane is a loaded symbol of “otherness” in the text, and most tellingly, he is the
murderer. Within the text, there is only agreement, by other characters, with Fane’s
summary of himself. He is apparently an embarrassment because of his mixed race.
The detective who uncovers the truth of Fane’s ethnicity and his crime is the wealthy
Sir John Saumarez. Saumarez too, is his “stage name”, since he has altered it from the
pointedly English but prosaic John Simmonds. Martella Baring, the actress who was
outraged at a suggested romantic link between herself and Handell Fane, ends the novel
as the fiancée of Sir John Saumarez, thereby rewarding her overt racial discrimination
with marriage to a wealthy and suitably, according to the text, white man.
Although Sayers’s fiction does not plumb the depths of racial essentialism in the
same way as Enter Sir John, clearly racial stereotypes do exist in her work. The
financial agents McBride and Solomon in Busman’s Honeymoon are depicted as little
more than clowns providing light relief during a tense murder investigation. Mr
Solomon represents Moss and Isaacs and the cockney Mr McBride represents Levy,
Levy and Levy, both firms having claims on the goods and chattels of the late Mr
Noakes. Mr Solomon a “stout, elderly Hebrew” (306) appears as Harriet and Wimsey
are attempting to have dinner:

6
More memorable is the 1931 Alfred Hitchcock film Murder, which is an adaptation of Enter Sir John.
 45

‘Very thorry to intrude,’ said this gentleman, in a breathless and hasty

manner. ‘No wish to cause inconvenience. I,’ he added helpfully, ‘am Moss
& Isaacs—’
‘You were wrong, Bunter. It’s not an individual—it’s a company.’ (307)

This passage exhibits the dual discourses of Englishness at work in the Wimsey
narratives. Wimsey simultaneously displays his charming civility and invites the men
to stay for dinner, and at the same time conflates Mr Solomons with his company,
rendering the term “Jew” metonymic for “usurer.”
In the wider narratives, Jewish men are almost always depicted as businessmen.
Five Red Herrings contains a travelling merchant dubbed “Ikey Mo” (the abbreviation
of Isaac Moses, a derogatory epithet) by the murderer of the piece, the painter, Ferguson
(285). In the short story “The Piscatorial Farce of The Stolen Stomach” the diamond
merchant visited by Wimsey is Jewish. He, once again, is on friendly terms with
Wimsey, who values his expertise and treats him with respect. While Sayers
undoubtedly draws upon the store cupboard of stock versions of “other” ethnicities, her
aristocratic detective did not share the extreme views of another member of that
elevated strata of society. The Duke of Gloucester, described by A. N. Wilson as
“moronic”, stated at the beginning of the Second World War: “You can say what you
like about this Hitler Johnny, but he knows how to treat the Nosey Brigade” (341).7
Given these prevailing attitudes, it is fair to say that if the views of Sayers were typical
of her time, and distasteful, they were certainly not extreme.
Whereas a member of the Jewish community was an established, if at times
controversial part of English society in Sayers’s time, the presence of a black man was
something altogether more remarkable. The Reverend Hallelujah Dawson appears in
Unnatural Death and his first mention in the text is courtesy of a letter from the voluble
Katherine Climpson. Miss Climpson is relating a conversation with Miss Timmins, “A
most disagreeable CENSORIOUS woman” (125) who uses a range of epithets to
describe the man including “blackamoor” and “nasty dirty nigger” (126). These
descriptions do not help Wimsey who points out that “‘Nigger’, to a Miss Timmins,
may mean anything from a high-caste Brahmin to Sambo and Rastus at the Coliseum—
it may even, at a pinch, be an Argentine or an Esquimaux” (127). Miss Timmins, being

7
To this one could also add the blatant racism in Conan Doyle’s “The Three Gables” (1926), when the
“Negro” Steve Dixie is described as having a “hideous mouth” (92) by Watson. Holmes, more
offensively, tells Dixie that he requires a “scent-bottle” (101) because of his close proximity to the black
man.
46

of the servant class, does not have access to the taxonomic certainty of the detective,
and, the text implies, also lacks good manners. Lord Peter, whose manners are perfect,
is able to analyse the term “nigger” and provide many possibilities for its meaning,
drawing from the imperial archive with ease. Sandy Arbuthnot in John Buchan’s The
Three Hostages is equally confident in his cataloguing of the arch villain Dominick
Medina. He describes the flaw in his character as one of breeding when he states that
Medina is marred by “the far-away streak of Latin in him” which when combined with
his Irish heritage “never makes a good cross” (142). Both Arbuthnot and Wimsey can
make such emphatic pronouncements, highly distasteful to us in the twenty-first
century, from the security of their inviolable status as British gentlemen.
Sayers’s Unnatural Death presents the Reverend Hallelujah Dawson in
sympathetic terms. He is a mild, elderly gentleman who is in straitened circumstances
and has been badly treated by the cold-hearted Mary Whittaker. Any suggestion of the
vengeful colonial other returning to England is completely expunged by the man’s meek
acceptance of his failed mission. He has travelled to England in the vain hope of
claiming a lost inheritance, but when advised of the impossibility of this (his parents’
marriage was a sham) he accepts both his illegitimacy and penury with Christian
forbearance. “‘I called resignation to my aid’ said the old Indian, with a dignified little
bow” (152). Here, the text shifts from the offensive epithet of “nigger” to the more
dignified title of Indian (Dawson is from the West Indies). He is also dismissed as a
suspect in the murder of Agatha Dawson. This point is underlined at the conclusion of
Unnatural Death when the humble cleric ends up with 10,000 pounds of Dawson
money, while the evil Mary Whittaker commits suicide. Charles Parker ensures that the
cheque is honoured, which, despite his occasional use of racist terms, indicates his
regard for the elderly Reverend Dawson.
Anti-Semitism and ethnic difference were issues of note in the inter war years in
England but they are given less attention in the Sayers narratives than are matters of
class and gender. This is not to suggest that race, class and gender can be neatly
separated. However, the pervading cause of anxiety within the Wimsey narratives is the
change in social structures among the white population and in particular those at the
upper end of the hierarchy. Whereas race is rarely directly addressed in P. D. James’s
early novels, the later Dalgliesh novels betray unease about the changes in the social
fabric of Britain caused by immigration. Her texts overwrite these anxieties far more
overtly than do the Wimsey narratives. However both the Wimsey and Dalgliesh series
contain twinned narratives of cultural reconstruction and consolation in which the state
 47

of the nation is a source of mournful yearning. The way in which England is imagined
and remembered produces a consolatory narrative rooted in English customs, history
and cultural artefacts. The “imperial detective” is the arbiter of these objects and
practices and the faint hope upon which England rests.

The Consolations of Culture

Both Wimsey and Dalgliesh are proponents and exponents of a particular kind of
Englishness. Surrounding their detective work is a display of key cultural concerns,
including literature, art and architecture which effect a form of cultural reconstruction
within the novels. Part of this process is evidenced in the detectives concentrating upon
the minutiae, the details and rituals of a particular version of English life, often using
these seemingly banal details to solve a case. The sanctified version of English culture
is repeatedly associated with the past and contemporary England almost always an
inferior copy. Replaying these English cultural rituals forms a consolatory discourse
which is uneasily balanced against the anxieties of the present.
The rewriting of England and the re-imagining of English surroundings are by no
means unique to these authors. As many critics have pointed out, nostalgia and
yearning are in evidence in much post World War One English writing, among them
David Gervais. His is essentially a conservative argument and does not include women
writers. He wonders whether “their concern with ‘Englishness’ were not of a different
order” (xiii), and presumably finds himself unable to address this quandary. However
he makes the point that the past and nostalgia are inherent in discussions of England:
In other words, far from being the option of the sentimentalist, nostalgia has
become a living part of our culture, something that we may sometimes feel
stuck with but not something we can simply wash our hands of. It is in this
sense that I think it is possible to think of our England as ‘the aftermath of
England.’ (198)

Peter Ackroyd states that the English have long been thought “a race subject to
melancholia” (Albion 55) and adds, “it is as if the English were born looking
backwards” (62). Ian Baucom too, makes this point eloquently when he says “if the
nation is an imagined community, then the English nation is a community in mourning”
(176). Such wistful reflection is portrayed in H. V. Morton’s foreword to his work, In
Search of England, where he speaks to those reading the book away from England:
48

If you find in these pages the smell of English meadows, if they bring back
to you the smooth movement of English rivers, the stately somnolence of
cathedral cities, and the sound of bells among elm-trees on cool, summer
mornings, I am happy because—well; the pain will not really hurt you. You
may even enjoy it. (xii)

The ninth edition of this travelogue was published in 1929 and it reached its seventeenth
edition in five years, suggesting that the pleasure and pain of remembering England was
enjoyed widely. Morton’s allusion to homesickness and the distress of being away from
home is part of a discourse of travel writing; the acknowledgment that perspective alters
with distance. However, what is more interesting, I think, is his use of the word “pain”
to describe the evocation of England. The concatenation of nostalgia, longing and
melancholy created when writing of England is apparent in the work of both Sayers and
James, and fits, more broadly, within a discourse of nostalgia in twentieth-century
English writing. Being English, it seems, requires a degree of suffering.
There are, of course, a recognisable series of images pined for in twentieth-
century constructions of an imagined England. A profusion of such perfect pictures is
to be found in the quarterly magazine This England. Available on news-stands, online
and by subscription this production espouses English virtues of a very particular kind.
The cover of the Autumn 2007 edition of “England’s loveliest magazine” proclaims that
This England is “for all who love our green and pleasant land.” The index reveals
which England the journal portrays, with articles about historic homes, literary
landscapes, English schools, churches, inns, surnames and Christian England. The
gentle magazine for English gentlefolk, however, also contains scathing attacks upon
the supposed menace of Europe, particularly its threat to the imperial system of weights
and measures. In a column entitled “Forever England” the history of the magazine’s
campaign against the metric system is outlined, with its champions listed as Margaret
Thatcher (whose removal from office was “suspiciously organized”) and the late Steve
Thorburn. Steven Thorburn was a fruit and vegetable trader in Sunderland. He was
charged with the offence of selling bananas by the pound:
Steve was awarded our Silver Cross of St George for his bravery (Autumn
2001) but sadly, after almost four stressful years of standing up to this
metric madness, he suffered a massive heart attack and died at home…He
was only 39. (Appleyard 31)
 49

The martyrdom of the unfortunate trader is based upon his supposed death at the hands
(or centimetres) of the metric system, a system which hails from continental Europe.
Tapping into martyrologies from England’s Protestant past, the magazine makes a plea
for the late Steve Thorburn to receive a Royal Pardon to quash the conviction he
received for the banana selling offence.
This England, and this article in particular, highlights the vehemence of the
opposition towards the European Union and the perceived threat towards British
sovereignty. The cloying pages of cosy recollections, as Jeremy Paxman acidly points
out, cloak “a torrent of outrage” (78). Interspersed with polemics against the EU are the
nostalgic memories of English childhood, English customs and history which depict a
sovereign island nation, free of the taint of Europe, or indeed anywhere else.8 It
constructs a version of Fortress England, the plucky island once more seeing off
European raiders; simultaneously it contains the strand of melancholy and nostalgia for
the ideal England which can only exist in the past.9 Both these ideas can be discerned in
the fiction of Sayers and James in a less vituperative and more poetic fashion.

A House in the Country

In the final novel of both the Wimsey and the Dalgliesh series something curious
occurs. In each narrative a country house, neglected or converted from its traditional
role, is restored to a seat of English family life. In Busman’s Honeymoon, Wimsey
pledges to return the Elizabethan farm house of “Talboys” to its former glory, and retain
it as his house in the country. The Private Patient narrates, not the “imperial detective”
Adam Dalgliesh, but a proxy, the plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell’s, plans to
restore Cheverell Manor from a private hospital to a private home. In the James novel,
Helena Cresset, the daughter of the original owner of Cheverell Manor, agrees to marry
George Chandler-Powell, reasserting her role as the rightful heir to the stately home.
Described by the educated detective Francis Benton-Smith as having a face that “is pure
Plantagenet” (161), Helena Cresset is situated as a character who embodies English
history and landed privilege. Her reassumption of the role as lady of the manor is a re-
attachment of heritage in the familial and cultural sense of the word. The restoration of

8
The magazine also offers a DVD: Britain on the Brink warning that “the founders of what is called the
European Union always intended to create A United States of Europe by stealth…” (67).
9
Jeremy Paxman offers a critique of the magazine and an interview with the editor, Roy Faiers in The
English (77-81). Simon Featherstone too discusses this magazine in his study Englishness: Twentieth-
Century Popular Culture and the Forming of English Identity (10-12).
50

these icons of English culture offers a consolatory thread in a narrative which, for the
most part, delineates its version of the inexorable decay of English culture.
Ian Baucom has asserted in Out of Place that the country house became a focus
for film and television productions in the 1980s and 1990s as part of a collective surge
of nostalgia in Britain. In these productions Baucom claims “the country house, and
that moment in England’s cultural history which it synecdochially locates” was
“rediscovered and fetishized” (165). The moment to which he refers is the peak of
British imperialism, celebrated through the building of magnificent houses by wealthy
colonists returning home. This visible symbol of England’s imperial past represents,
Baucom states, “the ordered, and hegemonic, moral economy of England’s privileged
classes; the heyday of British capital; the national and imperial project of identity
formation; the Pax Britannica.” He goes on to argue that the country house must be
read, “not as the desired thing but as the surviving fragment of the lost object of desire”
(173). An examination of the treatment of the country house in the Wimsey and
Dalgliesh novels reveals a trajectory from qualified certainty in the inter-war years,
through to anxiety in the early Dalgliesh novels, and finally a concentrated attempt in
the final four Dalgliesh novels to gather up fragments of these “lost objects of desire”
into a textual museum of the imperial past.
Baucom has argued for the existence of anticipatory or “proleptic” nostalgia in
writings about Englishness. Within the Wimsey and Dalgliesh novels the description of
the country house is almost always attended by this very state. Baucom terms
“proleptic nostalgia” a process:
. . . in which the traveller anticipates the bitter pleasure of occupying the
present only in memory and thus begins the work of forgetting or
evacuating the present in order that it might later be remembered or
imaginatively reoccupied . . . (51)

In the Wimsey and Dalgliesh novels the occurrence of proleptic nostalgia is largely
attributable to the decline of empire. This historical event, Simon Gikandi insists,
creates “that ill-defined space in which the experience of empire and its long past seem
to cast an aura—which is also an anxiety—over contemporary culture” (2). Both the
Wimsey and Dalgliesh series contain moments when the enjoyment gained from an
occasion is depicted against an impending societal change, a bittersweet process in
which being English can only be understood as a fleeting pleasure. The country house
 51

therefore, representing empire, can only be enjoyed in the knowledge that it is on the
cusp of disappearing, and with it the society which brought it into existence.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of proleptic nostalgia is contained in James’s
autobiography Time to be in Earnest, when she describes her experience of a perfect
day:
In the afternoon we drove to Rousham and walked in the gardens. We saw
very few other people and the ordered beauty of lawns and trees was
wonderfully refreshing, particularly the view down to the lake with the
water-lilies in flower and the golden carp sliding under the dark green
surface. We visited the kitchen garden and then sat in the rose garden, Jane
and I in silence, listening and inhaling the subtle scents of high summer,
while Peter roamed among the rose beds. I thought that I could not have felt
happier anywhere else in the world, however beautiful, but then I often think
this in England. It is a great disincentive to the ardours, dangers, delays and
inevitable disappointments of travel. And a perfect day should be recorded.
It can’t be relived except in memory but it can be celebrated and
remembered with gratitude. (49)

James is already filing this memory away, acknowledging its transitoriness, and
simultaneously desiring that it be “celebrated and remembered”. The memory of “a
perfect day” is also the memory of a perfect England, which in the act of it being
recorded is acknowledged, as having already slipped away. In her moment of proleptic
nostalgia James is celebrating what Baucom describes as the “surviving fragment of the
lost object of desire” (173), a piece of idyllic England, which exists only in the past.
Lord Peter Wimsey experiences a similar fear of the passing of all that is great
about his country, and this too is connected with a stately home. In Gaudy Night he
asks Harriet if she would like to visit the family home of the Wimseys; “Duke’s
Denver”:
Harriet will you come with me one day to Denver and see the place before
the new civilisation grows in on it like the jungle? . . . .They’ll tell you I
don’t care a damn for the whole outfit, and I don’t know that I do. But I
was born there, and I shall be sorry if I live to see the land sold for ribbon-
building and the Hall turned over to a Hollywood Colour-Talkie king. (271)
52

Wimsey’s urgent request to Harriet is set against the potential engulfing of his ancestral
home by the forces of modernity, in the shape of manufacturing and popular culture.
The passage implies that Wimsey values his heritage acutely, because it is in danger of
disappearing. He makes this explicit when he says, despairingly, “Our kind of show is
dead and done for. What the hell good does it do anybody these days?” (271).
Wimsey, like James, is enjoying the stately home even as he acknowledges its
inevitable disappearance. Wimsey’s despondency is repeated by the peer Lord
Martlesham in James’s The Murder Room when he says, “the England my father fought
for, is dying . . .” (325). Although these books are written over sixty years apart, the
sentiment expressed is remarkably similar. The version of England mourned for by the
peers Wimsey and Martlesham is most clearly symbolised, in both detective series, by
the country house.
The time in which the Wimsey narratives are set, and the moment of the
disappearance of the country house, is represented by Evelyn Waugh in his novel
Brideshead Revisited. The crumbling of the estates of the landed gentry is captured by
the painter Charles Ryder. Ryder says of himself that his “theme is memory” (197) and
during the dreariness of the Second World War he recalls the coruscating life which
preceded it. His paintings of English stately homes were often finished just before the
house was destroyed:
In such buildings England abounded, and, in the last decade of their
grandeur, Englishmen seemed for the first time to become conscious of
what before was taken for granted, and to salute their achievements at the
moment of extinction. (198)

The “moment of extinction” Ryder refers to is not only the house, of course, but the way
of life, and the notion of England as a place as Baucom has said of “hegemonic
certainty.” Charles Ryder, the artist, is transferring onto canvas this loaded symbol of
Englishness just as it reaches its vanishing point. Waugh’s novel luxuriates in
melancholy. Published in 1945, it sits between the Wimsey and Dalgliesh series and
looks back to the ordered certainty of Sayers’s “Duke’s Denver” in Busman’s
Honeymoon in 1937, and forward to the ailing “Martingale House” in James’s Cover
Her Face in 1962. The country house, I contend, is a luminous symbol of British
imperialism, and the fate of this icon can be read in tandem with the state of the English
nation in both the Wimsey and Dalgliesh narratives.
 53

The first sighting of Adam Dalgliesh in the series depicts him surveying
“Martingale House” and judging its architectural merits (Cover Her Face 48). Tying
the “imperial detective” to such a dynamic symbol of imperial Englishness signals the
beginning of a continuing narrative of re-identification with England’s past. England in
the Dalgliesh novels, as I have shown, is no longer culturally or racially homogenous,
and English identity has been complicated by the influx of British subjects from the
margins. Dennis Porter has noted that in Death of An Expert Witness buildings which:
. . . attest to the ideals of order, beauty, and faith of former times provide
the settings for the acting out of homicidal violence and lust in the confused
present. Such signifiers imply nostalgia for a nobler age of belief that
manages to exist in the fiction alongside a modest hope in the individual’s
capacity to live the good life now against all odds. (“Detection and Ethics”
17)

Porter goes on to describe that James’s detectives, Cordelia Gray and Adam Dalgliesh,
as “models of right conduct”. Although Porter does not specifically link these ideas to
notions of Englishness, he has identified the template of excellence offered by the
detectives. I contend that a specifically English code of behaviour, within a visibly
English landscape, is offered to the reader as a palliative against societal change
throughout each series of detective stories.
The Dalgliesh series begins with the ill-fated “Martingale” in 1962, a “typical
Elizabethan manor house” (48) in which the head of the family lies dying, and the lady
of the house has committed murder. Subsequent novels almost all contain magnificent
houses which have been converted into institutions. These houses have usually been
partitioned to make offices or otherwise despoiled in the name of practicality. Many of
them contain Gothic histories. Nightingale House in Shroud for a Nightingale and
Toynton Grange in The Black Tower pulsate with morbid possibility, a great deal of
which is realised in the text. As the series progresses stately homes operate as a
pathology laboratory in Death of an Expert Witness, a publishing house in Original Sin
and a theological college in Death in Holy Orders. This novel, and the three which
come after it, namely The Murder Room, The Lighthouse and The Private Patient,
display an almost frenetic gathering of English architecture, art and memorabilia within
the texts, creating a textual museum of the end of empire, or as King George V
described the 1924 Wembley Exhibition, “the whole Empire in little” (A. Wilson 272).
54

The textual museum in James’s work occurs in two principal forms. One is the
vignette, situated in a middle, or working-class home. The larger scale of the vignette,
the collection, is found in an institution, which as the series continues, increasingly
comes to resemble a museum of English culture. The domestic vignette occurs as a
room decorated with Victorian ornaments, prints and paintings which usually depict
figures or scenes of imperial glory. Such scenes are often associated with the figure of
the housekeeper, whose role I discuss in Chapter Four. In many respects these scenes
resemble the interior descriptions found in the Sayers novels. Mantelpieces overflow
with sentimental decorations. The sitting room of Miss Climpson in Unnatural Death is
choked with silver framed photographs (30) as are the quarters of the nurse, Miss Booth,
in Strong Poison (166). Yet these descriptions are cursory and merely provide context
for the class and age of the characters concerned. However in James’s fiction the
presentation of these vignettes gathers urgency as the series continues, as if the textual
conservation of such artefacts is the last hope of salvaging the remnants of the British
Empire.
I use the word “scene” deliberately, as these interior descriptions are as carefully
specified as the instructions for a stage set. James is more than ready to defend her
attention to detail when queried by an exasperated editor. In the typescript of Death in
Holy Orders, the editor writes “This description is stunningly uninteresting. What is the
point of it?” James replies, in red pen, “Action takes place here later” (TS Girton). The
description, in Chapter Nine of the published novel, is a catalogue of mismatched
furniture in the now empty apartment of Margaret Munroe. In the room is a bookshelf
which contains “only a leather-covered Bible and a copy of Alice Through the Looking
Glass” (204), an instance of the careful placement of an icon of English literature within
the text. However, despite James’s claims, the subsequent “action” in Chapter Thirteen,
in no way relies upon the particulars of the furniture or the contents of the bookshelf,
instead it is an interrogation of the murderer which relies on dialogue rather than setting.
James’s detailed settings are habitual in her prose and suggest a way of reading her
work, not only for the plot but also for the mise-en-scène.
The exquisite detailing of James’s interior descriptions reinforces their
anachronistic nature, and simultaneously expresses a desire for the world they represent.
Framed within a room or a home these pictures, repeated in the Dalgliesh series, form a
gallery of a lost world, a fragmented version of imperial England reduced to porcelain
and paint. Such a portrait of England past is found in the home of Mrs Minns, the
 55

Berowne’s cleaner, in A Taste for Death. Within her council flat, she has created, we
are told:
A small Victorian sitting room, dark, cluttered, claustrophobic. The
wallpaper was a dark olive-green patterned with ivy and lilies, the carpet a
faded but serviceable Wilton, while occupying almost the whole of the
middle of the room was an oblong table of polished mahogany with curved
legs, its surface mirror-bright, and four high-backed carved chairs. A
smaller octagonal table was set against one wall holding an aspidistra in a
brass pot while the walls were hung with sentimental prints in maple
frames; the Sailor’s Farewell and Sailor’s Return, a child reaching for a
flower above a brook, its heedless steps protected by a winged angel . . .
(306).

There is much more to this description of the tiny flat, into which copious animal
figurines and Victorian house plants are squeezed, overlaid with an overwhelming smell
of polish. Pointedly, Mrs Minns is described as resembling a “Victorian housekeeper”
(307). She is situated within the text, therefore, as one who is keeping, in the sense of
saving as well as maintaining, a house from the past, defiantly preserving her cultural
heritage.
The Victorian artefacts of Mrs Minns’s eccentric flat are replicated in numerous
other of James’s novels, most notably in Ruby Pilbeam’s cottage in Death in Holy
Orders (2001). This house too boasts a print of “The Sailor’s Return” and is decorated
with sentimental Victorian prints and porcelain figures (85). Ruby Pilbeam, like Mrs
Minns, is a housekeeper underscoring yet again the textual preservation of a domestic
heritage of Englishness. The Dalgliesh series also features multiple scenes of sitting
rooms and living rooms decorated with pictures of Britain’s imperial past. Cover Her
Face describes the tiny cottage of the elderly groom Sam Bocock which abounds in
“trophies and mementoes from the First World War” along with pictures of “King
George V and his Queen” (146). Julius Court’s elegant sitting room in The Black
Tower contains “a splendid Sunderland lustreware jug commemorating Trafalgar” and a
great deal of nautical memorabilia (375). Esmé Carling’s old-fashioned sitting room in
Original Sin (1994) features among “a clutter of ornaments; a George VI and Queen
Elizabeth coronation mug” (443). The Murder Room (2003) depicts the home of the
elderly Major Arkwright which boasts more Staffordshire figures, “The Duke of
Clarence, Edward the Seventh’s ill-fated son, and his fiancée, Princess May; Queen
56

Victoria in state robes; a mounted Garibaldi; Shakespeare” and “notable Victorian

preachers” (183). These collections of household objects, over the course of the series,
amount to a catalogue of imperial history, commemorated and celebrated in porcelain
and paint.
The textual significance of such collections is suggested by the nostalgic
Dalgliesh, when he enters the apartment of Mrs Burbridge, the housekeeper of Combe
House. He encounters a display of, “the accumulated relics of generations: family
mementoes of transitory or more lasting enthusiasms . . . ” Among this collection are
Staffordshire figures of John Wesley, Dick Turpin and a “two-foot-high Queen Victoria
in the regalia of Empress of India” (Lighthouse 214). Mrs Burbridge is middle-class,
the widow of a clergyman. Although she is of a different class to the more eccentric
Mrs Minns, the interior of her home is carefully positioned as an accumulation of family
history, rather than a display of poor taste. Dalgliesh, far from being offended by the
collection, sees its significance in a national context:
Our parents’ generation carried the past memorialised in paint, porcelain
and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is taught or remembered
in terms of the worst we did, not the best. (Lighthouse 215) (author’s
emphasis)

Surrounded by imperial memorabilia, Dalgliesh reflects on what has been lost. This
scene, in the second last of the Dalgliesh novels, is the culmination of the tableaux of
imperial nostalgia created throughout the series. Interior descriptions of rooms are
accompanied by a detailed cataloguing of English culture. The careful selection of
imperial figures of royal, military and religious significance is not coincidental. These
mementoes are a reminder of English values, forged in the heady days of the British
Empire. Their endorsement by Dalgliesh reinforces his role as a holder of imperial
values. The remains of empire are to be found in these collections of ephemera, a
reminder of how far England has declined from its days of imperial splendour.
There is a nice irony in the commodity being used to celebrate the empire. Anne
McClintock has stated that the Great Exhibition in 1851 “became a monument not only
to a new form of mass consumption but also to a new form of commodity spectacle”
(Imperial Leather 57). Within James’s works a version of the Great Exhibition exists,
or rather fragments of it: remnants of the great display of Victorian England. The scene
in Mrs Burbridge’s room in The Lighthouse is one such example: a modest collection of
British culture from the past. However, James also depicts much larger collections of
 57

these commodities in various forms of museums. Two such collections occur in the
descriptions of the Cadaver Club, in Unnatural Causes and Original Sin. The later
novel emphasises a miscellany which, when taken together, represents the
miniaturisation of the British Empire. There is a white marble bust of the Duke of
Wellington, an assortment of coronation mugs and a picture of Princess Charlotte’s
funeral. Overshadowing the eccentric collection is a “large and lurid print” (36) of the
Charge of the Light Brigade, an image epitomising the glory and grandeur of England
as a patriotic nation and military powerhouse.
Roberta Rubenstein has argued that nostalgia can function as a palliative. She
states that “nostalgia also functions as a fixative: something that makes permanent,
prevents fading” (160). If one extrapolates the argument of Roberta Rubenstein, the
prevalence of these collections of ephemera and collectibles in the Dalgliesh narratives,
can also be read as an attempt to employ the curative effect of nostalgia. It is, as
Rubenstein suggests, a fixing of these memories, of these pictures in the text. It also
reinforces the idea of an idealised Englishness, even when that ideal can never be
attained. The final four novels in the Dalgliesh series, set in stately homes converted to
institutional use, provide an even more urgent compilation and conservation of English
culture, particularly in the medium of paint on canvas.

Pictures of England
Within the Wimsey and Dalgliesh novels paintings perform two major functions. They
demonstrate the detectives’ discerning eye for art and they also triumphantly frame the
best England has to offer. The Wimsey family home at “Duke’s Denver” features a
gallery of such paintings, including a depiction of the young Peter Wimsey by Sargent.
He is part of a gallery of past Wimseys painted by famous names including
Gainsborough and Van Dyck. Wimsey’s expertise in describing these paintings is
evident, implying that he is as fine a judge of art as he is of food, wine and clues to a
murder. The gallery at Duke’s Denver is a record of power and influence, dating back
to a past long distant. When Wimsey introduces his new bride to the house and the
paintings, it is with an air of subdued pride, but also of familiarity, as it the paintings
and the house are an organic manifestation of aristocratic privilege.
Whereas paintings in Wimsey’s world are familiar, in Dalgliesh’s world they take
on a far greater significance. Time and again in the Dalgliesh novels landscapes, still
life paintings or portraits are highlighted, often through the appreciative eyes of
Dalgliesh. In particular, the single painting in an otherwise stark office or room is
58

accentuated as the sole personal effect, and therefore the key to a personality. These
paintings are always described and often attributed to British artists, among them
George Stubbs (Death of an Expert Witness), Arthur Devis (Taste for Death), Lucian
Freud (Original Sin), Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (Certain Justice) and Ben
Nicholson (Murder Room). The paintings are almost always described as originals and
form an integral part of the interior description of James’s novels. Twice she endows
rooms with the Sidney Nolan “Ned Kelly” paintings (Expert Witness and Devices and
Desires), framing the doubly colonial image, the Irish-Australian bushranger painted by
the Australian artist. In Death of An Expert Witness, the single painting in the office of
the director of the pathology laboratory is Stanley Spencer’s, the “Assumption at
Cookham” (614). Cookham is Spencer’s earthly paradise, the rural village set on the
River Thames. The resonance of such paintings escalates as the series progresses and
the single paintings effloresce into collections, galleries and museums of English art.
The final four Dalgliesh novels, Death in Holy Orders (2000), The Murder Room
(2003), The Lighthouse (2005) and The Private Patient (2008) can be read collectively
as a museum of English art. Together they contain artworks attributed to the Victorians,
the pre-Raphaelites, the inter-war artists, culminating, in the final novel, with the
collection of quintessentially English scenes contained in an ancient manor house,
Cheverell Manor. Any doubts about the eloquence of this house as a symbol are erased
when Cheverell Manor is described as “a house built for certainties, for birth, death and
rites of passage, by men who knew what they believed and what they were doing. A
house grounded in history, enduring” (132). It is precisely this final quality, of
endurance, that posits the house as a bulwark against the threats to English identity and
as an ark of English culture.
It is, however, the reaction of Dalgliesh which best expresses the function of
Cheverell Manor within the text. Entering the building, Dalgliesh:
. . . experienced an extraordinary moment in which architecture, colours,
shape and sounds, the soaring roof, the great tapestry on the right-hand wall,
the vase of winter foliage . . . the row of portraits in their gilt frames, some
objects clearly seen even in a first glance, others perhaps dredged from
some childish memory or fantasy, seemed to fuse into a living picture which
immediately impregnated his mind. (134)

Dalgliesh, the embodiment of Englishness, is overwhelmed by the magnificence of his

surrounds, and experiences an almost hallucinatory pleasure. Even as this passage
 59

extols the glory of Cheverell Manor, it also acknowledges it as “childish” and a

“fantasy”. Cheverell Manor and its artwork are the culmination of the textual gathering
of English culture throughout the Dalgliesh series, a display of the very best of England.
It is also an acknowledgement of the hopelessness of such an endeavour.
Among other treasures within this haven, George Chandler-Powell’s favourite
paintings stand out. Bequeathed to him by a grateful patient who shared his “prejudice
against foreign ruins and alien landscapes,” (87) the paintings include works by Albert
Goodwin, Peter de Wint, Thomas Girtin, Robert Hill and Copley Fielding. His
favourite, oddly for a man who has a prejudice against “alien” landscapes, is “Turner’s
study for his watercolour of the arrival of the English packet at Calais” (88). J. M. W.
Turner’s evocation of England as a nation defined by its marine borders renders this
painting significant. Its appeal, I suggest, lies in the portrayal of the vessel, surrounded
by high seas and foreign faces, as plucky and indomitable, or in other words, thoroughly
English.
There is more to this painting however. Chandler-Powell’s choice of artwork not
only cites him as discriminating, but creates a knot of Englishness in the text which is
worth unravelling. In the National Gallery in London Turner’s more famous work,
“The Fighting Temeraire” hangs adjacent to “Calais Pier”, separated by two of Turner’s
10
other works. The relocation from the literal storehouse of English artwork, the
National Gallery, to an imagined one is significant. James’s version of the painting is
the sketch, not the finished oil painting which hangs in the National Gallery. It is a
textual facsimile of one of the nation’s treasures. In what is almost certainly the final
Dalgliesh novel, such a collection of paintings is the coda to an ongoing textual
archiving of English culture, at the very moment at which that culture, in James’s eyes,
is being lost.

Rebuilding the Nation

Whereas the gathering of imperial ephemera can be read as a hoarding of the past, both
the Sayers and James narratives exhibit a more triumphal treatment of “cultural
categories” in the form of architecture. In Out of Place Ian Baucom, in a chapter on
“imperial subject-fashioning,” discusses the way in which, during the nineteenth
century, imperial architecture was used to stamp Britishness onto its colonies. He puts
forward the argument of T. Roger Smith that the importance of erecting distinctively
English buildings is, “a sort of visual therapy to guard the colonist against the threat of
10
The full title of the painting is “The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838.”
60

identity loss. One becomes, or remains English, Smith maintains, by observing,

handling, entering and brushing against English objects” (80). Smith’s argument is
principally about the necessity of shoring up the national identity of British colonists in
India. He uses the terms British and English interchangeably because, in this instance
Baucom asserts, “Britishness is little more than Englishness writ large” (80). This too is
the case in the Wimsey and Dalgliesh novels, an issue addressed in my Introduction. I
suggest that the process of “visual therapy” takes place in the novels of Sayers and
James, but in this case it is a textual version thereof. Furthermore, there is a mapping of
an idealised England onto that which already exists. It is a form of cultural
reconstruction, a concept Baucom takes from Ruskin. For Ruskin, Gothic architecture
could alter the national consciousness and remind the English of their cultural heritage.
For Sayers and James, it is the privileging of Englishness, in terms of personal identity
and surrounding artefacts, which enacts a form of cultural reconstruction in these texts.
This form of cultural reconstruction in the novels of Sayers and James is defiantly
celebratory. It manifests itself in the textual erection of imaginary buildings. Both
Sayers and James impose fictional buildings onto real spaces. This in itself is not
unusual, but the imperial splendour of these buildings does warrant attention. The
assignation of real architects to fictitious buildings, and the nature of those buildings
suggest a consistent attempt to rewrite the English landscape. It also suggests that there
is something more complex occurring in the choice of these constructions, which has to
do with Englishness and identity. The way in which this occurs raises questions of
imperial subject fashioning and the reclamation of a national identity dating back to an
imperial past.
In the fiction of Sayers and James architecture operates as a rebuilding of the
nation. It is related to Ruskin’s philosophy of the importance of Gothic architecture, as
explained by Ian Baucom:
While it remains difficult to determine how thoroughly Ruskin believed in
the efficacy of saving England through the actual erection of Gothic
Cathedrals, post offices, banks and mechanics’ institutes, it is clear that his
belief in the power of architecture to shape individual and collective identity
was unwavering, and that his contemporaries chose to read him quite
literally. . . . Not all the public buildings that were erected in the latter half
of the nineteenth century were Gothic, but most of the major edifices
constructed in England during these years were vaulted tributes to those lost
Middle Ages that Ruskin and Pugin spent so much of their adult lives
 61

conjuring back into existence. . . .Across the surface of the nation as the
century drew to a close, the island’s architects and governors were devoting
England’s public spaces to the redemptive return of the medieval past. (78)

The power of architecture to shape a nation’s consciousness is evident in Ruskin’s

thinking and it is echoed in the narratives of Sayers and James. Redemption is a
concern in the novels of Sayers, and particularly in those of James. The reclamation and
declaration of imperial England can be discerned in the choice of buildings valued by
the authors. The medieval past offers redemption but the nineteenth-century
interpretation of this past graces the textual cityscapes and landscapes of their works.
Just as Pugin and Ruskin reached back to the Middle Ages for their idea of what
constituted England, so too do these texts seek an idealised version of nationality, and
they represent it through grand imperial buildings.
Sayers’s biographer, Barbara Reynolds, states that her love of architecture began
at an early age:
She had been taught by her father to admire the Early English style of
church architecture. As an adult her love of Oxford was heightened by its
structural glories. Building and writing, both forms of making, were linked
in her mind from the beginning (‘I will build up my house from the stark
foundations’). (Reynolds, Life 319)

Sayers’s fascination with architecture was nurtured by the finest buildings ecclesiastical
and academic England could produce in her time. While planning The Nine Tailors the
specifications of the parish church of Fenchurch St Paul were carefully thought out.
Barbara Reynolds notes that the church is a combination of St Peter’s in Upwell, St
Wendredas’s in March and Terrington St Clement’s near King’s Lynn (Life 273).11 The
amateur architect W. J. Redhead produced detailed sketches of the church and they are
placed at the very beginning of the novel, depicting a splendid Gothic building. In
creating a Gothic structure Sayers was following in the footsteps of her Victorian
ancestors. The Victorian fascination with the medieval, Charles Dellheim argues, “was
on the one hand, a protest against industrial society, on the other hand it became an
integral part of its culture, because it satisfied the longing for continuity without

11
It is worth noting the sheer volume of churches in Norfolk, which houses one thousand parishes. Bill
Bryson notes that it has 659 medieval churches (At Home 2). Sayers had a wealth of churches to choose
from.
62

impeding the march of improvement” (1). Such cultural reconstruction in Sayers’s

work speaks strongly of a desire for the continuity of the Christian church and its
values, expressed in a powerfully English symbol. They are part of the reconfiguring of
the English landscape in which the central symbol of Anglican religion and Anglican
identity is amplified.
It is perhaps unsurprising that Sayers would wish her fictitious church to be
something splendid. Reynolds goes on to assert that much of Sayers’s success as a
novelist comes from her attention to detail, and that “The Nine Tailors resulted in the
construction of a world which the reader enters and re-enters with a delighted sense of
realism” (272). Similarly, Catherine Kenney writes of The Nine Tailors: “As is true of
all profoundly realistic novels, this attention to the particular manners of a particular
place also implies something universal in human experience” (72). I argue that the
reverse is true. Sayers’s novels are very deliberately constructed and what they
represent is an idealised version, or even a simulacrum, of England. Perhaps what her
readers respond to is the idyllic nature of Wimsey’s world, the very opposite of a
“realistic” version of England. Literary realism and historical authenticity are, of
course, not necessarily the same thing.
In her construction of Fenchurch St Paul, Sayers does create an unmistakably
English building. It is a monument to Englishness; a symbol of the Church of England.
The novel is centred upon the church. It is the location of the murder, the hidden
treasure and, in the final part of the story, it is a refuge for the entire village population.
Lord Peter, whose opinion carries great weight in the text, is most impressed upon his
first sighting of the church: “Great Heavens!’ said Wimsey, ‘is that your church?” (Nine
Tailors 11). Wimsey is even more astonished when he sits in the church during the
New Year’s Eve service. He finds himself “sobered and awe-stricken by the noble
proportion of the church” (30) and is amazed by the beauty of the angel roof:
Incredibly aloof, flinging back the light in a dusky shimmer of bright hair
and gilded out-spread wings, soared the ranked angels, cherubim and
seraphim, choir over choir, from corbel and hammer-beam floating face to
face uplifted. (31)

The power of the church to affect Wimsey so markedly immediately denotes the
importance of the building. The symbolism of the magnificent church, tucked away in
the damp, underpopulated fen country, is a branding of Englishness upon the textual
landscape. Fenchurch St Paul is a testimonial to the power of Anglican architecture.
 63

Like Sayers, P. D. James too exhibits spectacular buildings in the course of her
novels, and in particular a remarkable church in the vicinity of Paddington. A Taste for
Death contains detailed descriptions of the imaginary church of St Matthew’s, which,
like Fenchurch St Paul, is the site of a murder.12 In an area that is described as down at
heel, and frequented by a spinster in straitened circumstances and a neglected child, the
choice of such a large and impressive cathedral has the effect of reinforcing Englishness
in the “native quarter.” James does not merely construct a huge Victorian church, she
also attributes it to an historical figure. James makes an “apology” in the note at the
beginning of the novel for erecting a Sir Arthur Blomfield campanile and basilica upon
the Union Canal. Her choice of architectural style and use of specific architects
consistently creates a pattern of imperial construction. James’s fiction rebuilds imperial
England upon a modern London.
Sir Arthur Blomfield was an architect of some note in the nineteenth century. He
held the title of Architect to the Bank of England. In addition he designed the Royal
College of Music, the Law Courts in Fleet Street and carried out work on Southwark
Cathedral (originally St Saviours) in South London. He also designed St George’s
Anglican Cathedral in Georgetown, Guyana, taking imperial design to the colonies.
Blomfield, in A Taste for Death is joined by two other prominent architects from
different eras of the British Empire, Sir John Soane and Sir Edwin Lutyens. Soane, like
Blomfield held the title of Architect to the Bank of England and the building was one of
his most famous works. Soane was influential and prolific in his public and private
architectural practice. Proof of his elevated status is his appointment to carry out work
on Numbers Ten and Eleven Downing Street. Sir Edwin Lutyens similarly held a
number of prestigious positions. He planned much of New Delhi including the
imposing Viceroy’s palace. He also designed much of Hampstead. He was one of three
architects to the Imperial War Graves Commission and his Cenotaph stands in
Whitehall. Each of the architects cited by James are major figures in their profession
and their public buildings form a topography of imperial England. Stretching from the
eighteenth, through to the mid-twentieth century, their work in a sense created English
architecture, both public and private, which contributed to the identity of the nation.
James employs their accumulated architectural merit to apply her version of an
aesthetically pleasing veneer over the awkward bricolage of late twentieth-century
Greater London.

12
James also orchestrates death in churches in Death of an Expert Witness, Death in Holy Orders, The
Lighthouse and The Private Patient.
64

The home of the Berowne family in Campden Hill Square offers an example of
imperial confidence expressed through architecture. Much of the action in A Taste for
Death takes place in this private house which is attributed to the prolific and eccentric
design of Sir John Soane. The matriarch, Lady Ursula Berowne, like the house,
represents an era long past. The house is already familiar to Dalgliesh through his
perusal of it in architectural guidebooks. However Dalgliesh’s actual viewing of the
house provides more than his usual cataloguing of architectural features. He does note
that its features “looked more Gothic than neo-classical” and records its “stone
caryatids” and “Soanian pilasters” (102). But as he carries out this architectural
stocktake the traffic of Holland Park Avenue is briefly muted and a slippage in time and
space occurs:
. . . it seemed to him that two images, the shining façade of the house and
that dusty blood-boltered room in Paddington, were held suspended out of
time, then fused so that the stones were blood splattered, the caryatids
dripped red. And then the traffic lights released the stream of cars, time
moved on, the house lay uncontaminated in its pale pristine silence. (103)

The logical, ratiocinative Dalgliesh briefly stumbles into a Gothic world. Time ceases
to be linear, implying that a building such as this contains a force well beyond the
aesthetic. The recent event of Sir Paul Berowne’s murder is brought into focus, but so
too is the more distant past. Such an historic and beautiful house carries with it
meaning beyond the everyday.
Dalgliesh’s reaction to the church of St Matthew’s earlier in the novel is
remarkably similar to his response to the Berowne house. Once again he evinces a
susceptibility to melancholy combined with a vivid imagination. Whereas Wimsey
experiences wonder and awe in the presence of Fenchurch St Paul, Dalgliesh registers
impermanence and incongruity in the huge Victorian construction attributed to Sir
Arthur Blomfield. Earlier in the novel, the church is described as “extraordinary” and
built with “confidence” (8). When Dalgliesh sees it he is reminded of his childhood
buildings made of blocks, unstable and ephemeral, holding “for him some of the same
hubristic impermanence and, even as he gazed, he half expected it to bend and sway”
(31). Once again, Dalgliesh undergoes an almost psychedelic moment when confronted
by a building from England’s imperial past. The grandiosity of the Victorian church
forces Dalgliesh to recognise its incongruity in modern England. It creates a splinter in
time between the dream of England past and the mundane nature of the present. Just as
 65

the Berowne house acts as a monument to fallen social structure, so too does St
Matthew’s stand as a relic of the past power of the Anglican church. In Dalgliesh’s
eyes they are both doomed to crumble.
The significance of St Matthew’s Church as a representation of England can be
divined through an examination of an earlier draft of A Taste for Death. Only a few
pages on from the above quotation a description is provided of Dalgliesh inside the
church:
Moving into the passage he wondered whether this quiet air tinctured with
the scent of incense, candles and the more solidly Anglican smell of musty
prayer books, metal polish and flowers, had held for Berowne also the
promise of discovery, of a scene already set, a task inevitable and
inescapable. (36)

The original draft contains the word “English” instead of “Anglican” (TS Girton). The
words are interchangeable in James’s prose, as the Anglican Church marks a keystone
of English identity. The ancient church at Fenchurch St Paul emits a perfume almost
identical to that experienced by Dalgliesh in the more modern St Matthew’s Church.
Wimsey inhales the combination of “ancient wood, varnish, dry rot, hassocks, hymn
books, paraffin lamps, flowers and candles, all gently baking in the warmth of slow-
combustion stoves . . .” (Nine Tailors 24). Both descriptions suggest that Anglicanism
carries a timeless essence and, by implication, one that can be spread beyond the church
walls. For Wimsey it is the breath of life, but for Dalgliesh it carries an odour of decay.
In James’s work the Anglican Church is constantly described in terms of failure and
doom. By association the condition of England is similarly grim.

Reading for Consolation

In the writing of both James and Sayers, England is threatened by social unrest and
ethnic diversity. Within this locus of anxiety, the canon of English literature provides
both solace and reconfirmation of the greatness of English culture. Both Sayers and
James draw extensively upon English literature in their writing. Sayers’s diversity of
influences originates from her classical education and her prodigious desire for
knowledge. Her novels are bursting with allusions to writers who span centuries of
English literature. She began, but never completed, a work on Wilkie Collins and, after
she had retired Lord Peter, completed extensive translations of Dante. She also wrote
highly successful and highly controversial religious plays for radio and theatre. James’s
66

literary references range from John Webster to W. H. Auden, and from Christopher
Marlowe to Alexander McCall Smith with a great deal of Victorian literature in
between. Adam Dalgliesh reads Beowulf in Death in Holy Orders and George Eliot’s
Middlemarch in The Lighthouse. Sayers and James both esteem English literature as an
essential element of their nation’s heritage. It is not surprising therefore that their
detective fiction should be cornucopian in its literary references.
Wimsey and Dalgliesh are well read, to say the least. Wimsey and Dalgliesh are
also published authors, although Wimsey’s work, The Murderer’s Vade Mecum is a
mere footnote to his detecting career, rather than a defining opus. Dalgliesh on the
other hand is a published poet of some renown. In A Mind to Murder we learn that his
volume of verse has had three reprints (19). Over a decade later in Death of an Expert
Witness the link between Dalgliesh as a poet and a policeman is made. Dalgliesh, after
working on the case of a murdered child had written a poem which “no-one at the Yard,
even those who professed to understand it, had had the temerity even to mention to its
author” (709). Original Sin, published in 1994, sees this poem mentioned again and he
describes it as “one of his best poems” (275). The implication seems to be that
Dalgliesh is able, through his poetry, to extract meaning from the brutality of his
professional life and to radiate that meaning outwards. His ability as a poet renders him
a cerebral, sensitive, educated and deeply caring individual. The aureole of poetry
raises him far above his fellow officers, and indeed above almost every other character
in the series.13 This does not always endear him to his fellow officers, as is made clear
in The Skull Beneath the Skin when Grogan scathingly describes Dalgliesh as “one of
those literary cops” (774). However, Dalgliesh’s superior literary, and detecting, ability
is once more underscored
Whereas Dalgliesh and Wimsey are unusual in holding the joint roles of author
and detective, their enhanced ability as readers is part of their detective ancestry. The
term “super-reader” is one used by Patrick Brantlinger in a discussion of nineteenth-
century fiction. He makes the link between the detective and the reader when he states
that:
Whether amateur or professional, the detective operates as a sort of super-
reader, a person more capable than the average reader of novels of
deciphering the clues that, like pieces of a puzzle or even like Freudian

13
Few examples of Dalgliesh’s verse appear in the series. Unnatural Causes contains “Remember me at
Blythburgh” (182). In Death in Holy Orders he writes a brief six lines, after which he writes “with
apologies to Marvell” (266). Earlier in the novel the aged Father Martin returns to Dalgliesh a poem he
had written in childhood.
 67

dreamwork, lie scattered around the narrative present. As if second-

guessing the author, the detective reconstructs the fragmented text of the
past—the buried story of the crime or crimes. (The Reading Lesson 145-
146)

Brantlinger is specifically referring to the Victorian detective and goes on to make the
point that these detectives provided a mediating role between the novelist and the
reading public. Dalgliesh and Wimsey, decades later, can be seen to perform very much
the same function, augmented by their equally vital role of “super-writer”. Wimsey and
Dalgliesh not only have extraordinary vision, but they are also incisive readers of their
world. The “imperial detective” does more than read the body of evidence. He also
reads, quotes and interprets English literature and in doing so declaims his intellectual
superiority. More than that however, by drawing on the heritage of English literature
the “imperial detective” becomes part of a discourse of cultural consolation.
Stefan Collini has commented upon the pervasiveness of the idea that literature is
the chief cultural form in the expression of national identity in England. His book,
Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930 charts
the history of the study of English literature during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Discussing literary study between the wars he notes the importance of class
in the debate about ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ texts. He notes that there was a
“conviction that a cultural heritage that was under threat or disappearing [and] had to be
rescued and made vital and effective in the present” (370). The urgency of the inter-war
years debate can be discerned in the work of both Sayers and James, even though
James’s work occurs after this period. Both authors deliberately colour their prose with
literary allusions in such a way that they become, as Collini suggests, both “vital” and
“effective” in the narrative. The more educated Wimsey and Dalgliesh are the principal
instigators of this, but it is also carried on by other “educated” characters, such as
Sayers’s Harriet Vane and James’s Emma Lavenham. There is a sense in both the
Wimsey and Dalgliesh series that canonical literature should be kept alive, and that it is
an integral aspect of English society.
It is important to recognise the difference in the cultural landscape occupied by
Wimsey from 1923-1937 and that of Dalgliesh, who first appeared in 1962. The way in
which literature is invoked in the Sayers novels, and indeed the way in which other
cultural artefacts form part of a consolatory discourse, differs from her successor James.
However, these differences are far fewer than one might imagine. The principal
68

difference is the extent to which a nostalgic and elegiac thread is sewn into the texts.
Collini, siding here with Gervais, Baucom and Ackroyd, cited earlier, makes the point
that for the post World War One generation, nostalgia for England lost is the prevalent
emotion and that the ubiquity of the elegiac form cannot be overlooked. He suggests
that:
. . . one might also consider the ways in which the fond dwelling on
England’s ‘incomparable’ (and unrepeatable) literary heritage can be seen as
a modulation of that pervasive nostalgia many observers have detected in
English culture since 1918. (371)

A yearning for an idealised England and the urgency with which its literature is extolled
is characteristic of the writing of both Sayers and James.
The marriage of Anglicanism and English literature is held sacred by P. D. James.
She has repeatedly stated her belief in the importance of the work of Thomas Cranmer
as a fundamental element of English literature. She declares herself astonished that
students in the late twentieth century can study university level English without having
read his work. For James, the Anglican Church and the English language are
symbiotically bound, and her fears for both of them are profound:
If you want to destroy a country’s traditions and soften it up for a culture
you personally find more to your liking, there is no better way to begin than
by an attack on its language and literature. (Earnest 140)

This sentence comes after James’s description of her attending a memorial service for
Saumel Johnson whom she describes as “a polymath of literature as well as one whose
whole working life has been devoted to its cause” (Earnest 136). English literature,
language and culture are absolutely fundamental, in James’s eyes, to an English
identity. The most compelling example of this is the normally restrained Dalgliesh’s
reaction to seeing a copy of the Jerusalem Bible, the beauty and majesty of which “had
brought him close to tears” (Original Sin 358).
The Wimsey narratives contain another version of English literature as the
extolling of an immutable truth. For Wimsey and Harriet it is the poetry of John Donne
which best expresses their love for one another. The metaphysical poetry of Donne
provides a point of understanding for Wimsey and Harriet after a very difficult
courtship. Wimsey attempts to buy a signed manuscript by Donne for Harriet, unaware
that Harriet has already purchased it as a wedding gift for him. When he receives the
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gift, he opens in front of his mother, who notes that it causes him to blush with emotion.
She goes on to record the fact that “Peter has always been queer about Donne” and
describes the manuscript, as “a very beautiful letter from D. to a parishioner—Lady
Somebody—about Divine and human love” (Busman’s 29). As well as illustrating
Wimsey and Harriet’s equality in terms of intellectual and cultural status, this episode
gestures toward the idea that English literature contains a sanctity which is unique. It is
underscored by the final page of the novel in which Donne’s “Eclogue for the Marriage
of the Earl of Somerset” is quoted:
This is joy’s bonfire, then, where love’s strong arts
Make of so noble individual parts
One fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts.

Wimsey and Harriet’s marriage is beatified by the association with Donne, the
metaphysical poet. Just as James concludes her final (to date) novel with the words of
Jane Austen, so too does Sayers seal the narrative with John Donne. In doing so both
authors suggest that the ideal England, immutable and resolute, is best found in the
pages of English literature, a source of consolation when all other Englands disappoint.
The textual reconstruction of buildings, paintings and literature in the work of
Sayers and James is part of the wider process of cultural reconstruction evident in their
detective narratives. In the work of Sayers, such objects of Englishness are celebrated
and enhanced within the narrative, creating a triumphal discourse of English superiority.
Set between two world wars, this is an avowal of English fortitude and longevity. For
P. D. James, England is altered beyond recognition from the “Golden Age” of Lord
Peter Wimsey. The insistent textual recreation of vignettes of Englishness is part of a
consolatory narrative within her work, an attempt to rewrite the wrongs of
contemporary England. It is a continuation of an idealization of England typical of
imperial narratives, one encapsulated by this chapter’s epigraph, taken from John
Buchan’s Mr Standfast. In the same section of the novel Buchan’s Richard Hannay has
an epiphany when he views England’s countryside: “I had a vision of what I had been
fighting for, what we all were fighting for” (16-17). That vision is an idealized rural
England, peaceful, ordered and enduring. But this dream was forever rent by the
cataclysmic events of World War One and its successor World War Two. The terrible
consequences of those global conflicts upon the British Empire, and its subjects, is the
topic of my next chapter.
70

CHAPTER TWO

At War.

Praise God, now, for an English war—

The grey tide and the sullen coast,
The menace of the urgent hour,
The single island, like a tower,
Ringed with an angry host.
Dorothy. L. Sayers “The English War” (1-5)

The endeavours of the “imperial detectives”, Wimsey and Dalgliesh, are both
necessitated and complicated by the two global conflicts of the twentieth century.
Questions of individual justice and guilt are raised by the detective narrative against the
unprecedented carnage of World Wars One and Two. The ongoing trauma of war is
embodied principally by Wimsey, in Sayers’s narratives, and by a variety of characters
in the Dalgliesh stories. However, I contend that both Sayers and James construct
heroic narratives from the story of war, while still acknowledging the dreadful
consequences of these conflicts. The tension between these contrapuntal streams
creates knots of anxiety in the text, resulting in the “imperial detective” often exhibiting
self-consciousness and doubt during his investigations. For two undeniably patriotic
writers the cost, to the British Empire, to England and to the individual, of these
conflicts is clearly registered. However both the Wimsey and Dalgliesh narratives
depict the “imperial detective” as a warrior in peacetime, fighting for English values. It
is a process which reflects, at times wistfully, upon England’s long history as a military
power and contrasts it with the current state of the nation as each writer envisions it.
P. D. James writes in Time to be in Earnest that her generation “was born under a
pall of inarticulate grieving” (152), a legacy of the First World War. Like Sayers, James
lived in a nation and an empire shaped by the Great War and by its successor, World
War Two. James’s father fought in the First World War and her husband served in the
Second. James’s life was forever altered by this conflict. Her husband, Connor Bantry
White, returned from the war with a mental illness from which he never recovered. The
rest of his life was spent in and out of psychiatric institutions until his death at the age of
forty-four, in 1964 (Earnest 113). James, like Sayers, understands firsthand the
ongoing toll of war upon those who serve and those who are left behind. Dorothy
Sayers lived through both wars. Her husband, Oswold Arthur “Mac” Fleming, whom
 71

she married in 1926, suffered ongoing physical and psychological damage from his war
service (Reynolds, Life 179).1 It is unsurprising therefore that so much of her prose is
inflected by the idea of war and the resultant trauma, guilt and horror. The Wimsey
narratives take place between the wars and are shadowed by the end of the first and the
looming inevitability of the second. The Dalgliesh novels hold echoes of the First
World War but they resound with the abominations of the Holocaust and the mass
civilian casualties of the Second World War. Both detective series however wrest
imperial values from these conflicts, and reinforce their importance to English identity.

The Empire at War 1914 - 1918

During the First World War the British Empire drew upon its colonies to provide
troops; and the colonies gave up their men to fight and die on battlefields in countries
they barely knew. It was a truly imperial conflict with troops from Australia, New
Zealand, Canada, India, the West Indies and many other former colonies. Gandhi
himself supported the war effort (Ferguson 306). The initial pro-British sentiment from
the colonies was changed forever by the awful reality of trench warfare. The war
changed the empire and it changed the way many imperial subjects viewed the mother
country. The appalling death toll of World War One left the idea of the greatness of the
British Empire open to question or even greatly tarnished. Les Carlyon sums up the
Australian post-war attitude to Britain, a country formerly held up as an ideal. He says
the soldiers discovered that:
British generals made terrible mistakes and they were called Fromelles and
First Bullecourt. British politicians made mistakes and one of the worst was
called Gallipoli. British democracy was not the same as Australian
democracy; it came with hangovers from feudalism. (756)

It was not only the Australians, of course who bore the brunt of disastrous military
strategy. Paul Fussell notes that the British army had all but been obliterated by
November 1914, and that whereas the original height requirement for army enlistment
was five foot eight inches, by “. . . November 5, after the thirty thousand casualties of
October, one had to be only five feet three to get in” (9). As a result conscription was
introduced in Britain in March 1916. Englishmen from all classes enlisted and were

1
Fleming’s real names were Oswold Arthur , but he adopted the name “Atherton”. He was known as
“Mac” due to his Scottish origins (Reynolds, Life 179).
72

conscripted into the army and they were joined by men from the far reaches of the
empire.
The British Empire, for which almost a million men died, was a shell of its former
self after the First World War and the survivors of the conflict were often little better.
At the end of the war, ironically, the British Empire was “at the peak of its territorial
extent” due to the African colonies acquired from Germany (Pugh 17). However, it was
unable to control them, having almost exhausted not only its financial reserves but also
its manpower. The breed of public school boys trained to administer Britain’s overseas
interests had been annihilated on the battlefields. A war which had been undertaken
with hopes of a swift, if fierce, fight became a protracted bloody massacre after which
ideas of imperial glory could only be countenanced with difficulty. The length of the
conflict and the numbers of men involved meant that almost every household in the
British Empire was affected by the war. James writes movingly about an early
childhood memory of “a photograph of a fresh-faced private, himself hardly more than a
child, in the window between small Union Jacks. It was one of many such humble and
poignant shrines” (Earnest 152). James’s memory demonstrates the communality and
longevity of trauma caused by the Great War.
At the beginning of the Great War however the prospect of imperial conflict still
held glamour, at least for the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey. Dorothy Sayers was in
France when war was declared in August 1914. She had ventured there at the age of
twenty-one with an escort who, it seems, was deeply ignorant of the gravity of the
situation in Europe. Her sprightly letters to her parents provide a detailed picture of
Tours at this time and are peppered with statements which betray her naivety and her
patriotism in equal parts: “You have no idea how frightfully exciting it is being here”
she writes. In the same letter Sayers continues her exuberant descriptions of the French
whose “Soldiers and sailors were all over the place. They are not anything like as smart
as our Tommies and Jack Tars, and most of them look very small to English eyes, but
they seem full of go” (“To Henry and Helen Sayers” 1: 92).2 Sayers writes of the
conscription of men and horses and the excitement of the French people. The French
are “wonderfully patriotic” and evince “a fervour of enthusiasm” (“To Henry and Helen
Sayers” 1:95). She is blithely unconcerned about the fate of alleged spies, such as the
local priest, declaiming, “I’m sure traitors ought to be shot.” She then tells her parents
that, “One feels rather glad to be English” (“To Henry and Helen Sayers” 1:96). This

2
By the end of the war, 1.38 million of these French men were dead (A. Wilson 147).
 73

sentiment at least was to remain with Sayers for the rest of her life. Her appetite for
war, after living through two major conflicts, was rather more subdued.
Sayers’s enthusiasm for “our” Jack Tars and Tommies rested on the historical
notion of Britain as a military powerhouse. As Robert MacDonald states, imperial
history manifested an impetus which “had only to touch on the great heroic names to
make the emergence of the imperial fact inevitable . . .” (51). Wellington at Waterloo
and Nelson at Trafalgar provided the template for land and naval battles, in which the
British were the inevitable, and in some eyes, rightful, victors. The recent past, for
Sayers’s generation, was one of conflicts carried out abroad against opposing armies
who were often poorly equipped. As Niall Ferguson points out in Empire:
In all, there were seventy-two separate British military campaigns in the
course of Queen Victoria’s reign—more than one for every year of the so-
called pax britannica. Unlike the wars of the twentieth century, these
conflicts involved relatively few people. On average, the British armed
forces during Victoria’s reign amounted to 0.8 per cent of the population;
and servicemen were disproportionately drawn from the Celtic periphery or
the urban underclass. (255-256)

This was the concept of war with which Sayers and her generation were familiar. Wars
were carried out by professional soldiers, away from England, with relatively few
casualties. It was an idea that would be obliterated during the Great War, as Les
Carlyon explains:
War here was no longer pretty: no red-and-blue uniforms, no pipeclay, no
rushes of cavalry, none of the panoply of the fox hunt, no generals issuing
orders from the saddle and needing nothing other than their voice to pass
them on. The new colours were khaki and field grey, the right hues for the
industrial age and its armies of conscripts. The war here was about
machines: howitzers and mortars, machine guns and trains, wafer-like
aircraft and tanks so ponderous that one could outpace them on foot,
poisonous gas and flamethrowers. (16)

Such was the war carried out by the British Empire in the twentieth century. Its
brutality, anonymity and mechanisation made the mythology of clean and glorious death
difficult to sustain.
74

Before the mechanised destruction of the First World War colonial wars were
mined by imperial writers for narratives of heroism. The Boer War provided inspiration
for tales of valiant British imperialism, as Horace Annesley Vachell demonstrates in
The Hill, published in 1905. In the final chapter of this romantic school story, the
Harrow-educated Henry Desmond sprints his way to death and honour on the
battlefields of South Africa. Desmond applies what he had learned on the Harrovian
playing fields to the African war:
He ran—so the Special Correspondent reported—as if he were racing for a
goal. The men staggered after him, aflame with his ardour. They reached
the top, captured the guns, drove down the enemy, and returned to the
highest point to find their leader—shot through the heart, and dead, and
smiling at death. Of all the men who passed through that blizzard of bullets
he was the youngest by two years. (249)

The bravery of Henry Desmond “rang through the Empire” (248). Vachell situates
Desmond’s death at the battle of Spion Kop, which took place on 24 January 1900. The
battle was witnessed by Winston Churchill, then a war correspondent, who described it
as “a bloody reeking shambles” (qtd. in Ferguson 275). Although Vachell echoes this
language with the “reek of that awful slaughter on Spion Kop” (249), he is able to
project the heroic figure of Desmond upon it, and thereby create a triumphant story of
individual bravery.
Henry Desmond’s achievement would no doubt have been applauded by another
participant in the Boer War, the historical figure of Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-
Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement. Baden-Powell likened the siege of
Mafeking, during the Boer War, to a game of cricket, meshing the imperial training
ground of sport with the reality of a colonial war. He writes, “we are having our innings
and have so far scored 200 days, not out, against the bowling of Cronje, Snijman, Botha
. . . and we are having a very enjoyable game” (qtd. in Ferguson 277). He also, as Niall
Ferguson points out, organised cricket matches every Sunday during the siege, along
with light entertainment to keep up morale. When the siege was relieved (after an
“innings” of 217 days) on 17 May 1900 there was great jubilation in London and
Baden-Powell was “rewarded with the command of a new force, the South African
Constabulary” (Ferguson 278). The underside of this victory was the terrible cost,
particularly to the black population of Mafeking, who were not afforded the same
protection by Baden-Powell as the white residents. These unpalatable facts were not
 75

reported by the English press at the time. Fourteen years after the relief of Mafeking,
the British Army entered a war which could not be easily moulded into anything
resembling a cricket score card.
The extent to which imperial rhetoric was stifled by the impersonal slaughter of
trench warfare can be judged by the following passage from Robert Graves. Graves
published his war memoir Goodbye to All That in 1929, by which time any possibility
of public school heroics had shrivelled into a grotesque mockery. His description of a
game of cricket, played about three quarters of a mile behind the front line, reverberates
against the hearty jingoism of Baden-Powell. The officers play the sergeants and
Graves makes the top score of twenty-four:
. . . the bat was a bit of a rafter; the ball, a piece of rag tied round with string; and
the wicket, a parrot cage with the clean, dry corpse of a parrot inside. It had
evidently died of starvation when the French evacuated the town. . . . Machine-
gun fire broke up the match. (103)

Graves’s match is a macabre parody of Henry Newbolt’s Clifton Close game of cricket
in his 1897 poem “Vitaï Lampada”, which features the refrain “Play up! Play up! And
play the game” (line 8). It is as Ferguson suggests, “the classic depiction of school
cricket as a form of military apprenticeship” (262). The ghastly reality of World War
One made such an apprenticeship scarcely valid.
Robert Graves was one of thousands of ex-serviceman trying to make sense of
wartime experience. Another was Eric Whelpton. Whelpton had been invalided out of
the army and returned to Oxford in May 1918, where Dorothy Sayers met and fell in
love with him (Reynolds, Life 106). In late 1919 Sayers spent time in France as his
assistant at a boarding school. Sayers was clearly very attached to him, but the
relationship came to nothing and she returned to London. It was at this time that she
invented Lord Peter Wimsey and his war service record. This was no doubt influenced
by her recent experiences. Wimsey’s literary descendants, Margery Allingham’s Albert
Campion, Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn and Josephine Tey’s Alan Grant likewise are
given a military history, which reinforces their courage, patriotism and sense of duty.
Wimsey’s war service is an integral part of his character. In a short story entitled “The
Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face” he says:
Well, it’s like the way a gunner, say, looks at a landscape where he happens to
be posted. He doesn’t see it as a landscape. He doesn’t see it as a thing of
magic beauty, full of sweeping lines and lovely colour. He sees it as so much
76

cover, so many landmarks to aim by, so many gun-emplacements. And when

the war is over and he goes back to it, he will still see it as cover and landmarks
and gun-emplacements. It isn’t a landscape any more. It’s a war map. (249)

Wimsey’s analogy is an apposite one for his generation. Those who survived the war
had their worldview changed irrevocably, and they returned to an England which was
vastly different from the one they had left. As Sandra Gilbert argues, soldiers were left
with a “sickened sense that the war had drastically abrogated most of the rules that had
always organized Western culture” (430). She further states that “it became clear that
this war to end all wars necessitated a sacrifice of the sons to the exigencies of the
fathers—and the mothers, wives, and sisters” (432). The gulf between the generations
and the sexes, for many of the returned soldiers, was vast.
The certainty with which the British regarded themselves as the apogee of
civilization had been undermined by four years of brutal and seemingly pointless
warfare. As Paul Fussell describes it, the Great War was “a hideous embarrassment to
the prevailing Meliorist myth which had dominated the public consciousness for a
century. It reversed the Idea of Progress” (7). The confused numbness of post-war
England is articulated in Unnatural Death by the elderly Mrs Cobling when she says to
Wimsey, “A cruel business that was, sir, wasn’t it?—and nobody the better for it as I
can see, but all these shocking hard taxes, and the price of everything gone up so, and so
many out of work” (140). Unnatural Death was published in 1927, indicating that
almost ten years after the cessation of war, the English public were still deeply troubled
by the conflict.
The Great War is the recent past in Wimsey investigations, but in the Adam
Dalgliesh series its represents the death of a distant ideal. When, in the 1986 novel A
Taste for Death, the elderly Lady Ursula Berowne meditates on the term “gentleman”,
she thinks, “That word and the world it represented have gone for ever, trodden into the
mud of Flanders” (65). In doing so she echoes Sayers’s Colonel Marchbanks in The
Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, who remarks that, “the War has had a bad effect on
some of our young men” and that there is “a less fine sense of honour in these days than
we had when I was a boy” (238).3 The Great War acts as a trigger for such nostalgic
musing in the Dalgliesh novels, signalling not only the decimation of a generation, but
the beginning of the decline of the empire and the nation. During Devices and Desires

3
I will subsequently refer to the novel as Bellona Club in this chapter.
 77

Dalgliesh begins the task of sorting through his late Aunt Jane’s belongings in the
Norfolk home which she bequeathed him:
It was a task which induced a gentle melancholy from which an occasional
scribbled identification on the back of a print, a remembered face or
incident, would stab him into pain. And the Elgar was an appropriate
accompaniment, the plaintive notes evoking those long, hot Edwardian
summers known to him only from novels and poetry, the peace, the
certainty, the optimism of the England into which his aunt had been born.
And here was her fiancé, looking ridiculously young in his captain’s
uniform. The photograph was dated 4 May 1918, only a week before he
was killed. (177)

The passage reinforces the “pain” of nostalgia, discussed in Chapter One. Dalgliesh
feels homesick for a version of England which has passed long before he could
experience it. The photographs of his aunt and her fiancé represent what was taken
away by the Great War; that is an English nation confident of its present and of its
future. Significantly, Dalgliesh chooses the music of Sir Edward Elgar, a composer
described by A. N. Wilson as “the musical accompanist . . . of late British imperial
glory” (332) as the soundscape to his melancholic thoughts.
Dalgliesh’s personal remembrance of the war dead is amplified into a wider sense
of mourning later on in the series when he visits the Dupayne Musuem in The Murder
Room. He views a painting by Paul Nash, Passchendaele 2:
Here at last was a picture which spoke with a more powerful resonance than
any words. It was not his war, nor his father’s. It was now almost beyond
the memory of living men and women. Yet had any modern conflict
produced such universal grieving? (24)

Grief shadows these texts, and combines with the horror created by World War Two. It
is often associated most closely with upper class families. The Dungannons in Death of
an Expert Witness, the Berownes in A Taste for Death, the Arbuthnots in Death in Holy
Orders and the Conistones in The Lighthouse are all portrayed as families whose men
lie dead on battlefields, urged on by their belief in, and loyalty to, the British Empire.
They represent the ordered society of Edwardian and Victorian England, whose rules
and codes have been diminished by war and ideologies of egalitarianism. The nostalgia
78

elicited by memories of the Great War is always associated with that conflict as the
marker of the end of an idyllic England.

The Refusal of Consolation

The reading of detective fiction, especially that of the “Golden Age”, has often been
cited as a consolatory activity. After World War One the “Golden Age” novels offered
an organised, predictable world where the crime of murder could be solved by logic,
and thereafter tidied away. Discussed by critics from W. H. Auden in his affectionate
tribute to the form, “The Guilty Vicarage” and derided by Edmund Wilson in “Who
Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”, the enduring appeal of this form remains a topic of
critical attention. The novels of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and
Josephine Tey, along with Dorothy Sayers, depict an ordered England in which people
were only ever temporarily inconvenienced by the body in the library. Charles Rzepka
suggests inter-war detective novels overflow with soothing elements:
. . . the cultural nostrums of fictional detection were artificially enhanced
with pre-war sweeteners: sprawling country estates, tidy villages, and
townhouses populated by comfortable eccentrics. Here was a world
featuring members of the four most ancient and honourable professions:
retired military officers, local clergy, lawyers, and doctors. (Detective
Fiction 153)

Dorothy Sayers’s novels clearly match this template. Among the minor characters in
the Wimsey series Colonel Marchbanks is a retired military officer, Sir Impey Biggs
and Mr Murbles are lawyers, and the erudite and unworldly vicars Venables and
Goodacre represent the best of England’s own church. (Doctors, it must be said, do not
fare so well; both Sir Julian Freke and Dr Penberthy are unrepentant murderers.)4
Wimsey himself admits to reading detective fiction for consolation during his
convalescence after the war, “They were about the only thing I could read. All the
others had the War in them—or love. . .or some damn’ thing I didn’t want to think
about” (Bellona Club 217) (ellipsis in original). Wimsey’s chosen reading matter
depicts a world far removed from the abominations of war or the intensity of love. It
was a literary choice that would be emulated by many in the next global conflict.

4
Both these doctors are “nerve specialists”, something they share with Virginia Woolf’s incompetent and
unfeeling doctors, Holmes and Bradshaw, in Mrs Dalloway.
 79

World War Two saw the appetite for detective fiction increase markedly, allowing
the besieged British population a notional escape from their wartime anxieties. The
Blitz resulted in Londoners heading for the air raid shelters, armed with suitable reading
material, as Howard Haycraft explains:
At the height of the Nazi blitz of London in 1941 special “raid libraries”
were set up at the reeking entrances to the underground shelters to supply by
popular demand detective stories and nothing else. No more dramatic
illustration can be imagined of the singular appeal of the once lowly and
scorned whodunit as the chosen escapist literature of modern times in
general and wartime in particular. (536)

The British public were seeking refuge in a literary world with which they felt
comfortable. Kristine Miller confirms Haycraft’s claim in her studies of Mass
Observation surveys taken during the war:
Mass-Observation materials confirm that readers sought an antidote to
wartime violence: one young working-class man says that he reads in
wartime “to pass the time. That’s the reason I like a good mystery,” and this
35-year-old middle-class woman agrees: “Well, I used to read for all sorts of
reasons—interest, following up certain lines of study, and so on. But now
I’m so overworked I read hardly anything but thrillers, to get me to sleep at
night.” (117)

The consensus seems to be that the readers of detective fiction found a comforting form
of escapism in these texts. Miller goes on to discuss the enormous popularity of Agatha
Christie and Margery Allingham during World War Two. These writers continued to
write during the conflict and included the subject of war in their narratives. Dorothy
Sayers, by contrast, was vehement in her refusal to supply the British public with what
they clamoured for, and directed her energies into telling them so.
Sayers’s patriotic opinions were inflamed by World War Two. Escaping the war
was not a course of action she could endorse, especially if it involved losing oneself in
detective fiction. In a letter to Sir Richard Acland in 1940 she states: 5

5
Acland, along with J.B Priestley, was a founder of the short-lived British Common Wealth Party. Later
he was elected as a Labour candidate (P. Clarke 214). Unlike the “shrinking socialists” of Wimsey’s
adventures, Acland donated his family estate in Devon, comprising 19,000 acres, to the National Trust.
He later had a role in forming the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1957.
80

These are the people who write passionately to me, begging for more
detective stories, “to keep their minds off the war.” I tell them, and have
tried to tell them in this book, that they will be much happier, and much
more useful citizens, if they will only put their minds on the war, and
6
especially on the peace. Neither you, nor I, nor the Government, can do
things for them—we have only too much to do already: they must learn to
do things for themselves. (“To Richard Acland” 2: 161)

Later in the year she writes, in the same vein, to her son John:
The detective market—thank Heaven—has fallen off; I say thank Heaven,
because it was getting bad for people; encouraging them in the delusion that
there was a nice, complete, simple, one-and-one-only solution to everything.
There isn’t. There is a solution to murder mysteries only because the
murder is made to be solved. (“To John Fleming” 2: 211)

Sayers maintained her position, and did not publish another detective novel during the
war, or in fact at all. Sayers strongly believed she had a role to play during the war, but
it in no way involved entertaining and distracting the masses with detective fiction.
Sayers’s attitude toward individual responsibility in wartime was clearly
expressed in “The Wimsey Papers” published in The Spectator in late 1939 and early
1940. Sayers wrote a series of letters from various characters in the Wimsey series
dealing with current wartime issues such as blackouts, evacuations and most
significantly, keeping up morale. The Reverend Theodore Venables from The Nine
Tailors exhorts his congregation, on Armistice Sunday, “don’t let us think of peace as
something that concerns governments, statesmen, other people; let us consider what we
can do, each one of us, here and now” (“Wimsey Papers-II” 737). Venables has great
moral weight within the Wimsey narratives, as has Wimsey’s mother the Dowager
Duchess. She tells Harriet Vane of the demand for detective fiction because, “the
readers wanted their minds taken off dictators” (“Wimsey Papers-VI” 895). Colonel
Marchbanks congratulates Winston Churchill on bolstering public morale (“Wimsey
Papers VIII” 9). But Wimsey, in the final letter exhorts his wife: “Tell them, this is a
battle of a new kind, and it is they who have to fight it, and they must do it themselves
and alone” (“Wimsey Papers XI” 105). Sayers, by the beginning of World War Two
saw herself as a public commentator, and grasped her opportunity vigorously. It was
6
The book to which she refers is Begin Here: A War-Time Essay, published in 1940.
 81

not that detective fiction could not provide consolation, in her eyes, it was that it should
not be allowed to do so, in a nation at war.
Barbara Reynolds describes Sayers’s sense of responsibility as “titanic” and her
wartime activities included the roles of fire watching and air raid warden as well as
knitting large quantities of socks (Life 335). Early in the War she offered her public
profile and her writing skills to the Government. This resulted in a brief and
unsatisfactory stay at the Ministry of Information described rather coyly by Barbara
Reynolds: “the Ministry found her difficult to work with and she was dropped. This
was just as well as she had more important things to do” (Life 334). Sayers, rather more
picturesquely, describes the Ministry as “that overcrowded monkey-house of graft and
incompetence” (“To. J. H. Oldham” 2: 137). It is perhaps not surprising that her time in
the Ministry was notable for its brevity.
Sayers’s influence reached beyond Britain. In 1944 the then Prime Minister of
Canada W. L. Mackenzie King wrote to Sayers, expressing his delight with her play The
Man Born to be King and requesting an autographed copy. Seizing the opportunity,
Sayers wrote an impassioned plea that his country and the dominions and allies
understand the strategic importance of her island home. She begins by saying:
England is very small and very old. . . . In the years between the Wars we
were very nearly talked into believing that we were an anachronism, and no
longer fit to call ourselves the centre of a great Empire. . . . For nearly nine
hundred years we have kept the gate of Europe open. We hold the sea-way
and we hold the air-way. But the gate is getting too heavy for us to hold
alone; this time it almost slipped from our hands before help could come.
Yet when we saw the enemy in the Channel Ports, we felt a great lifting
of heart, because then we knew for a certainty that what people had been
saying about us was not true. We knew again who we were, and what we
were for. (“To W. L. Mackenzie King” 3: 9-10)

Sayers explicitly links British character with martial strength and an allegedly historical
role of meting out justice. Mackenzie King was obviously moved by this treatise,
quoting it later in his nation’s parliament and sending Sayers the Hansard report.
Britain’s role as a keeper of the Christian faith and the gateway of civilization is
fundamental to Sayers and she probably relished the chance to make this point. Sayers
may have relinquished detective fiction, but she continued to present to the world a
82

portrait of the English as warriors who embrace their role as protectors of the free
world. 7
Like Sayers, P. D. James refuses the consolation of “Golden Age” detective
fiction in her novels. In Death in Holy Orders an eccentric brother and sister, the
Bettertons, occupy a flat well stocked with books. Among the library of Father John
Betterton is an entire shelf of detective writers which reveals to Dalgliesh, “that Father
John was addicted to the women writers of the Golden Age: Dorothy L. Sayers,
Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh” (187). Father John is a priest who was (wrongly
the text strongly implies) accused of sexual misconduct, and removed from parish work
to the safety of a theological college. He is described as unworldly and innocent. His
thoroughly eccentric sister Agatha, is revealed to have lost a fiancé during the Second
World War, an event described in terms of pathos and dignity. She is later murdered.
Along with the Bettertons, the detective novelist Esmé Carling in Original Sin,
also a murder victim, is described as a devotee of “Golden Age” detective fiction. She
is a writer of the form, but her books no longer sell. In addition, the sensible middle
aged church goer Joan Willoughby in Original Sin owns an extensive collection of
“Golden Age” writers (259). Joan Willoughby’s cousin, Miss Blackett, the elderly
secretary in the same novel finds the most comfort in the “Golden Age” of detective
fiction. When staring into the fireplace she sees a vision of Agatha Christie’s Miss
Marple, “handbag protectively clutched to her bosom, the gentle wise old eyes gazing
into hers, assuring her that there was nothing to be afraid of, that everything would be
all right” (259-60). It is, of course, an illusion, brought on by the shock of murder and
perhaps by the restorative sherry Miss Blackett has imbibed. Even the spirit of Miss
Marple cannot make everything all right in James’s fractured England. James’s readers
of “Golden Age” fiction are all quintessentially English, elderly and in some way
bereaved, indicating that these detective novels are relics of a former England which can
now only be experienced nostalgically. Detective fiction, in the Dalgliesh narratives, is
not a guaranteed catholicon for a difficult world.

The Code of Behaviour

The extent of the trauma of the Great War makes glib consolation impossible for both
Sayers and James. Retrieving anything hopeful from a war which sent millions to their

7
In 1940 Sayers wrote “The English War”, a poem which expresses almost identical sentiments. It was
first published in The Times Literary Supplement in September 1940. In Ralph Hone’s discussion of the
poem he notes that Captain A. R. Williams, who was private secretary to Lord Wavell, Viceroy of India
(1943-47) “heard the Viceroy recite from memory the entire poem” (122).
 83

deaths was difficult in the extreme. However, the shocking experience of the conflict
did create a bond between those who served, as Gill Plain suggests:
A belief in the nobility of death could scarcely emerge unscathed from the
carnage of the First World War, but it could be argued that elements of this
national heroic ideal were transmuted into a hardly less destructive code of
individual loyalty. Sacrifice co-existed with the acknowledgement of its
futility—duty continued to be done, but it was performed less out of
deference to authority than out of respect for comradeship. (50)

What Plain terms a “national” ideal can also be read as a more universal ideal, one
shared by the soldiers from the colonies. Private Edward Lynch, an Australian soldier,
ends his account of the war with the conclusion that he and his fellow soldiers would re-
enlist if called upon. The final paragraph of his story declares that “The war is over.
The trial was long and severe. The Prize was worth it though, when measured in the
mateship of men. My mates!” (338). An allegiance to nation or to empire, in his mind,
has been replaced by a code of “mateship” or, in other words, of loyalty to one’s fellow
soldier.8
Lord Peter Wimsey is an adherent to this code of behaviour and at times it creates
difficulties for him. As well as being a returned soldier, Wimsey is also a member of
the landed aristocracy which renders his personal code of loyalty a distinctly imperial
one. As Gill Plain suggests: “Wimsey never entirely loses this anachronistic desire to
see fair play and on one level he is a relic of a pre-war past . . . (50). Wimsey’s own
code of behaviour is therefore a confluence of his aristocratic upbringing and his war
experience. This complicates his amateur work as a detective, most visibly in Bellona
Club. Much critical attention has been given to this novel, first published in 1928, as it
depicts the issues of returned soldiers in post-war society.
On Armistice Day the aged General Fentiman is found dead in his favourite chair
in the Bellona Club in London. The Bellona Club, which bears the name of a Roman
goddess of war, is a private club for military officers, of which Wimsey is a member.
Wimsey is present when the General is found dead, but is called in “officially” as a
detective when the elderly solicitor Mr Murbles gives him the full facts of the case.
Wimsey immediately points out that the situation is “uncommonly awkward” (23) for

8
Not all men felt drawn to their fellow servicemen after the war had ended. Joanna Bourke discusses the
complex factors including race, class and marital status which affected the returned servicemen’s attitudes
to post-war bonding in Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (153-170).
84

him, but agrees to take it on. The awkwardness is caused not only by him having to
interview his fellow club members, but also by his loyalty to the younger men who
“knew too much” (10). The void between those who served in the recent war and those
like the ancient General Fentiman, to whom “the Crimea is still the War” (8) (author’s
emphasis), is demonstrated as the narrative progresses.
The murder victim, General Fentiman, is aligned with the Crimean War thereby
creating an emblematic divide between the veterans of World War One and those of
General Fentiman’s generation. The Crimean War began in 1853, a time when the
cavalry charge was still common. One such charge was that of the Thirteenth Light
Dragoons at the battle of Balaclava, an episode in which the words “noble” (line 55) and
“glory” (line 50) could be used without irony by Tennyson in his poem “The Charge of
the Light Brigade”. The Crimea therefore represents military values from another era,
before mustard gas and shells. The General’s grandsons, Robert and George, are both
veterans of the Great War, and are both suspects in the case. When it becomes apparent
that the shell-shocked George Fentiman may be the murderer, Wimsey falters and
announces to the phlegmatic policeman Charles Parker: “I wash my hands of this case”
(181). He finds himself unable to do so however, when appealed to by George
Fentiman’s wife Sheila, after George goes missing. As the case continues Wimsey
compares himself to Judas (200), indicating the extent to which his loyalties are being
tested.
Despite Wimsey’s misgivings, he does continue with the case, knowing that he
risks not only an episode of neurasthenia, but the ostracism of his fellow Club members.
Charles Rzepka links this behaviour to Wimsey’s aristocratic status and specifically to
his code of noblesse oblige which encourages Wimsey to defend the society for which
his fellow soldiers died (162). Rzepka further argues that:
Wimsey’s commitment to do good despite its personally devastating
consequences is based on more than lingering guilt from the war. . . .His
sense of responsibility to his society is rooted in a rationale for the
privileges of the landed, warrior classes that goes all the way back to
Homer’s Iliad . . . (Detective Fiction 165)

Rzepka’s argument is supported by a direct statement Wimsey makes in Whose Body?.

Wimsey acknowledges his observance of this code and the obligations it entails when
Bunter, his manservant, suggests that Wimsey is paid a “nobleman’s income” to deal
with irascible old ladies at dinner parties. Wimsey replies, “Noblesse oblige—for a
 85

consideration. I daresay you’re right. Then you’re better off than I am, because I’d
have to behave myself to Lady Worthington if I hadn’t a penny” (22). Wimsey’s class,
rather than his income, dictates his behaviour.
Mervyn Bunter too is consistent in his loyalty to Wimsey. The bond forged
through their shared war experience sustains both men throughout the series. Bunter
served in the same unit as Wimsey and after finding themselves in a “jam” as the
Dowager Duchess puts it, Wimsey promised him a job after the War (Busman’s
Honeymoon 379). Bunter, as I shall discuss later, appears free from the nervous
disorders of his master, but his shared experience of the horrors of warfare strengthens
the relationship between the two men, transcending even the barrier of class. Clouds of
Witness sees the men recall the ghastly screams of dying horses at Poperinghe (189),
which encapsulates the unspeakable memories they bear, and explains the rapport
between them. After Bunter saves his master from the bog, Wimsey thanks him saying,
“I’m so beastly deep in debt to you already, Bunter, it’s not a bit of use tryin’ to repay
it” (197), a sentiment reiterated throughout the series. Bunter’s loyalty, and his status as
a veteran of the Great War, endows him with the qualities of patriotism, bravery and
loyalty which accord him great value in the text.
The aristocratic Wimsey’s motivation, according to Rzepka, is to prove his worth,
and by association, defend the claims of the “landed, warrior classes” to which he
belongs. Wimsey does, despite occasional misgivings, care about the tradition into
which he has been born. He tells Harriet in Gaudy Night: “ . . . I have a cursed
hankering after certain musty old values, which I’m coward enough to deny, like my
namesake of the Gospels” (271). Wimsey’s inherited code of noblesse oblige is
complicated by his war service and loyalty to his fellow soldiers. However Wimsey
does not shirk his role as an agent of justice, and often enforces a supralegal form of
justice, just as Sherlock Holmes does. Holmes on occasion flouts the law, as in the case
of “Charles Augustus Milverton”, in order to achieve his idea of justice. In “The Abbey
Grange” Holmes becomes justice, when he declares “I am the judge” (341). Joseph
Kestner suggests that Doyle “supports but also probes the dominant cultural institutions
of the era . . .” (Sherlock’s Men 38) in his construction of Holmes’s extra-legal
activities. Sayers, I contend, reinforces the imperial ethos of the “gentleman” through
Wimsey’s extra-legal activities, as I shall demonstrate.
During the course of his investigations in Bellona Club Wimsey determines that
the murderer of General Fentiman was neither of the two grandsons, but rather the
callous ex-army doctor, Penberthy. Wimsey knows that it is almost impossible to prove
86

that Dr Penberthy gave the General a fatal dose of medicine, especially since George
Fentiman has admitted to the crime while in the middle of a psychotic episode. Wimsey
meets with Penberthy at the Bellona Club and confronts him with the truth. He then
calls upon Penberthy’s gentlemanly instincts and advises him on the appropriate course
of behaviour, which in this case is a written confession, followed by suicide. Penberthy
concurs, whilst vehemently declaring he is not sorry he murdered the old man. Despite
his lack of contrition, Penberthy complies with the public school code, and does what is
expected of him. Wimsey calls upon Colonel Marchbanks, who is a generation older
than Wimsey, to assist him. The Colonel advises Penberthy on the location of his
loaded gun. The implication is made that using the weapon will avoid the necessity of
being taken by the police, something which would “cause a great deal of unpleasantness
to yourself and to other people . . .” (239). Penberthy writes out a confession, is left
alone in the library, and shoots himself. He has, in the words of the old soldier Colonel
Marchbanks taken “the right course” (239).
When Wimsey hands Penberthy’s signed confession, witnessed by himself and
Marchbanks, to a plain clothes policeman he declares, “it’s the end of the case” (241).
The final chapter entitled “Post-Mortem” is a neat tying up of loose ends culminating in
the club bore, Wetheridge, continuing his litany of complaints with which the novel is
punctuated. The circularity of the narrative suggests that the code of loyalty adhered to
by Wimsey and Colonel Marchbanks enables life to go on despite the “unpleasantness”
of fraud, murder and suicide, and perhaps war trauma.
It is worth noting that Wimsey applies the same remedy to the murderer Mr
Tallboy in Murder Must Advertise. Like Penberthy, Tallboy is a public school man,
although, as the text makes clear, his alma mater of Dumbleton (also the name of the
butler in Vachell’s The Hill) is minor in the extreme. When Tallboy seeks advice from
Wimsey, Wimsey requires Tallboy to meet a certain death, a death which will spare his
wife and child the infamy of association with a murderer. Tallboy leaves Wimsey’s flat
with head held high, and Wimsey sees a man begin to shadow him. He is “knocked
down” (285) on his way home, an occurrence perceived, as it is intended, as an accident
by his colleagues. Wimsey, though terse with the triumphant Inspector Parker at the
end of the case, is still able to go back to Pym’s advertising agency, the site of the
murder, to make his farewells and there is no suggestion of a neurasthenic episode here.
This is in contrast with the end of Unnatural Death, which leaves Wimsey feeling ill,
Busman’s Honeymoon, when he breaks down in tears, or even Have His Carcase when
Wimsey flees Wilvercombe at the end of the case. Wimsey’s certainty of the rightness
 87

of his decision frees him from the destructive doubts that at other times plague him. His
imperial code of conduct, inherited through centuries of privilege, provides a partial
armour, at least, against the uncertainty of post-war England.
Wimsey’s code of behaviour is based partly on the respect for the fallen, the war
dead whose memories are honoured during Armistice Day. This resonates strongly in
the character of Adam Dalgliesh, linking him back to imperial ideologies of Wimsey’s
time. Not only is the dignity of death a constant motif in the narratives, but also the
insistence by Dalgliesh that his junior officers comply with this notion. This is made
explicit in Devices and Desires when junior officer Terry Rickards, in the charnel house
scene of the death of a fifty-year-old prostitute, says:
‘For God’s sake, can’t we get this thing out of here?’
And then he had heard Dalgliesh’s voice from the doorway like a whiplash.
‘Sergeant, the word is “body”. Or, if you prefer, there’s “cadaver”,
“corpse”, “victim”, even “deceased” if you must. What you are looking at
was a woman. She was not a thing when she was alive and she is not a
thing now.’ (345)

Rickards’s opinion of Dalgliesh is fixed by this encounter and he acknowledges that

because of it he respects but does not like the man (346). The context however makes it
clear that Dalgliesh’s view is wholly endorsed by the text. Similarly, in The Murder
Room, when viewing the fire blackened corpse of Neville Dupayne, Dalgliesh envies his
late father’s ability to call upon the Anglican liturgy when faced with such a situation.
Dalgliesh recognises a need to “bestow on these awful charred remains the recognition
that here had been a human being” (127). Dalgliesh never indulges in graveyard
humour, and while understanding that this is a coping mechanism for other police
officers, he will not tolerate it on his watch. His respect for the dead also underscores
the idea of his work as a vocation, instilling into police procedure a sense of honour and
chivalric behaviour inherited from the ideologies of the late nineteenth century.

War Trauma
Wimsey’s imperial code of behaviour is not the only aspect of his character forged in
the trenches of the Western Front. His most abiding legacy of the war is neurasthenia, a
88

topic which has attracted much critical attention.9 When General Fentiman is
discovered dead in the Bellona Club his grandson George scandalises the older patrons
with an hysterical outburst, described by the narrator as “unmannerly noise” (9).
George’s “shellshock” or neurasthenia is little understood by the older generation in the
novel, but Wimsey, a fellow sufferer, understands it only too well. Whereas the elderly
lawyer, Murbles, regards George Fentiman’s neurasthenic outbursts as due to hereditary
weakness, Wimsey knows that the War “pressed hardly upon imaginative men in
responsible positions” (18), and that George Fentiman has been damaged by the war,
rather than by so-called “bad blood”. Mr Murbles is echoing a commonly held view at
the time as Ben Shephard notes:
In Britain, the pre-war rhetoric of degeneration, mostly forgotten during the
war, began to return. Unrecovered pensioners bore the ‘congenital stigmata
of degeneration’ and were ‘constitutional psychopathic inferiors’, doctors in
the Ministry of Pensions declared in 1928. (151)

Sayers’s novel reflects the views of the time and, in particular, the very real prevalence
of post-war psychiatric illnesses amongst returned soldiers. Fentiman’s, and indeed
Wimsey’s, condition triggers the latent fear of degeneration and atavism, reflecting the
wider concern with the state of English society.
Wimsey, as the neurasthenic war veteran, reflects the very real problem this
presented to post-war English society. Soldiers during and after World War One
suffered from mental trauma on a massive scale. By 1916, Elaine Showalter notes,
“shell-shock cases accounted for as much as 40 percent of the casualties in the fighting
zones. And by the end of the war, 80,000 cases had passed through army medical
facilities” (168). The number of returned servicemen in Britain suffering from mental
illness is also reflected in the number of applications for pensions. Ben Shephard states
that as late as 1939 “there were still some 40,000 people in Britain receiving pensions
for mental disorders derived from the last war, and a further 80 000 cases had been
settled” (165). The problem of mental illness was a serious social issue after the war. It
is therefore a little unjust of Ben Shephard to accuse Dorothy Sayers of being “quick to
exploit the possibilities of shell-shocked characters who behaved in wild and
unpredictable ways . . .” (149) in her detective stories. She was surrounded by such

9
Gill Plain in Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance and Elaine
Showalter in The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 provide informed
readings of the issues surrounding Wimsey’s neurasthenia.
 89

men. As early as 1918 she reports that her friend Roger Dixey, recently demobilised,
has “frightfully bad shellshock” and is “terrified to see anybody” (Reynolds, Life 105).
Her husband “Mac” Fleming suffered from physical and mental trauma from the war,
something she was to live with until his death in 1950.
Fleming, a journalist, published How to See the Battlefields in 1919. This modest
book is a guide for those who wish to visit the main theatres of war on the Western
Front, and contains many anecdotes of that time. Rather touchingly, he suggests in the
Foreword that it may assist those whose “journeyings will be more in the nature of a
pilgrimage” to these locations. It is reasonable to assume that much of the detail in the
later Wimsey novels regarding the War may have come from, or been approved by,
Fleming whom Sayers married in 1926. Fleming, at the beginning of the War, was a
newspaper correspondent (Hall 43). He had previously served in the Boer War, like
Winston Churchill, as a war correspondent (Reynolds, Life 179). Fleming later joined
an artillery regiment and was posted to Carency. He describes the area as “little better
than a huge cesspit” and adds: “Never have I seen such rats or such numbers of them as
there were in the Carency sector” (25). This detail is included by Sayers in Bellona
Club when the unflappable Robert Fentiman is described by his neurasthenic brother:
He’s so thick-skinned; the regular unimaginative Briton. . . . I remember
Robert, at that ghastly hole at Carency, where the whole ground was rotten
with corpses—ugh!—potting those swollen great rats for a penny a time,
and laughing at them. Rats. Alive and putrid with what they’d been feeding
on. Oh, yes. Robert was thought a damn’ good soldier. (93-94)

Fleming, unlike Robert Fentiman, did not escape unscathed from his war experience and
suffered from a variety of physical complaints for the rest of his life. Although the first
Wimsey novel was written before Sayers met Fleming in 1925, the other novels do
show evidence of his war experiences. This verisimilitude is partly the reason, I
suggest, for the continued interest in Wimsey from literary critics.10 It also
demonstrates the importance to Sayers not only of being factually correct, but of
creating a character who continued to practise imperial values, when exposed to the
worst imperial conflict in living memory.

10
Unfortunately this interest at times results in poor scholarship, such as Ariela Freedman’s 2010 article
“Dorothy Sayers and the Case of the Shell-Shocked Detective.” An article which begins with the lively,
if inaccurate claim that Lord Peter is able “to score a cricket goal” (365), it is riddled with errors
regarding plot (382) and character names (372, 380), as well as Sayers’s biographical details (377) .
90

Wimsey’s war trauma or in the terminology of the day, shellshock, is evident in

the first novel, Whose Body? which relates an episode of neurasthenia sparked by
Wimsey solving a case. The link is immediately made between his sense of guilt at
sending a man to his death (the death penalty for murder was not abolished in England
until 1969) and his psychiatric episode. Late at night a distressed Wimsey wakes
Bunter, who is sleeping soundly, telling him that he can hear German sappers at work.
Bunter soothes Wimsey, by assuring him that it is, “our own sappers at work in the
communication trench” and sends him to bed (132). Bunter, clearly, is used to such
episodes, saying “Thought we’d had the last of these attacks” (133). He is referred to in
the final line of the chapter as “Sergeant Bunter,” reinforcing his military experience.
Bunter, though free of neurasthenic symptoms, understands what triggers them, and
how to deal with them. Later in the novel Wimsey tells a fellow patient in the waiting
room of Sir Julian Freke, the so-called nerve specialist, that he suffers from a “little
remains of the shellshock” (166). While Alison Light exasperatedly accuses Wimsey of
“nervy asininity” (73) due to his neurasthenia, she makes the important point that the
“post-war world . . . had made the notion of the conquering detective unpalatable to
some, and it needed to give way to a more modest, sometimes agonised sense of English
manliness” (72). Wimsey’s neurasthenia, therefore, is an acceptably masculine chink in
his otherwise flawless character. Gill Plain suggests that through the narrative of his
suffering, “. . . Sayers creates a careful and effective portrait of the survivor as hero”
(46). It is Wimsey’s awareness of his neurasthenia, I argue, combined with a
determination to carry on with his “work” that positions him as a humanly flawed and
an endearingly brave character.
Wimsey’s mother retrospectively fills in further details of his breakdown in
Busman’s Honeymoon, the final novel. She says, “I suppose if you’ve been giving
orders for nearly four years to people to go and get blown to pieces it gives you a—what
does one call it nowadays?—an inhibition or an exhibition, or something of nerves . . .”
(379). She also points out that Wimsey has an inherent dislike of responsibility, which
made his wartime command even more difficult. Wimsey’s determination to continue
with his wartime role for the duration of the conflict reinforces his dogged maintenance
of his personal code of behaviour.
Wimsey struggles with the morality of his amateur detection, providing further
evidence of his dislike of responsibility and his determination to overcome that
character flaw. As he says to his friend, the policeman Charles Parker:
 91

‘That’s what I’m ashamed of, really,’ said Lord Peter. ‘It is a game to me,
to begin with, and I go on cheerfully, and then I suddenly see that somebody
is going to be hurt, and I want to get out of it.’ (Whose Body? 122) (author’s
emphasis)

Parker is blunt in his reply, and points out to Wimsey that the Etonian notion of playing
the game is ridiculous when one is dealing with murder. He says, “Life’s not a football
match. You want to be a sportsman. You can’t be a sportsman. You’re a responsible
person” (124). Parker’s pragmatism forces Wimsey to acknowledge his obligation to
carry on with the case. This dilemma resurfaces for Wimsey throughout his
investigations; he has a responsibility to pursue the murderer, no matter how
“unsporting” Wimsey feels the process to be.
Wimsey’s neurasthenia can therefore be read as a result of his dislike of
responsibility clashing with his determination to do the right thing regardless of
personal cost. His psychiatric scars can be read as a “red badge of courage” when seen
through the lens of Great War psychiatry. 11 Wimsey held the rank of Major during the
war, and statistics show that a higher percentage of officers than enlisted men were
afflicted by the condition of shellshock (Shephard 75). According to the psychiatrist W.
H. R. Rivers this discrepancy was due to the obligations carried by the officers, as well
as the superior nature of their education, as Elaine Showalter explains:
The officer, on the other hand, has a more “complex and varied” mental life,
the benefit of a public-school education, which has taught him “successfully
to repress, not only expressions of fear, but also the emotion itself.”
Furthermore, his position requires him to continue to repress emotion in
order to set an example for his men. Responsibility for others and the
difficulty of keeping up appearances under continual strain or shock produce
“a state of persistent anxiety.” Neurasthenia, then can be interpreted as
selfless and noble. Indeed, Rivers concludes, the victims of neurasthenia
suffer mainly from excessive zeal and “too heavy a sense of responsibility,
and are likely to be the most valuable officers.” (175)

Rivers is best known for his work at Craiglockhart during the Great War where he
famously treated Siegfried Sassoon. Wimsey, Rivers’ theory suggests, was a valuable

11
I am referring to the notion of war service being proof of masculinity as evinced in Stephen Crane’s
1895 work The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War.
92

officer because he embraced responsibility. His Eton and Balliol education combined
with his aristocratic lineage fill him with a deep sense of duty, to which he responds and
from which he simultaneously tries to escape. The resulting strain causes a breakdown,
according to his Uncle Paul’s “biography”, in 1918 (Clouds of Witness 283). Using
such a paradigm, not only is Wimsey’s “shellshock” a badge of merit as an officer, but
also as a man, suggesting he is zealous, responsible, selfless and noble; all qualities
which reinforce the very best of the English tradition of gentlemanly behaviour.
Wimsey’s competence as an officer is further reinforced by the stories of the men who
served under him. Not only Bunter, but also Padgett, the loquacious porter at
Shrewsbury College, is fulsome in his praise for Wimsey. He tells Harriet Vane of the
enlisted men’s admiration for Wimsey, “Winderpane, we called ‘im along of the
eyeglass, but meanin’ no disrespect. None on us wouldn’t hear a word agin ‘im”
(Gaudy Night 337). Such loyalty is a measure of Wimsey’s imperial credentials: the
ability to consistently carry out the right course of action with no thought for oneself.
Read in this light, Wimsey’s heroism provides a consolatory narrative within the texts,
highlighting the strength and most importantly, the endurance of an essentially English
code of behaviour, forged and tempered in the service of the British Empire.
Crucial to Wimsey’s success as an officer is his suppression of emotion, an
attribute which reflects the ideology of his time, as Ben Shephard explains:
Public schoolboys were taught that emotional self-control—repression, as
the Freudians would call it—was one of the cornerstones of character. The
‘stiff upper lip’ left its mark on late-Victorian psychiatry in a distaste for
therapies based on ‘self-absorption’, which were thought to encourage
‘morbid introspection’ or ‘unnatural egotism’. The dominant view was that
patients needed to learn ‘not the indulgence but a forgetfulness of their
feelings, not the observation but the renunciation of self, not introspection,
but useful action.’ (19)

Although details of Wimsey’s treatment are not furnished in the texts he does spend
time in a rest home after the war, playing cards and reading detective novels, pastimes
designed, interestingly, to prevent him thinking. He describes the necessity for
repetitive, mindless activity in order to keep his thoughts in check:
I played patience all day. I was in a nursing home—with shell-shock—and
other things. I only played one game, the very simplest . . . the demon . . . a
silly game with no ideas in it at all. I just went on laying out and gathering
 93

it up…a hundred times in an evening . . . so as to stop thinking. (Bellona

Club 217) (ellipsis in original)

The paradox for Wimsey is that detective work not only forces him to think and feel,
but it forces him to think and feel about death and responsibility, the two triggers for his
neurasthenia. As Gill Plain expresses it, his chosen occupation, “remorselessly returns
him to the same crisis of responsibility from which he is trying to escape” (47).
Wimsey appears to be beginning to heal his mental torment at the end of
Busman’s Honeymoon when he weeps in his wife’s arms. However, the “Wimsey
Papers” provide a postscript, or even a coda to this scene. Wimsey declares, in a letter
to Harriet, posted from an unknown overseas location, that for the first time in his life
he is sure of something. He is convinced that, “the important thing is each man’s
personal responsibility.” He goes on to say, “. . . I have never felt more certain of
anything. To be certain of something is rather an achievement for me, isn’t it? Well,
there it is—I am perfectly certain for once” (“Wimsey Papers XI” 105) (author’s
emphasis). Wimsey has developed from an effete man about town to a wise adult in the
crucible of war.

The Complications of Guilt

War complicates the question of guilt enormously, as Ian McEwan’s Atonement
delineates in the following passage. The wounded Robbie Turner in his last fevered
hours meditates on the idea of guilt:
But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no
one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there
weren’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace,
to take down the statements of witnesses and gather in the facts. The
witnesses were guilty too. All day we’ve witnessed each other’s crimes.
You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die? (261)

Turner is replaying the guilt apportioned to him as a civilian, when he was wrongly
accused of a crime. His innocence, so important to him before the war, becomes
impossible. The guilt of those who fought in the war and those who didn’t, those who
survived intact and those who were injured, throws up such a multitude of possibilities
that the word “guilt” refuses the glib finality of many detective stories.
94

Remembrance, and its association with guilt, is raised in Bellona Club when
Wimsey says, to the equally jaded veteran George Fentiman:
All this remembrance-day business gets on your nerves, don’t it? It’s my
belief most of us would only be too pleased to chuck these community
hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn’t run it for all it’s worth. (5)

Wimsey’s reluctance to engage in commemorative activities may be linked to the guilt

he feels as a survivor. As Evelyn Cobley explains:
The desire to apologise to the dead for being alive is inevitably mixed up
with the need to justify one’s own survival. To remember the war means to
counteract the guilty desire to forget, for remembering can only apply to
what might otherwise be forgotten. Commemorating the dead is therefore
an attempt to alleviate guilt through the act of confessing one’s own part in
the war. (9)

Wimsey is not against a personal commemoration of those fallen, agreeing to attend a

dinner hosted by Colonel Marchbanks whose son was killed in the War (Bellona Club
6). However, the official ceremonies, perhaps because they involve those who did not
serve in the war, are seen as irrelevant for the veterans.
Adam Dalgliesh, though a non-combatant, lives in an England burdened with the
history of two twentieth-century wars. Although he was born after the Second World
War, he lives in a society indelibly scarred by the conflicts.12 His profession inevitably
raises the issue of guilt, in this case after the arrest of a child murderer:
A psychiatrist could explain, no doubt, why he felt himself contaminated
with guilt. The feeling was not new to him and he would deal with it in his
own way. After all, he reflected wryly, it had seldom inconvenienced him
for long and never once had it made him want to change his job.
(Unnatural Causes 25)

Dalgliesh sloughs off the guilt associated with this civilian crime with confidence. The
guilt created through war however, is a far more complex matter, creating murder cases
which cannot be satisfactorily solved.

12
Although Dalgliesh is referred to as “the old man” in Cover Her Face (1962) ,suggesting his birth date
must be in at least the 1920s, in the much later Original Sin it is stated that he was not born until after the
early 1940s. Elasticity of “biographical” details is perhaps necessary in a series that spans almost fifty
years.
 95

P. D. James’s Original Sin addresses the question of wartime guilt and the
possibility of peacetime reparation. Set in Innocent House, home of the small London
publishing firm Peverell Press, a series of murders takes place in a building which is
suffocatingly Gothic. The case begins when the newly appointed Chairman of the firm,
Gerard Etienne, is found dead with a toy snake stuffed in his mouth, a biblical symbol
of evil gesturing to the novel’s title. What at first seems a case of professional jealousy
and corporate intrigue gradually unfolds to become far more complex and far-reaching.
The origins of the crime lie in the Second World War. Gabriel Dauntsey, a
partner in the firm, after forty years of searching, has found proof that his wife Sophie
and their twin children had been sacrificed to the Nazis in order to keep a French family
safe. They were given up to the Nazis by Jean-Philippe Etienne, a former Chairman of
Peverell Press. Etienne is a decorated hero of the resistance, and lives in seclusion near
the Essex marshes. Dauntsey’s crimes therefore are committed as a revenge tragedy; he
takes the life of Etienne’s children Gerard, and later Claudia, just as Etienne was
responsible for the deaths of his own children in 1942. The reasons for the crime are
first discovered by the young Jewish policeman, Daniel Aaron. When Aaron uncovers
this information he does not inform Dalgliesh, instead he seeks to warn Dauntsey so that
he may flee. Aaron allows Dauntsey to walk to his death in the liminal location of the
Essex marshes, and in doing so ends his own police career. Aaron’s motivation, it
seems, is that Dauntsey and his family were Jewish, and that Aaron’s loyalty is
primarily to his race rather than to British justice.
Questions of guilt and justice are debated by Dauntsey and Etienne in the final
chapter of the book, with Daniel Aaron as a witness. Etienne says to Dauntsey:
‘But murdering the innocent is your forte, isn’t it? You took part in the
bombing of Dresden. Nothing I have done can compete with the horror and
magnitude of that achievement.’
Daniel said, almost in a whisper: ‘That was different. That was the awful
necessity of war.’
Etienne turned on him: ‘And so it was for me, the necessity of war.’ (545)

The final scene in this family tragedy is Etienne’s triumphant declaration to the
devastated Dauntsey that Gerard and Claudia were not his biological children, rather
they were adopted. On hearing this news Dauntsey stumbles out into the Essex
marshes, seeking death. Dalgliesh is not present when this exchange takes place, and
Daniel Aaron is the witness. The implication is that Dalgliesh cannot arbitrate in a case
96

where questions of guilt and innocence are refracted by the context of war. The novel
concludes with the realisation by Aaron that “There would be no trial now, no exhibits,
no need to produce . . . evidence in court” (551). The case of Etienne and Dauntsey
refuses a clear cut answer of who is guilty and who is innocent, undermining the
certainties upon which an “imperial detective” relies, namely that logic and rationality
can explain and complete any and every investigation.
The elderly Gabriel Dauntsey is a murderer, but he is also an established poet.
Dalgliesh, a fellow poet, credits Dauntsey’s poetry as among the finest of his generation
(210). Dauntsey served as a bomber pilot during the war, hence Etienne’s reference to
Dresden, and it was this experience that fuelled much of his poetry:
His had been the poetry of modern war, of loss and grief and terror,
comradeship and courage, cowardice and defeat. The strong sinuous, brutal
verses were lit by passages of lyrical beauty, like shells bursting in the mind.
The great Lancasters lifting themselves like ponderous beasts with death in
their bellies, the dark and silent skies exploding in a cacophony of terror, the
boyish crew for whom he, little older, was responsible, climbing clumsily
accoutred into that frail metal shell night after night, knowing the arithmetic
of survival, that this could be the night when they would fall from the sky
like flaming torches. And always the guilt, the sense that this nightly terror,
both dreaded and welcomed, was an expiation, that there was a betrayal for
which only death could atone, personal betrayal mirroring a greater
universal desolation. (210)

Dauntsey is beset by the guilt of the survivor, of the Jew, of the bomber pilot and of the
father and husband. He is almost iconic in this regard, and his suicide is described with
sympathy, despite his murder of three innocent people. His poetry is presented as a
lament for the Second World War, as well as a documentation of its atrocities. His
suicide in the liminal topography of the Essex marshes represents only a partial ending
of the narrative. Susan Rowland asserts that Dauntsey’s death recalls the marshland
adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Wimsey and “is a sign of the novel’s Gothic belief
that no law or courts can adequately contain such horrors” (133). Original Sin presents
a narrative from which complex questions continue to emanate, defying consolation
through closure.
 97

Dorothy Sayers 1944 poem “Target Area” is addressed to her old German piano
teacher Fräulein Fehmer, living in an unknown location in Germany. It too is about a
bombing raid:
When the great Lancasters,

roaring out of England, making the sky boil like a cauldron,

stooped at last upon Frankfurt from the blackness

between the stars,

did the old, heartbreaking melody cry to you

Poland’s agony through the crashing anger of England? (96-100)

Sayers’s poem is a lament for a pre-War England, but also an acknowledgment of

the complexity of war. Among the final lines she writes:
The solidarity of mankind is a solidarity in guilt,

and all our virtues stand in need of forgiveness,

being deadly. (133-135)13

The above lines could act as an epigraph for the novels of both Sayers and James when
addressing the question of wartime guilt. The complexity of the issue provides a
stumbling block for the “imperial detective”, as I have suggested, but also indicates that
the Wimsey and Dalgliesh narratives are reflective of the society in which they were
written.

The Warrior Myth

From the conflict of the Great War Wimsey, I have argued, stands as an heroic figure,
because of his shellshock. It is my contention that this is an example of Sayers
extracting heroic narratives from the indiscriminate slaughter of war. Like Dorothy
Sayers’s first novel, P. D. James’s Cover Her Face also features a character who carries
the mental scars of war and with it a narrative of personal valour. Felix Hearne is a
potential suspect, rather than a detective, but he does bear a marked resemblance to
Lord Peter Wimsey. Like Wimsey, he is fair haired, sophisticated, has beautiful

13
“Target Area” was originally published in Fortnightly in March 1944. It appeared in Atlantic Monthly
at the same time (Hone 145).
98

manners and an air of detachment. He also has elegant hands, as Deborah Riscoe
observes, or did have before the Gestapo got to him:
The nails had never fully grown again. She tried to picture those hands
moving about the intricacies of a gun, curled into the cords of a parachute,
clenched in defiance or endurance. But it was no good. There seemed no
point of contact between that Felix who had apparently once known a cause
worthy suffering for and the facile, sophisticated, sardonic Felix Hearne of
Hearne and Illingworth, publishers . . . (26)

Like Wimsey, Hearne has carefully manufactured a public persona to keep the world at
bay. He too has a code of loyalty to the Maxie family and the “warrior class” to which
they belong. Hearne is an ambivalent suitor to Deborah Riscoe, daughter of the Maxies,
but, it seems, the legacy of his war service is an indifference to most things, marriage
included.
Any suggestion that this is due to homosexuality is quickly countermanded by
James when she stridently equates physical courage with heterosexuality:
A man cannot be either effeminate or a fool who holds both French and
British decorations for his part in the Resistance Movement. He was one of
those whose physical courage, that most respected and most glamorous of
virtues, had been tried in the punishment cells of the Gestapo and could
never again be challenged. (25)

War trauma, in this instance, is presented as a guarantee of masculinity and

heterosexuality. (James appears to be overlooking war heroes such as T. E. Lawrence,
whose homosexuality is as well-known as his daring desert exploits during World War
One.) James is employing the terms “respected” and “glamorous” without irony,
reinforcing the Edwardian paradigm of manhood:
Edwardians took for granted an equation between masculinity, virility,
courage and emotional self-control. ‘For the best part of a hundred years,’
the military historian Sir Michael Howard has written, ‘war did indeed
“define masculinity” in British society. War was a test of manhood.’
(Shephard 18)

James’s novel, published in 1962, reflects ideas which date back to the beginning of the
century, and even earlier. They present a continuous masculine paradigm, imbued by
 99

Wimsey and Felix Hearne, as those who proved their masculinity during war. In
particular they can be linked back to Victorian ideas of masculinity as John Tosh
explains:
Imperial reputation was grounded in a small repertoire of masculine
qualities: stoicism as in the death of General Gordon, steely self-control
exemplified by Kitchener, self-reliance in the case of Baden-Powell. (174)

Not only war in general, but specifically war heroes were held up as templates against
which masculine behaviour could be measured. Tosh also makes the point that Gordon
and Kitchener avoided matrimony while Baden-Powell delayed it and ,“married at the
age of fifty-one, on his mother’s urging” (174). The reinforcement of military
masculinity as grounded in an exclusively male environment is made clear. These
templates persist throughout the war-related narratives of P. D. James.
Whereas in Cover Her Face, heterosexuality and courage are equated, in Death in
Holy Orders, a narrative of heroism is offered through the character of an elderly
homosexual priest. During World War Two Father Martin was held in a Japanese
Prisoner of War camp, along with his friend Rupert, “the only love of his life” (164).
Father Martin’s nightmares begin late in his life, his elderly mind no longer able to
suppress them after sixty years of trying (163). He relives the sight of his beloved
friend Rupert’s beheading.14 Father Martin is the onlooker, powerless to stop the event.
He suffers the nightmare repeatedly, waking with a scream and bathed in sweat, very
much as Wimsey had done some seventy years earlier. Father Martin’s stoic acceptance
of his war experience and his devotion to his faith are presented as admirable. He is
without bitterness and is an exemplar of peace and harmony within the text.
The following novel, The Murder Room, features a hero of the resistance, Marie
Strickland, whose résumé of war activities suggests strong similarities with Australian
war hero Nancy Wake, known as “the White Mouse”. Marie Strickland is described as
a former member of “the Special Operations Executive who were parachuted into
France on the verge of D-Day” (204). Like Nancy Wake, Marie Strickland is described
as both beautiful and ruthless (205).15 Strickland’s wartime activities are described by
James Calder-Hale in terms of the utmost admiration, an opinion with which Dalgliesh
concurs. Felix Hearne, Father Martin, and Marie Strickland all offer narratives of

14
Their relationship, James is careful to point out was “requited but unconsummated” (164), a nicety that
is Jamesian in the extreme.
15
Nancy Wake’s war time activities are chronicled in her autobiography White Mouse and by Peter
FitzSimons in Nancy Wake: a Biography of our Greatest War Heroine.
100

heroism forged during wartime. Judith Johnston and Monica Anderson suggest that
intrinsic British values include “integrity, courage, fortitude” (3). These qualities are
exemplified by each of these three characters who stand as beacons of imperial values
within a declining England. While Marie Strickland and Father Martin represent the
Herculean strength that can be found during times of conflict, they are also a reminder
of how unlikely these acts are in contemporary society. Father Martin is part of an
institution, St Anselm’s Theological College, which is faced with closure. So too is
Marie Strickland; the Dupayne Museum too is under threat of closure. They are
depicted as the last of their kind, and twenty-first century England, having turned its
face against its heroic past has lost something precious.

Wartime Adventures
Whereas such portraits of British valour stand as reminders of the strength of the nation,
the novels of Sayers and James also contain narratives where the “imperial detective”
exhibits an active kind of heroism. War in the twentieth-century, as Joanna Bourke
points out in the following passage, was a bloody, dull and impersonal business.
Inscribing ancient legends of bravery, skill and chivalry was almost impossible amongst
the corpse bloated mud of France and Belgium, or indeed the immolated civilians of
Germany and England in the Second World War:
Although modern slaughter was typically anonymous, dirty, and banal, by
conjuring up myths of chivalry, combatants were able to evoke feelings of
respect and compassion for their enemy while still remaining committed to
the killing enterprise. The disappointment (sometimes even horror) of being
unable to enact the role of the warrior sometimes resulted in the realization
that they were not engaged in ‘war’, but in ‘bloody murder’. Despite such
bouts of disillusionment, the myth of the duellist, the knight, and the expert
maintained an indistinguishable appeal throughout the century. Chivalry
was evoked to stifle fears of senseless violence; intimacy was substituted for
confusing anonymity; skilfulness was imposed to dispel numbing
monotony. (History of Killing 56)

Bourke goes on to argue that the myths of the knight, duellist and military expert are
superimposed on twentieth-century warfare by many combatants and commentators.
Using this framework one can read Douglas Bader, the fighter pilot, “duelling” in the
skies with the Luftwaffe in World War Two, while in the First World War, T. E.
 101

Lawrence was the “knight on horseback”. The lives of war heroes Bader and Lawrence
have been chronicled in book and film, reinforcing Bourke’s argument of the popularity
of these cultural myths. 16 Writing of World War Two, A. N. Wilson states that, “Those
on both sides who engaged as fighter pilots were heroes in the Homeric mould,
individuals who actually made a difference” (410). It is unsurprising therefore, that
Sayers provided Wimsey’s nephew, Viscount St George, with an heroic death, killed
during the Battle of Britain (Reynolds, Life 385). Although Wimsey and Dalgliesh are
not fighter pilots, their individual battles with the enemies of England cast them in that
Homeric mould nevertheless.
Adam Dalgliesh becomes involved in a personal battle in the 1971 novel Shroud
for a Nightingale. The narrative presents Dalgliesh with a case he cannot satisfactorily
solve. It also posits Dalgliesh as a duellist, sparring with a German enemy, while
defending English values. It is set, primarily, in the John Carpendar Hospital and its
nurse training facility, Nightingale House, a gloomy Victorian building. The hospital’s
matron, the seemingly English Mary Taylor, is actually the German Irmgard Grobel
who during the Third Reich served as a young nurse in a hospital which routinely
euthanized mentally ill German patients. As the narrative explains, this was legal at the
time in Germany. However, the case on which the story hangs is the murdering of
thirty-one Russians and Poles by the injection of the barbiturate, Evipan. Irmgard
Grobel was on the staff of the hospital, but was not involved in the administering of the
injections. After the war she is brought before a war crimes trial, which finds her not
guilty. She creates a new identity, becoming a much respected nursing professional in
England. However Grobel’s identity is revealed and her need to protect herself leads to
murder.
Dalgliesh discovers the true identity of Mary Taylor and identifies her as the
murderer of fellow nursing sister Ethel Brumfett. Despite Dalgliesh having unravelled
this intricate plot, there is insufficient evidence for Taylor to be brought to trial. It is at
this point that Dalgliesh steps into the role of duellist. Consistently characterised by
self-restraint and moderation, Dalgliesh unusually takes on a form of vigilantism in the
case of Mary Taylor. The reason for this aberrant behaviour seems, quite clearly, to lie
in the nationality and wartime record of the murderer. At the end of the novel it is
revealed Dalgliesh had “pursued the case as if it were a personal vendetta, hating

16
I am referring to Paul Brickhill’s 1954 biography of Bader, Reach for the Sky, which was followed by a
film of the same name in 1956, with Kenneth More playing Bader. T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of
Wisdom was published in 1935. David Lean’s 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia cast the image, memorably,
of a blonde blue-eyed Peter O’Toole as Lawrence.
102

himself and her. And she had admitted nothing; not for one moment had she been in
any danger of panicking” (284). The intimacy of their “duel” is reinforced in a carefully
judged verbal sparring bout between the two which culminates with Taylor saying “You
and I are not so very different after all, Adam Dalgliesh” (281).
A discussion of the war crime trial of Irmgard Grobel brings the normally
restrained Dalgliesh close to stridency when he says, to the younger Masterson, “the
usual Teutonic plea of legality you note, Sergeant” (257). Masterson regards the war as
largely irrelevant, and asks Dalgliesh, “Who really cares now? Isn’t the official policy
to forgive and forget?” (258). Dalgliesh’s rather Wildean reply is as bitter as his earlier
statement, “We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the
obligation of liking our friends” (258). His determination to pursue Taylor/Grobel
suggests strongly that the international justice of the war crimes tribunal does not satisfy
the “imperial detective” any more than his own nation’s policy of post-war forgiveness.
This case, more than any other, brings out acrimony in Dalgliesh, and sees him lurching
towards zealous irrationality in his determination to bring Grobel to justice.
The final chapter of the book, “Summer Epilogue”, outlines both the suicide of
Mary Taylor in a squalid flat in London, and the destruction of Nightingale House.17
Mary Taylor, having written a confession addressed to Dalgliesh, commits suicide by
injecting herself with Evipan, ensuring that the case is closed, metaphorically as well as
literally. Taylor’s suicide note accuses Dalgliesh of seeing “his job as the embodiment
of moral law” (284). While this reinforces the detective’s role as heroic, it also suggests
that even he is powerless when faced with the multiplicities of guilt and evil spawned in
wartime.
Dalgliesh carries out a metaphorical duel with the former Nazi Mary Taylor.
Sayers’s “imperial detective”, Lord Peter Wimsey, is an accomplished duellist outside
of the theatre of war (Gaudy Night 373). Wimsey has a history as a swordsman, and
uses a walking cane which contains a steel blade (Whose Body? 35). As Joanna Bourke
explains, the bayonet and the sword were seen as part of the chivalric history of warfare
and that this belief “insisted that the bayonet had a righteousness that other weapons
lacked” (History of Killing 48). It is however another role outlined by Bourke that
Wimsey takes on during wartime, which is that of an “expert”, in particular that of a
spy. Wimsey’s biography relates his “recklessly dangerous” work behind enemy lines
(Bellona Club 250). He has this in common with another literary imperial adventurer,

17
Nightingale House had been partly destroyed by the fire lit by Mary Taylor, in which she burnt Ethel
Brumfett’s body.
 103

Richard Hannay. Like Wimsey, Hannay has a knowledge of ciphers gained during his
time, “as intelligence-officer at Delagoa Bay during the Boer War” (Buchan, Thirty-
Nine Steps 26). He goes on to use this knowledge to decode a cipher and embarks on
his endeavour to save England in The Thirty-Nine Steps. Wimsey, like Hannay, draws
on his knowledge of ciphers on numerous occasions to solve civilian crimes.
Richard Hannay, after his exploits in The Thirty-Nine Steps, set before the war,
embarks on no less than two adventures during the conflict itself, chronicled in
Greenmantle (1916) and Mr Standfast (1919). Greenmantle begins with Hannay
convalescing after the battle of Loos (1). He is asked by his government to take on “a
matter of life and death” (10). The task requires him to uncover information in order to
save the Allied cause, which he does with aplomb. Like Hannay, Wimsey serves both
in the trenches and as a spy, rounding him out as an expert but one who has shared the
experience of the common soldier.
Wimsey’s wartime experience comes into play in a different form towards the end
of Have His Carcase. He deciphers a letter belonging to the murder victim, Paul Alexis
who is Russian by birth.18 Talk of Bolshevik plots erupts from time to time, especially
from the middle-aged, and rather foolish fiancée of Alexis, Mrs Weldon. She, and the
less educated members of the community, fear foreign agents, but Wimsey is reassured
by his friend Chief Inspector Parker that, “Morris, the Bolshevik-wallah” does not
knows of any “Communist or Russian agent who might be knocking about
Wilvercombe . . .” (244). Wimsey, with his ability to gain access to the imperial
archive, is the authority on many subjects, Bolsheviks included. As a member of the
aristocracy, he could be expected to show concern about a Bolshevik revolution, as his
King, George V, undoubtedly did.19 However, in Have His Carcase Bolsheviks are a
mere red herring, as it were, and the real threat is an ungrateful son, Henry Weldon and
his equally immoral accomplices.

Keeping the Peace

Between the wars, Wimsey is called in by the Foreign Office to soothe ruffled
diplomatic feathers. He is so discreet about this activity that even Harriet Vane is
unaware of it until in Gaudy Night Freddy Arbuthnot informs her of Wimsey’s work for

18
Alexis was the name of the Russian haemophiliac prince, son of Tsar Nikolai Romanov. He was
executed along with the rest of his family in July 1918 (A. Wilson 225). Paul Alexis too is a
haemophiliac, a clue central to the plot.
19
A. N. Wilson argues the King George V and Queen Mary were acutely aware of the changing world
order and “could always hear the rattle of tumbrils over the cobblestones” (116).
104

the Government. Arbuthnot says if Wimsey is abroad, “he’s left his country for his
country’s good” (212). Wimsey is far more modest about his efforts, telling Harriet,
“I’m the professional funny man of the Foreign Office. . . . I take people out to lunch
and tell them funny stories and work them up to mellowing point. God! What a game!”
(268). Wimsey is far more equivocal about his work than Buchan’s Richard Hannay,
but carries it out just the same. The “Great Game” of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (251), and
its zealous participants, are a thing of the past. Wimsey’s endeavours are carried out
with a sense of the inevitably of further conflict, and of a return to “All the old filthy
uproar” (Gaudy Night 268), a premonition which turns out to be correct.
When World War Two does break out, Wimsey is once again working for the
British Government and undertakes a dangerous overseas mission. This is outlined in
the “Wimsey Papers” which were published weekly in The Spectator at the beginning of
the war, as previously noted. Blatantly written as propaganda, and aimed at morale
boosting, the series of letters outline the state of the Wimsey family, and associates, in
1939. Jill Paton Walsh used these articles as the basis for her second Wimsey novel
Presumption of Death in which Wimsey, accompanied by Bunter, ventures abroad on a
life and death mission. The short story “Talboys” was written by Sayers in 1942, but
not published in her lifetime.20 It demonstrates that Peter did survive his espionage
activities, as he has three sons and is enjoying country life at the eponymous house.
Wimsey’s reward for returning to the danger of spying is an idyllic family life in the
heart of rural England. 21
The question of espionage is a more complicated one for Adam Dalgliesh. As a
policeman, he does occasionally cross paths with the Secret Service, an institution with
which he has an uneasy relationship. Despite this, Dalgliesh is still capable of aligning
himself, however equivocally, with MI5, as the cause of keeping Britain safe is one
shared with his Secret Service colleagues. This is made clear in The Murder Room
when he interviews James Calder-Hale, an employee of MI5:
Turning to go, Dalgliesh thought, That’s close to an admission of his secret
activities, but why not? He’s been told that I know. We’re both playing the
same game and let’s hope on the same side. What he’s doing, however
apparently trivial and amateur, is part of a greater pattern. It’s important

20
According to Trevor H. Hall, the story “Talboys” was “discovered and published in 1972” (24).
21
Barbara Reynolds states: “They were to have five children in all.” She notes that this was only
disclosed to friends (Life 385).
 105

and he has to be protected—protected against everything but an accusation

of murder. (233) (author’s emphasis)

Dalgliesh, like Wimsey, employs the imperial terms of the “game” with an implied
reference to Kipling’s “great game”. The game now is played within England’s borders
however, as MI5 deals with national, rather than international threats to security.
It is not the first encounter Dalgliesh has had with the security services. He also
meets them on his ill-starred holiday to Norfolk in Devices and Desires, a holiday in
which he becomes embroiled not only in a murder investigation, but also a matter of
national security. When Dalgliesh arrives in Larksoken, he encounters a landscape
which resonates with a military past, and hints at a traumatic present:
The headland was empty and almost bare, the few straggling trees, distorted
by the wind, struggled to keep their precarious hold in the uncompromising
soil. And now he was passing a second and more dilapidated pillbox and it
struck him that the whole headland had the desolate look of an old
battlefield, the corpses long since carted away but the air vibrating still with
the gunfire of long-lost battles, while the power station loomed over it like a
grandiose modern monument to the unknown dead. (21)

Larksoken is home to a behemoth of a nuclear power plant, a significant narrative

element. It is an inversion of Edwin Lutyens’ Cenotaph in Whitehall, with the hopes of
Edwardian England distorted into a symbol of anonymous modernity, primed with the
ability to rain death upon thousands of innocent civilians.22
Devices and Desires contains three plots; the serial killings of the bathetic
Whistler, the murder of Hilary Robarts, and the presence of a terrorist mole in the
nuclear power plant. There are three separate criminals at work simultaneously in this
barren location, and Dalgliesh is enmeshed at some level in each case. However, it is
the last which provides the most illuminating material for reading this novel in the
context of espionage. The threat to England in this narrative comes from Germany,
specifically from a terrorist group housed in that country. MI5 is responsible for
monitoring such activity and keeping England safe. England’s coastline, once again, is
cited as the weak link in its defences. The terrorists plot to take over nuclear

22
Devices and Desires also chronicles Dalgliesh’s sudden accumulation of wealth, when he inherits his
Aunt Jane’s substantial estate. His decision to remain a detective reinforces his dedication to the
Metropolitan Police.
106

installations throughout England and Europe and make demands from this position of
power. Terrorism is the fear of the age. Devices and Desires was published in 1989,
but echoes the paranoia of an earlier time. John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)
and Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) both hinge on the fear of a
German invasion by sea. James’s choice of Germany as the hub of a terrorist enterprise
in the late 1980s can be seen as historically realistic. During the 1980s terrorist groups
such as the Baader-Meinhof gang were active in the country, before and after the re-
unification of Germany. The unnamed terrorist group to which Caroline Amphlett has
pledged allegiance, code named “operation Birdcall” (417) can be read as a fusion of
nuclear age fear combined with decades-old loathing of the German nation.
Dalgliesh is equivocal about the Secret Service and, when requested by MI5 to
destroy any evidence of Amy Camm being involved in a terrorist cell, he complies with
reluctance. Amy Camm, along with Caroline Amphlett, has been horribly murdered, at
sea, by the German terrorist cell. Dalgliesh searches Amy’s belongings and attends a
debriefing with MI5 security officers at a secluded location. When they thank him for
his work he says, acerbically:
The request you made then seemed to me to be reasonable in the
circumstances. I’m neither naive nor ambivalent about terrorism. You
asked me to do something and I’ve done it. (447-8)

Dalgliesh does not embrace his role as spy, nor does he regard the MI5 officers in a
favourable light. Sowerby has a “sly superior smile” (454) and is deemed ruthless by
Dalgliesh. The meeting place is a Victorian house, to which Dalgliesh along with Alex
Mair, director of the power station, are invited. They are part of a discussion with the
two intelligence officers which in location and tone resembles a sour version of the
imperial adventure narrative. It is an inversion of the jolly pals routine of the Bulldog
Drummond or Richard Hannay stories.
Terrorism is a concern which becomes more frequent as the Dalgliesh books
progress. Death in Holy Orders raises the issue of the Irish Republican Army, and there
is little doubt as to where the textual sympathy lies on this matter. The death of her
soldier son at the hands of the IRA marks the last blow for the ailing Margaret Munroe.
A captain in the Army, he was captured and tortured by the IRA, then killed. Ruby
Pilbeam describes watching Margaret Munroe’s grief as seeing someone “being tortured
in Hell” (87). Munroe’s grief, Ruby Pilbeam tells Dalgliesh, becomes acute when,
“they let those murderers out of prison under the Good Friday agreement and she
 107

couldn’t take that” (87). The Good Friday Agreement was reached in April 1998, then
endorsed by the Irish public in a referendum in May 1998 (Clapson 35). It was a recent
event when this novel was published in 2001. Ruby Pilbeam is the working class cook
at the college, but the simplicity of her explanation does not mask the implication that
the IRA killed both mother and son.
The possibilities of imperial heroics carried out by espionage agents is all but
extinguished by the later Dalgliesh novels. In The Lighthouse Dalgliesh muses on the
fact that:
. . . the secret service, like the monarchy, in yielding up its mystique in
response to public enthusiasm for greater openness, seemed to have lost
some of that half-ecclesiastical patina of authority bestowed on those who
dealt in esoteric mysteries. (5)

As James puts it, the veiled glamour of the secret service has evaporated and with it the
opportunity for deeds of nobility or glory. The linking of the secret service to the
monarchy and the church imbues it with a particularly Anglican aura, a marker of value
in James’ writing.
Not only the raised public profile of the Service registers as a decrease in its
effectiveness, but also the agents portrayed in the later Dalgliesh novels depict the
service as one in decline. The erudite James Calder-Hale, in The Murder Room (2003),
is dying of cancer, and his attempt to complete his history of the inter-war years seems
destined to fail. The MI5 representative in The Lighthouse (2005), Colin Reeves is
described as “a fresh-faced boy” (4) whose brief utterances are all but ignored by his
older colleagues. The secret service agents have diminished from the threatening
figures of Devices and Desires to sick men or naive recruits. The Secret Service, like
the rest of England, is not what it once was in P. D. James’s novels.
The extent to which Britain has, in James’s work, declined as a nation can be
measured, not only by the state of the secret service but also by the diminution and
domestication of its military history. In Devices and Desires, one of Britain’s most
famous naval figures has been reduced to a collection of mawkish imperial nostalgia.
The village inn is named “The Local Hero” and its sign features a painting of Lord
Nelson. Rickards the policeman thinks it so badly done it makes Nelson “look like the
Princess Royal in drag” (270). The interior is even more offensive to Rickards’s taste,
with a blossoming of lithographs, commemorative mugs and nautical pennants. He
feels it manages to “trivialize and diminish both the building’s own long history and the
108

Admiral’s achievements” (272). Nelson was a popular figure in his time, a sentiment
publicly commemorated in an eighteen ton statue atop the column in Trafalgar Square
(Briggs, Victorian Things 144). The innkeepers, in creating such a misguided tribute to
England’s naval hero, have reduced triumphalism to absurdity, and the vestiges of
Britain’s imperial past are now mere ephemera, indistinguishable from any other tawdry
trappings found on a seaside pier.
By the time The Murder Room appears in 2003, the only military characters
featured are elderly and frail. Major Arkwright is an elderly homosexual who has a
penchant for Staffordshire figurines and a kindly attitude towards rent boys. Despite his
altruistic efforts towards one of these boys, Ryan Archer, Arkwright is attacked by
him.23 When the police come to call, they find a weak elderly man with a bandaged
head, a frail remnant of Britain’s once great military force. The same novel, as I have
noted, features Marie Strickland, whose astonishing resistance achievements are
compared with her current rather pointless volunteer work, a comparison expressed in
terms of frustration and bitterness. These veterans of the Second World War are tired
and frail, but they represent once again, a measure of how far the country has fallen,
from altruism to pointless violence in the case of Major Arkwright, and from bravery
under torture to unnecessary calligraphy in the case of Marie Strickland. Any
possibility of consolation proffered by Britain’s glorious past is always retracted by its
positioning against Britain’s current unsatisfactory state. Both the Great War and
World War Two, by the end of the Dalgliesh series, are harbingers of melancholy, and a
measure of how far the nation has declined.
The Wimsey and Dalgliesh narratives are inflected by the trauma of war. In both
narratives the cataclysm of World War One is registered as the beginning of irrevocable
changes in British society. The residual trauma of this war weaves a threnodic element
through both narratives and the intensity increases as the Dalgliesh novels progress.
The possibility of a narrative of imperial heroism is created by Wimsey’s espionage
work, and briefly in Dalgliesh’s post-war investigations. This however, in the Dalgliesh
novels, slowly frays into another marker of Britain’s decline, accentuated by the
diminution of England’s military. Both series share, however, an adherence to an
imperial code of behaviour in which decency and humanity are fundamental. The
imperial wars of the twentieth century shattered British society, but the remnants of that
Victorian code of chivalry and manliness persist in the characters of Wimsey and

23
Once again, James makes it patently clear that Arkwright does not have a sexual relationship with Ryan
Archer, only a paternal one.
 109

Dalgliesh. These qualities are displayed most vividly when the “imperial detective”
enters adventurous terrain, into which my next chapter ventures.
110

CHAPTER THREE

Imperial Adventures.

“Oh, Uncle Peter! This is a real adventure!”

Viscount St George to his Uncle, Lord Peter Wimsey.
Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head.” (200)

Among the manuscripts Dorothy Sayers left unfinished when she died in 1957 was a
biography of Wilkie Collins. Sayers completed only five chapters, but never entirely
relinquished the project. The study of Collins appealed to her academic proclivities,
and provided respite from the commercial pressures of writing detective fiction, giving
her the opportunity she said of “easing up a little and writing a peaceful biography”
(Reynolds, Life 271). The influence of Wilkie Collins upon her work, and upon that of
P. D. James, is prodigious. The Moonstone is described by Sayers as “that
incomparable classic” (“To John Cournos” 1: 240) and by James as “the first detective
story” (Talking about Detective Fiction 23). The Moonstone demonstrates the generic
intermingling of sensation fiction, the Gothic and imperial adventure with the (then)
new form of detective fiction. It also, more cogently, is a story of imperial detection, in
which the empire is brought home to England in the form of an Indian gem. The
narrative and the solution to the mystery of The Moonstone lies in an understanding of
England’s complicated relationship to its empire. This complex web of associations
with a now diminishing empire informs the work of Sayers and James and The
Moonstone, with its diffuse generic structure, provides a template for their later forms of
imperial detection. However, the adventures encountered by the “imperial detectives”,
Wimsey and Dalgliesh, take place almost exclusively in England, rather than in the far
reaches of empire, rendering them “imperial detectives” at home.
This chapter is concerned with the way in which an imperial identity is mapped
onto an imperial and post-imperial England in the work of Sayers and James. As the
empire shrinks, narratives of exploration, discovery and contact, formerly carried out in
the periphery, are enacted within England itself. Throughout these narratives spaces for
adventure are opened up within the text in a variety of ways. The darkness of the inner
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city, associated with detection through Poe, Dickens and Conan Doyle, becomes a locus
of imperial adventure. In addition, liminal spaces, such as moors, beaches and
marshland become contested sites where imperial anxieties break through the narrative.
The merging of imperial detection and imperial adventure is a product of an underlying
anxiety about English identity at a time when the British Empire and the sustained idea
of the empire is under threat of disintegration.
At all times Wimsey and Dalgliesh are policing the borders of England, literally
and metaphorically. Laura Otis has argued that another “imperial detective”, Sherlock
Holmes, “defends the heart of his Empire against the germs that must inevitably reach it
from the foreign lands it seeks to control. Imperialism, the product of European
aggression, had rendered Europe porous” (32). Otis claims that because of the
expansionist nature of European empires, they were “vulnerable to the new germs,
mates and ideas that their soldiers would bring home with them. The Empires needed
immune systems” (32). Both Wimsey and Dalgliesh perform a similar function to
Holmes, in the detection and treatment of the “foreign body”. This is not limited to
those of foreign ancestry, but includes those whose alterity is caused by social or
criminal behaviour. The fear of invasion and disruption by foreign or aberrant entities
is repeatedly evoked in these narratives, and the “imperial detective” posited as the cure,
if only temporarily, of these infections.
In their role as the shield against invasions of alterity both Wimsey and Dalgliesh
slide into the role of adventure hero. They cast aside measured thought for muscular
might and often encounter physical danger. Concomitant with this role are the imperial
practices of surveying, measuring, cataloguing and mapping. The detectives’
adventures take place within and upon England’s shores. The Wimsey and Dalgliesh
narratives can be read therefore as a mapping of imperial practices and ideologies, not
on the margins of empire, but upon the margins of England itself. I read this process as
a response to the failure of colonialism abroad. Simon Gikandi in Maps of Englishness
asks whether “colonial culture, even in crisis, continues to replay tropes and ideologies
conceptualized in the high noon of colonialism?” (189). My response is to suggest that
the narrative of imperial adventure is one of these acts of “replay” and as that empire
becomes more distant, the urgency of this reinscribing is increased.
Caroline Reitz, in Detecting the Nation, calls for a reading of the origins of
detective fiction as a response to and a part of the imperial project. She suggests that in
the nineteenth century, the figure of the detective and the imperial explorer were
conflated. This occurs vividly, she states, in the character of Murthwaite the explorer,
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in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. Murthwaite “is so substantially similar to Cuff that
the knowing reader of detective fiction might raise an eyebrow at the fact that the two
never appear together in the text” (61). Reitz asserts that the detective was a necessary
invention in transforming the foreign concept of the police into a figure both acceptable
and familiar to the English public. The narratives in which this process occurred,
carried out by writers including Godwin, Mill, Kipling and Doyle, did no less “than
reimagine English identity in an age of Empire” (Reitz 78). My argument proceeds
from this point. The “imperial detective” was conceived during the age of empire and
following that empire’s fragmentation he becomes a part of the renegotiation of an
English identity. By reprising imperial roles in a post-imperial England he reimposes
upon the text the fundamentals of imperial Englishness, among them, fortitude, courage
and decency. It is a role that wavers between celebration and consolation. Central to
the character of Wimsey and Dalgliesh however, is the role of imperial adventure hero.

Imperial Adventure
Adventure fiction was an integral part of the imperial project. As Martin Green writes,
these stories “were, collectively, the story England told itself as it went to sleep at night;
and, in the form of its dreams, they charged England’s will with the energy to go out
into the world and explore, conquer, and rule” (3). Such adventure stories involved
Englishmen venturing beyond England and exploring or conquering new territory. The
English mandate to rule over an enormous Empire was manifested by the adventure
hero’s “splendid presumption that the world was theirs—and therefore England’s . . .”
(MacDonald 13). Within these adventure narratives masculinity was carefully codified.
According to Joseph A. Kestner, adventure fiction was responsible for “imprinting
codes of masculinity: rescue, heroism, survival, courage, duty, isolation, voyaging”
(Masculinities 1). These codes are manifested by Wimsey and Dalgliesh throughout
their detective endeavours, re-stamping imperial masculinity upon England itself.
A key element of such adventure stories was the exhibition of physical courage
and strength. Such displays reinforced the physical and genetic superiority of the
English race. Robert Dixon in Writing the Colonial Adventure argues that:
It was the task of the New Imperialism as an ideology and the adventure
novel as an ideological form to resolve contradictions in the lived
experience of imperialism, usually by inscribing the male reader in tales of
regenerative violence on the colonial frontier. (1)
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Dixon shows that the 1870s were a time of doubt and trepidation regarding the state of
the empire. The adventure heroes of imperial fiction therefore constantly prove their
version of masculinity through muscular strength and their apparent moral superiority
by remaining chaste, despite the temptations of “exotic women”. Their physical
encounters with strong, bellicose opponents reinforce the innate superiority of the
Englishman. As Robert MacDonald points out: “Doubts about Anglo-Saxon virility are
repudiated by these contests with the most martial of all the savage races” (211). Sir
Henry Curtis’s battle with the murderous Twala in King Solomon’s Mines is just such a
contest. At the end of their encounter, Curtis is wounded, but Twala lies dead (237).
Just as these late Victorian adventure narratives were written against a climate of
insecurity about English imperial identity, so too the Wimsey and Dalgliesh narratives
perform the reinscribing of masculinity at a time when that construct is a node of
national anxiety. Wimsey operates at a time, in the inter-war years, when the cataclysm
of the Great War had left men and their families shattered, physically and emotionally.
In the case of Dalgliesh, it is immigration and the social changes of the 1960s which
have altered England irrevocably. The constancy of the “imperial detective” can be
read an ameliorative figure for these troubling times.
Dixon cites “regenerative violence” as being key to adventure narratives. Both
Wimsey and Dalgliesh undergo physical travail several times in the course of their
investigations. During his first outing, in Whose Body?, Wimsey puts himself at the
mercy of the murderous doctor Julian Freke, who endeavours to kill him with a lethal
injection. He is shot at by the ineffectual socialist George Goyles in Clouds of Witness
and, in the same novel, falls into quicksand and is attacked by the surly Yorkshire
farmer Grimethorpe. Wimsey’s life is also threatened in Murder Must Advertise (but it
is Inspector Parker who actually takes the blow). He deliberately puts himself in danger
in Unnatural Death when he meets the mysterious Mrs Forrest alone, and narrowly
escapes death. Sayers’s short stories depict even greater acts of daring, especially in
“The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba” which I will examine later in this
chapter. Wimsey’s willingness to undergo physical harm and his insouciance are
qualities shared by Henry Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain and Horace Holly, as well
as John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, to name only three imperial heroes. It is also shared
by Sherlock Holmes who tells Watson why it is necessary to get close to a dangerous
adversary: “I love to come to close grips with my man. I like to meet him eye to eye
and read for myself the stuff that he is made of” (“Illustrious Client” 19). Holmes, like
his imperial descendants, is more than willing to risk personal harm for the cause which
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he serves, and he establishes himself as a reader of other men, whom he oddly possesses
(“my man”).
Dalgliesh risks his life by following the murderer, George Gregory, into the sea at
the end of Death in Holy Orders. He does so in the knowledge that he is motivated,
“not out of compassion and humanity, but out of obstinacy and pride” (371). Gregory
has the audacity to commit murder at St Anselm’s College while Adam Dalgliesh is
visiting. Both men are rescued, but it is Dalgliesh who is dragged ashore unconscious,
retching seawater and oozing blood from a head wound. This is by no means the first
near fatal encounter for Dalgliesh. He narrowly escapes death when wrestling with the
crippled Sylvia Kedge on a rooftop above surging floodwaters in Unnatural Causes.
He is coshed in Shroud for a Nightingale and in The Black Tower he is shot and
narrowly avoids being flung over a cliff. Devices and Desires depicts Dalgliesh hurling
himself into a burning house in a failed effort to rescue the murderer, Alice Mair, and in
James’s penultimate novel, The Lighthouse, disease attacks him, and he almost dies of
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS. For a cerebral detective Dalgliesh
collects numerous battle scars, far more than most of his contemporaries. Colin
Dexter’s Inspector Morse and Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford, for example, rarely
suffer physical injuries. Despite P. D. James claiming that Dalgliesh is “not an action
hero, always dashing around” (Picker 2), he is, in fact, cast in that mould.
Wimsey and Dalgliesh repeatedly prove their worth as imperial adventure heroes
through their displays of physical courage. At times these adventures are carried out
with ebullience and gusto, especially in Wimsey’s case. Murder Must Advertise
displays Wimsey’s astonishing athletic ability as he dives into a fountain (64). He also
exercises supreme horsemanship when riding in Rotten Row (268). But it is the cricket
match at the end of the novel which displays Wimsey’s peculiarly English
characteristics of bravery, athleticism, and playing a straight bat. Cricket, as a number
of critics have observed, is a quintessentially English game, exported during the
nineteenth century to the colonies for the betterment of imperial subjects, and governed
by rules, written and unwritten, of fair play and individual excellence. 1 It is therefore
an appropriate sphere in which Wimsey can excel.

1
Simon Gikandi in Maps of Englishness, Ian Baucom in Out of Place, Mike Cronin and Richard Holt in
“The Imperial Game in Crisis: English Cricket and Decolonisation” and Patrick McDevitt in “May the
Best Man Win”: Sport, Masculinity, and Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, 1880-1935 also
use the game of cricket to demonstrate the ways in which the unfinished business of colonialism can be
seen to be played out on the sports field.
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Late in the novel, Wimsey takes to the cricket field, still in his alter ego as the
copy writer Death Bredon. Wimsey has hidden his true identity for almost the entire
novel in order to carry out an investigation at an advertising agency, but it is the cricket
match which unmasks him. Hit on the elbow, Bredon instantly becomes Wimsey of
Balliol and puts on a stunning display of batting. The elderly Mr Brotherhood, a
lifetime watcher of cricket, recognises Wimsey through his “late cut which is
exceedingly characteristic” (260), and the game is afoot. Fluent batting is so integral to
Wimsey’s character that it cannot be disguised. Similarly in W. E. Hornung’s “Nine
Points of the Law” it is the gentleman thief Raffles, who is recognised by a long-time
watcher of cricket. “I know your bowling,’ he said reflectively . . . and I’ve seen you
bowl again and again—yes, and take the best wickets in England on a plumb pitch”
(57). Raffles, the gentleman thief, however is a wily bowler rather than an elegant
batsman. Raffles turns the ball, but Wimsey plays it straight. Wimsey’s cricketing
exploits reinforce his Englishness and his “straightness” simultaneously.
Wimsey’s high spirited athletic displays are not the only mode of adventure he
experiences. Like his literary successor Adam Dalgliesh, he is part of adventure
narratives which often lapse into the uncertain gloom of the Gothic, and specifically into
the mode of imperial Gothic. Patrick Brantlinger coined this term in his work Rule of
Darkness and argues that the concept applies to much late nineteenth century adventure
writing. He outlines the three principal themes as:
. . . individual regression, or going native; an invasion of civilization by the
forces of barbarism and demonism; and the diminution of opportunities for
adventure and heroism in the modern world. (230)

Brantlinger’s study covers the period of 1830-1914. My project, however, seeks to

extend this timeframe to include the work of both Sayers, in the between-the-wars
period, and James up to and including the twenty-first century.
Crucial to Brantlinger’s idea of the imperial gothic is the elegiac tone in which it
mourns “the loss of adventure, heroism, true nobility” (42). Adventure is no longer
possible in an atrophying empire and the theatre in which heroic deeds can be
performed is almost closed. Adventures undertaken in the mode of imperial gothic are
therefore self-conscious, and often overshadowed by a foreboding of failure, which
presents a paradox for detective fiction. A detective, in theory, embodies the opposite
of the Gothic, with his predisposition to observe, measure and explain. In doing so he
exposes the mysterious to the epiphanic light of rationality and reason. John Watson
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describes his friend Sherlock Holmes, as the “perfect reasoning and observing machine”
(“Scandal in Bohemia” 1), setting the template for the detective who operates in the
realm of fact and logic. Yet the equally cerebral Wimsey and Dalgliesh are subject to
feelings of unease, at times bordering on superstition, especially when they find
themselves in unfamiliar terrain.
Dalgliesh is particularly prone to attacks of self-doubt and an almost visceral fear
of failure. Dennis Porter has noted that “Failure of one kind or another” haunts a
variety of characters in James’s fiction (“Detection and Ethics” 13). It is Dalgliesh, the
series detective however, upon whom failure most heavily weighs. In the second
Dalgliesh novel, A Mind to Murder, he is “irked by a foreboding of tragedy and failure”
(179) and later, “visited by the chilling presentiment of disaster” (192), reviewing a case
as if it had already failed. The Black Tower finds Dalgliesh suffering from a “nagging
sense of failure” (497). At the end of Death in Holy Orders the rational Dalgliesh feels
an overwhelming need to arrest the murderer himself to “in some way assuage the
defeat of his last case” (368). In each instance, it is the details surrounding the case
which act as the trigger for Dalgliesh’s feelings of self-disgust. In A Mind to Murder it
is the pathetic Priddy family about whom Dalgliesh vents his feelings of frustration
(193). Tellingly, in The Black Tower, his failure to help Father Baddeley causes an
outbreak of self-loathing. The nuclear family and the Church of England, both
described as being threatened in these instances, are the underlying reason for
Dalgliesh’s sense of inadequacy.
Wimsey suffers less from a fear of failure than from doubts about the efficacy of
his “hobby”. As an amateur detective he is called upon at times to justify his work. In
Clouds of Witness his own brother accuses him of embarrassing the Wimsey name
through his detective exploits. At the time, Gerald, Duke of Denver is in prison
awaiting trial for murder but still finds the energy to castigate his younger brother: “I
know you like playin’ at detectives, but I do think you might draw the line somewhere.”
Wimsey responds by arguing that he is doing “valuable work” (175) but his brother’s
charge of “playin’ at detectives” haunts Wimsey throughout the series. The adulation
accorded to the nineteenth-century imperial explorer is not always available to Wimsey
in his domestic role and, like Dalgliesh, he is denied the constitutional self-belief of
Richard Hannay or Allan Quatermain. The imperial adventures of Wimsey and
Dalgliesh, whether in the Gothic mode or not, are often attended by an air of self-
consciousness and self-doubt. The mode of imperial Gothic in the work of Sayers and
James reflects concern about the state of the English nation, a state weakened by the
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shrivelling of its once vast empire and further fractured, as I shall demonstrate, by class
fluidity, immigration and a thinning out of English values.
Barbarism is one of the key elements of Brantlinger’s definition of “imperial
Gothic”. In the Wimsey and Dalgliesh stories, barbarism can be read as the fear of
England being altered by foreigners. The Oxford English Dictionary Online, in giving
the etymology of the word barbarism, records its Greek meaning as “foreign mode of
speech” and notes that, “The extension from language to social condition (= F.
barbarie, L. barbaria, -ies) is exclusively English.” The necessity of England
remaining an exclusively English domain is a recurrent concern in these narratives of
imperial detection, manifesting at times as annoyance, and others as intense paranoia.
In Have His Carcase the jury foreman demands that “police regulations about
foreigners did ought to be tightened up . . .” (279). The bumbling Inspector in
Unnatural Death is horrified at the thought of a black man kidnapping a white girl, an
idea that proves completely fallacious (231). Wimsey never expresses such sentiments,
but they emanate from the mouths of minor characters, a dull refrain in the background
of the text. Dalgliesh too does not directly comment on immigration or
multiculturalism but, as I have stated in Chapter One, the narratives evince a strong
distaste for this social phenomenon.
The Wimsey and Dalgliesh narratives also betray unease about English society
fracturing into a classless fluidity in which traditional hegemony is replaced by a form
of socialism. In Sayers’s second novel, Clouds of Witness, the socialist organiser
George Goyles is portrayed as “foolish and cowardly” (161), but his links with the
Soviet Club signal an awareness of the movement for social change. In the inter-war
years social unrest was impelled by massive unemployment, which stood at two million
in 1921 and rose to 3 million by 1932 (Clapson 21). The General Strike of 1926, the
year in which Unnatural Death was published, was a result of these economic
circumstances. In the later Wimsey novels Annie, the vengeful college “scout” in
Gaudy Night, and the mendacious Frank Crutchley in Busman’s Honeymoon defy or
ignore class barriers, and create havoc in their own communities. Both are guilty of
criminal acts.
In James’s work anxiety about societal change is reiterated through a depiction of
the weakening of particular English institutions: most visibly the Church of England, as
discussed in my introductory chapter, and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
The bitterness of Clive Stannard in Death in Holy Orders is caused, Piers Tarrant
supposes, by his being offered a “lectureship at an ex-polytechnic university instead of
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Oxbridge” (237). Dan Padgett, the murderer in The Lighthouse, has been offered a
place at one of the “new universities” (209), an institution seemingly unconcerned about
his poor A-levels (227). Conversely, any character of significance has not only been to
Oxford or Cambridge, but almost always has achieved a “First”. Dalgliesh’s
subordinates, Piers Tarrant and Francis Benton-Smith hold these qualifications, and
although the academic credentials of Dalgliesh are not revealed, one can assume they
too are first class. The reiteration of such motifs reinforces a concern in the narratives of
the weakening of institutions which, in James’s eyes, underpin English society.

Dark Places
Unease about social conditions is reflected in the Gothic darkness manifested in the
adventurous narratives of the “imperial detectives”. Dorothy Sayers’s 1934 novel The
Nine Tailors carries many of the motifs of an imperial adventure. It begins in a
celebratory fashion, but soon lapses into the mode of imperial Gothic. The novel opens
with Wimsey arriving, by accident, in an unfamiliar, isolated village in the middle of a
snowstorm. It is New Year’s Eve. His arrival is greeted as providential by the local
rector, the Reverend Theodore Venables, when he discovers that Wimsey is an
accomplished bellringer. Wimsey’s presence enables an historic ritual of bell ringing to
go ahead. Wimsey arrives as an explorer (he is carrying a map and torch), is welcomed
into the community and joins in their campanological ritual, which is a night long peal
of the church bells. Having taken part in this stupendous feat, Wimsey is fêted by the
community, and leaves in triumph.
The first part of the narrative follows the pattern of the typical adventure story and
is a tale of accident and discovery. Upon leaving the village however, Wimsey signals
the impending descent into the Gothic when he surveys the surrounding fenland.
Wimsey, a native of East Anglia, knows how bleak the area becomes when flooded and
describes it, to his manservant Bunter as, “desolate” and “lonely” (53). He explains to
Bunter that the fenland drainage is piecemeal, and therefore the ground is unstable, a
signalling of the Gothic anxieties which lie beneath the village society. Later on in the
narrative Wimsey registers Lincolnshire, with its complicated system of dykes and
ditches, as a highly symbolic landscape:
‘It’s like Looking-Glass Country. Takes all the running we can do to stay in
the same place.’
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The Superintendent glanced about him. Flat as a chess board, and squared
like a chess-board with intersecting dyke and hedge, the fen went flashing
past them. (186)

This description of the countryside is explicitly linked to Lewis Carroll’s Through the
Looking Glass, in which Alice sees the landscape as “marked out just like a large chess-
board” (207). Wimsey paraphrases the Red Queen, implying that he, like Alice, is in an
“other” place. Throughout the novel, the dank, low-lying landscape is presented as
portentous, with captured water waiting to break free of the dykes and canals in which it
is contained. In The Nine Tailors, as Dennis Porter has observed, “The element of the
marvellous inherited from gothic and mystery story is situated in an external nature
evoked to suggest the vulnerability not only of human life but also of benevolent and
enlightened culture” (Pursuit of Crime 194). While I discuss the landscape of the fens
in more detail further on in this chapter, I note here that Wimsey, as the acme of that
culture, is made susceptible to these elemental forces. Wimsey’s reading of the
landscape as mutable and potentially deadly signals his limitations against such ancient
and powerful forces, as the narrative goes on to demonstrate.
The second, and noticeably Gothic, part of Wimsey’s adventure begins when he
returns to the village, having been summoned by the wise and thoroughly decent Mr
Venables. A headless handless corpse has been found in the grave of Lady Thorpe, the
squire’s late wife. Not only a mysterious corpse, but also the combination of isolation,
insularity and superstition mark out the imperial Gothic mode of this adventure tale.
The isolation of the village of Fenchurch St Paul is most strongly manifested in the
character of Potty Peake, a young man with a sad history and an obsession with
hanging. The local policeman, Superintendent Blundell, describes Potty as “the village
idiot” (182). Potty has been fixated upon ropes and nooses since he found his mother
hanging in the cowshed at a young age. Potty Peake embodies the fear of the
degeneration of the English race, current in the 1930s.
Sayers’s reference to the eugenics movement in her 1935 novel Gaudy Night
(30) reflects her familiarity with this debate, one which A. N. Wilson notes was largely
discredited in the 1940s due to the “enthusiasm [shown] by the German government”
(268). The presence of Peake within the Gothic surrounds of the fens reinforces the
idea of his occupying a liminal role, the blurred line between English civilization and
the threat of degeneration. The final volume of Sherlock Holmes stories, The Case-
Book of Sherlock Holmes published in 1925, too is notable for the tales of atavism, in
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“The Creeping Man”, and foreign disease in “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier”.
Both these tales evoke the fear of the grotesque caused by foreign contagions, but this is
contained by Holmes’s scientific explanation of the seemingly baffling occurrences in
both these stories. However, in Wimsey’s case, the threat of degeneration, in the form
of Potty Peake, comes, not from a foreign source, but from within the village society.
Once raised, it remains a concern in the text and one which Wimsey cannot entirely
assuage through his detecting work.
Looming over the entire narrative, and the village itself, is the magnificent
church of Fenchurch St Paul. Housed within the church belfry are the bells, each with
its own name and legend. The local inhabitants repeat the stories about the bells,
positing them as superstitious, and insular. The men who care for the bells, the retired
sexton Hezekiah Lavender and his successor Jack Godfrey, hold the metal instruments
in awe. Godfrey recounts the story of “Batty Thomas” killing a soldier raiding the
belfry during the Civil War (64). The aged Hezekiah Lavender advises an embarrassed
Wimsey, “Yew ain’t no call to be afeared o’ the bells if so be as yew follows
righteousness” (234). Tailor Paul is the signal bell, and Hezekiah is of the belief that
this bell in particular can exact its vengeance on the un-righteous.
Significantly, it is not just the local people but also the analytical Wimsey and
the educated rector Theodore Venables who are in thrall of the bells. Even the hardened
London thief Nobby Cranton freely admits to being overwhelmed by the bell chamber
when he says, “You’ll think I’m loony, but I tell you that bell was alive” (245). The
phlegmatic Parker dismisses Cranton’s statement, but Wimsey declares “Bells are like
cats and mirrors—they’re always queer, and it doesn’t do to think too much about
them” (245). In this statement Wimsey acknowledges the presence of the supernatural,
a force beyond logic or reason and one which is antithetical to his detective mission.
The strength of this supernatural element is increased when, at the end of the narrative,
it is revealed that the bells are the central clue to the murder mystery. The death of the
irredeemable Jeff Deacon, a man who committed multiple transgressions against the
village community of Fenchurch St Paul, was caused by the bells. Deacon is guilty of
many crimes, including murder. However, it is his transgression as a servant by stealing
from his employer’s house, and ruining the Thorpe family in the process, that is of most
significance in the text. These metal instruments, described throughout the novel as
being agents of righteousness, ending the life of such a criminal, is of profound
significance in the text.
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Deacon’s death, fitting as it is in the moral schema of the text, almost foils
Wimsey’s detective abilities. Wimsey’s venture to the top of the church tower, as the
bells begin to ring, almost destroys him:
Staggering, feeling as though his bones were turned to water, and with
blood running from his nose and ears, he fell, rather than stepped, out upon
the windy roof. As he flung the door to behind him, the demoniac clamour
sank back into the pit, to rise again, transmuted to harmony, through the
louvres of the belfry windows. (294)

Wimsey crawls from the bell chamber, and closes the door on the cacophony of the
bells, and upon his most deep seated fears. Wimsey, through the strident clamour of the
bells, experiences the Gothic sublime, where terror and awe overcome all other feeling.
The sublime, according to Fred Botting, exposes the rational mind to an excess which it
cannot process. He further states that: “This excess, which confronted the individual
subject with the thought of its own extinction, derived from emotions which [Edmund]
Burke argued, pertained to self-preservation and produced a frisson of delight and
horror, tranquillity and terror” (26). Wimsey experiences these emotions in turn, horror
at the clamour of the bells, terror at this near death experience and finally tranquillity
and delight as he escapes the belfry. In this instance Wimsey’s ratiocinative self is
overwhelmed by the primitive experience of fear, and his identity as a detective is
threatened. During the experience he realises that he was inadvertently involved in the
death of Deacon, in his role as a bell ringer, further fracturing his identity. It is not
detection, but religion which closes the narrative. The educated, deeply Christian rector
Mr Venables provides an answer, seemingly endorsed by the text, to Deacon’s death
when he says, “Perhaps God speaks through those mouths of inarticulate metal” (298).
He suggests that the power of God provides a form of justice which supersedes all
others, including that of the “imperial detective”.
The power of God has considerably abated by the time Adam Dalgliesh embarks
upon his adventure, some forty years later, in the 1975 novel The Black Tower. The
self-consciously Gothic referentiality of the novel is evident on the contents page, where
chapters entitled “The Dreadful Shore” and “A Stranger for the Night” provide a
palpable signal to the reader that they are entering Gothic terrain. Dalgliesh, like
Wimsey, is visiting an unknown location: this time in Dorset. Like Wimsey, he is
summoned by an elderly priest. The unworldly Father Baddeley, known to Dalgliesh
from childhood, sends Dalgliesh a letter requesting his assistance and “professional
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advice” (297). Father Baddeley also encloses a map of Toynton Grange. The map
reminds Dalgliesh of a seventeenth century chart with its hand drawn lines and
imprecise illustration. Adding to these portents of adventure at the beginning of his
journey to Toynton Grange is the fact that Dalgliesh is on the verge of resigning from
his profession as a policeman, a momentous decision. He is metaphorically leaving
behind his old life as he begins the journey to Dorset. The reader is furnished with a
Gothic presage when Dalgliesh arrives at the outskirts of Toynton Grange: “He sensed
something strange and almost sinister in its emptiness and loneliness which even the
mellow afternoon sunlight couldn’t dispel” (303).
The single feature included on Father Baddeley’s map, “the black tower” (298)
stands alone on the jagged Dorset coast line, a folly designed by the original owner of
Toynton Grange, and the site of his bizarre suicide. The original owner of the house,
Wilfred Anstey, secretly walled himself in the tower to await the Second Coming.
When found, months later, his hands were shredded from his ineffectual efforts to
escape his self-made tomb. This legend, along with the looming manor house, the
monks’ habits worn by the staff of the Grange and the clamouring sea, place Dalgliesh
in an undeniably Gothic landscape. Weakened by serious illness and unprepared for a
murder investigation Dalgliesh is uncharacteristically vulnerable. His entrance to this
unknown community therefore carries with it the tang of Catherine Morland in Jane
Austen’s Northanger Abbey or Emily St Aubert in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of
Udolpho. What Dalgliesh discovers at Toynton Grange more than fulfils his initial
disquiet.
Described in Father Baddeley’s letter as “a private home for the young disabled”
(297) Toynton Grange is an inversion of what it purports to be. The head of the
institution, Wilfred Anstey, is the great-grandson of the entombed zealot of the same
name. Anstey is the antithesis of Sayers’s wise and humble Reverend Theodore
Venables. Anstey’s identity is based on a lie, that of his self-declared “miracle healing”
experience. Having been diagnosed with a form of disseminated (now known as
multiple) sclerosis, Anstey is freed of all symptoms after being sluiced in the waters at
Lourdes. Declaring his cure to be divine, Anstey chooses not to return to the hospital
for a scientific confirmation of his condition. Had he done so he would have discovered
that his condition was in fact not multiple sclerosis but “hysterical paralysis” (549).
Dalgliesh’s first impression of Anstey is telling. He views him as “a bit-player acting
with practised conviction the part of an ascetic bishop” (332). Anstey, who chooses to
dress in a monk’s habit, is neither ordained nor the recipient of a miracle of healing.
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Rather he is an ineffectual and indecisive administrator of a failing enterprise housed in

an unsuitable building. When Dalgliesh realises his old friend Father Baddeley was a
victim of murder, rather than natural causes, the suggestions of evil within the text are
realised in full.
Toynton Grange is a mutated version of the country house, an icon of English
culture which represents the security, hierarchy and stability of Anglo Saxon culture.
The manor house, the cultural object which represents Englishness at its apotheosis, has
shrivelled to an uncanny double of itself. The house is consistently described in
negative terms. It is an “aberration”. “The owner had been unlucky in his architect”
and the one round window is, “a sinister Cyclops eye glinting in the sun” (303). The
gloomy mansion in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” also features
“vacant eye-like windows” and fills the narrator with “a sense of insufferable gloom”
(273). The “shadowy fancies” (274) which afflict Poe’s narrator, and the horror he
eventually confronts, provide a template for Dalgliesh’s experiences in The Black
Tower. Toynton Grange, like the House of Usher, has an effect of enervating
depression upon its visitor, in this case Dalgliesh:
It was well, he thought, in a mood of self-disgust, that he was giving up his
job if pity and anger could so destroy his detachment. Or was it Toynton
Grange? This place, he thought, is getting on my nerves. (487)

Dalgliesh, in particular, as an officer of the Crown is the embodiment of logic, order and
reason. However, Dalgliesh’s response to his surrounds is intuitive rather than rational.
The Gothic surrounds of Toynton Grange, like those of Fenchurch St Paul for Wimsey,
render the “imperial detective” self-doubting and at great personal risk, as the narrative
progresses.
Throughout the narratives the inhabitants of the community are figured as strange
or “other”. The inmates are sufferers of multiple sclerosis in varying stages of the
disease. Dalgliesh, who throughout the series is described as “handsome” (Cover her
Face 59; Holy Orders 303) is clearly distinguished from those he meets. This is made
explicit when he encounters the character of Philby, the handyman. Dalgliesh’s
response to him, unusually, is of physical revulsion as he thinks he “had, in fact, seldom
encountered a man whose physical appearance so repelled him” (387). Philby is judged
by the same standards which are applied to any subject peoples in colonial texts; that of
mental and physical inferiority. The handyman is coded as a savage because of his
difference to the colonising detective. Philby’s clothes are sweaty and dirty and his
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shorts “almost indecent” (388) as opposed to the refined, and appropriately dressed
Dalgliesh. At the end of the novel, the “Caliban” figure (370) of Philby literally
becomes the white man’s burden when Dalgliesh has to wheel his corpse to the edge of
a cliff, under the command of the ruthless Julius Court.
Significantly, it is the monk’s garb, worn by male employees at the Grange, that
alters the unfortunate Philby’s appearance from “dirty and disreputable” to “positively
sinister” (388). Dalgliesh’s reaction to the figure of the monk links this detective novel
to eighteenth-century Gothic romance, most notably to Matthew Lewis’s The Monk,
first published in 1796. The concept of a holy man turned evil is a trope of Gothic
romance derived, it has been argued, from anti-Roman Catholic sentiment, itself an
historical consequence of Britain’s antipathy towards France, as I have noted in Chapter
One. Ann Radcliffe’s novels, The Italian (1797) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794),
“contain criminal characters who seek protection from their crimes under the robes of
various Catholic orders” (Wright 76). However, the monk’s habit is also a conveniently
anonymous garment, and James uses this as a central plot device in The Black Tower
and later in Death in Holy Orders. At Toynton Grange, the monastic garment also
serves to accentuate the physical and moral shortcomings of the wearer, and of the
institution they serve.

(Dis) Orientations
The presentiments of evil felt by Dalgliesh at the very beginning of the narrative are
fully realised in the character of Julius Court. He is an attractive young man, but
Dalgliesh discerns, “a trace of self-indulgence in the perceptible pouches under the wary
eyes and the slight petulance of the small mouth set in a heavy chin” (316). Dalgliesh’s
initial impression is borne out as Court is later identified as a murderer and a drug
smuggler. Court’s criminal activities chart his degeneration from his role as a diplomat,
a protector of England’s borders, to a blatant violator of national boundaries. Court uses
the community’s occasional pilgrimages to Lourdes as a method of importing heroin
into England. The money from this enterprise allows him to live in a manner to which
he feels himself entitled. Crucially, Court is responsible for bringing what we are asked
to read as the contamination of the Orient into England’s ordered spaces. He is a carrier
of imperial disease. James’s “Orientalism”, to use Said’s famous term, is a disturbing
element in the narrative.
A way of reading this outbreak of “Orientalism” is suggested by Neil McCaw. In
his discussion of another classical English detective novel, he has this to say:
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These Oriental moments in an otherwise relatively flat and unremarkable

cultural landscape are significant because of the light they throw on the
processes of identity formation and control . . . For although these moments
do not offer the reader explicit resistance to the dominant Englishness of the
natives of the village, they pose questions that are not satisfactorily
resolved. (27) (author’s emphasis)

McCaw is writing about Caroline Graham’s 1987 novel The Killings at Badger’s Drift.
Like Graham’s English village, James’s community at Toynton Grange, though odd in
many respects, is homogenous in terms of its “cultural landscape”. Framing Court in
terms of the “other” therefore raises questions of the potential fluidity or indeed
instability of an English identity. Court’s alterity is also positioned against Dalgliesh’s
unquestioned Englishness, and as the narrative unfolds, they are literally pitted against
one another.
Court transgresses against English law when he commits murder but more
significantly he transgresses the nation’s boundaries through importing heroin, a drug
which can be read as a marker for social decay in England. The friable coast line cannot
prevent drugs from entering the country, reinforcing England’s vulnerability. Heroin
causes crime, disease and death among its users, and its trafficking creates enormous
wealth for criminal organisations. It is simultaneously a denotation of modern
corruption, as well as a powerful marker of the stereotyped indulgence and danger of
the Orient. As he unravels Julius Court’s illegal enterprise, Dalgliesh mentally charts
the journey of the drug:
The fields of opium poppies on the high Anatolian plateau, the bulging pods
oozing their milky sap. The secret rendering down of the raw opium into
base morphine even before it left the hills. The long journey by mule train,
rail, road or air towards Marseilles, one of the main distribution ports of the
world. (542)

Dalgliesh knows how heroin importation works, but also knows he cannot stop it.
Despite his feelings of frustration, the text implies, it is his abhorrence of Julius Court
which motivates Dalgliesh to continue his police work. Yet, even as he makes his
decision to continue as a policeman, the decision is not triumphal, but a “kind of defeat”
(548). As an “imperial detective”, Dalgliesh acknowledges that the borders which once
defined England’s strength now delineate its diminished status as an island nation
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unable to repel foreign invasions. By implication, the character of Court suggests that
the borders separating Englishness from “otherness” may be similarly weakened.
The sub-narrative about heroin importation is particularly telling. The British
Empire’s history as a merchant and trader of opium is well documented. As Niall
Ferguson puts it: “It is indeed one of the richer ironies of the Victorian value-system
that the same navy that was deployed to abolish the slave trade was also active in
expanding the narcotics trade” (166). Dalgliesh as the “imperial detective” is faced with
the empire returning home, in this case in the packets of white powder smuggled in the
wheelchairs of the Toynton Grange pilgrims. This scenario meshes together multiple
fears; of foreign contagions, the Catholic “other” and the insecurity of England’s
borders. It is Julius Court, the embodiment of these fears, who threatens the life of
Adam Dalgliesh, in a struggle to the death.
At the climax of the novel Dalgliesh and Court fight, literally on the edge of
England, when Court attempts to murder Dalgliesh. Julius Court with his sybaritic,
ruthless and devious ways is anathema to the “imperial detective”. He is figured as
other in a disturbingly similar way to Sax Rohmer’s arch villain Dr Fu Manchu, whose
depravity is amplified by the glowing manliness of the Englishman, Nayland Smith:
It was a breath of the East—that stretched out a yellow hand to the West. It
was symbolic of the subtle, intangible power manifested in Dr. Fu-Manchu,
as Nayland Smith—lean agile, bronzed with the suns of Burma, was
symbolic of the clean British efficiency which sought to combat the
insidious enemy. (138)

The histrionic hyperbole of Rohmer’s narrator in 1915 positions the East as antithetical
to Britain and is the dominant (indeed the only) theme of Rohmer’s book. The echo of
this sentiment, in the “orientalising” of Julius Court, suggests a deep textual anxiety in
The Black Tower, focussed upon the instability of English identity.
Such concerns about identity were often expressed in imperial adventure fiction.
As Douglas Kerr asserts, the risks faced by an Englishman embracing Eastern culture
ranged from, “inefficiency and torpor to degeneracy, madness, savagery and death”
(Eastern Figures 131). Reinvoking such imperial tropes, in a novel written in 1975, I
suggest, indicates a recurrent concern with English identity in the Dalgliesh series.
Dalgliesh grapples, quite literally, with the perceived threat to England’s borders before
the Machiavellian Julius Court topples over the cliff’s edge. Julius Court suffers the
fate prescribed by Kerr; he is a degenerate man who suffers a horrible death. By
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contrast, the end of the novel shows Dalgliesh, having exacted justice for his old friend
Father Baddeley, returning to the metropolis with his health recovered, the case solved
and his vocation as a policeman reconfirmed. However, using McCaw’s argument, the
questions raised by Court’s seeming hybridity, are not entirely allayed by his death. The
vulnerability of an English identity is an ongoing concern throughout James’s work.
Dorothy Sayers’s 1930 novel, Strong Poison proffers another more overt example
of Orientalism, this time within the confines of respectable middle-class London.2 In
this case it is not an English geographic border which is violated, but rather one of
English identity. The investigation leads Lord Peter Wimsey to encounter a murderer
whose choice of drug is arsenic rather than heroin. Norman Urquhart, a seemingly
upright London lawyer and cousin of the deceased Philip Boyes, has an appearance
immediately marking him as “other”, and particularly as Oriental. Upon first meeting
him Wimsey notices that he has “thick, smooth, dark hair”. He also notices his skin
which is:
. . . pale and curiously clear, except for a number of little freckles, like
sunspots, rather unexpected at that time of the year, and in a man whose
appearance conveyed no other suggestion of an outdoor life. The eyes, dark
and shrewd, looked a little tired, and were bistred about the orbits, as though
anxiety were not unknown to them. (100)

Adhering to the conventions of the Detection Club, of which she was an active member,
Sayers provides the reader with the central clue to the mystery.3 Urquhart’s appearance
is due to his regular ingestion of arsenic. It takes Wimsey some time to realise this,
unlike Harriet Vane’s friend Sylvia Marriott who declares early in the novel, quite
correctly, that she thinks the lawyer is guilty because he is, “too sleek to be true” (82).
Sylvia Marriott is right, and Urquhart’s appearance is a corporeal expression of his
guilt, as the arsenic causes his hair to shine. Sayers may have been influenced in this
regard by her interest in the medical aspect of Wilkie Collins’s stories. She was
particularly interested in Poor Miss Finch which, “turns on the case of a young man
afflicted with fits, who in order to cure them is obliged to take nitrate of silver, which

2
In employing the term “Orientalism” I am drawing on the seminal work by Edward Said, who defined
this discourse and its history in his 1978 study Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Said
describes Orientalism as the “corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making
statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short
Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient” (2-3).
3
The “Detection Club Oath” required the member to swear, among other things, “never to conceal a vital
clue from the reader” (“Detection Club Oath” 198).
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turns him blue all over” (“To Eustace Barton” 1: 277). Sayers affects her own literary
transformation of Urquhart from Occidental to Oriental as an integral element of the
plot.
Through the ingestion of the poison Urquhart has made possible the almost
perfect crime: he provides himself with an unbreakable alibi by sharing an arsenic laced
meal with Philip Boyes. Boyes dies from arsenic consumption, against which Urquhart,
through his regular intake of the poison, has inoculated himself. However, as a side
effect, his body betrays him. Wimsey’s ability to read strangeness, which is encoded as
foreign, in a corporeal sense aligns him with Sherlock Holmes. Ronald R. Thomas, in
his discussion of Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, states that,
“Holmes solves the case by recognizing the culprit’s foreignness in the traces of his
criminal body left at the scene of the crime . . .” (220). In this case Wimsey discerns the
lawyer’s criminality by reading his external appearance, rather than what he leaves at
the crime scene. Once again, however, it is an example of a bodily manifestation of
aberrant behaviour.
It is another form of aberrant behaviour through which Wimsey finally ensnares
the lawyer, and the bait is Turkish delight. Wimsey invites Urquhart to his flat and
offers him refreshment. This consists of Turkish coffee, “that curiously syrupy brew, so
offensive to the average Occidental” (214). Not only does Urquhart delight in Eastern
beverages he positively adores exotic sweets. He is offered:
. . . a box of that equally nauseating mess called Turkish delight which not
only gluts the palate and glues the teeth, but also smothers the consumer in a
floury cloud of white sugar. Mr Urquhart immediately plugged his mouth
with a large lump of it, murmuring indistinctly that it was the genuine
Eastern variety. Wimsey, with an austere smile, took a few sips of strong
black coffee without sugar or milk . . . (214)

The reader is left in little doubt as to who is the authentic Occidental. This superiority is
reinforced when Wimsey tells Urquhart the Turkish delight is covered in arsenic, and
were he not in the habit of ingesting the poison, he would certainly be very ill. Wimsey,
of course, has done no such thing, but Urquhart is foolish enough to believe he may
have. Urquhart feebly affects appropriate symptoms before declaring that he has been
“got by a vile, damnable trick” (221) and is duly taken into custody by the policeman,
Charles Parker. As in James’s The Black Tower, Wimsey’s Englishness resonates
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against the acquired alterity of the criminal. Simultaneously however, the solidity of an
English identity is questioned through the ease with which it can, apparently, be
transformed.
Norman Urquhart’s sticky end can be likened to that of Sheridan Le Fanu’s
character, the clergyman Mr Jennings in “Green Tea”. The transmogrification of a
westerner into an Oriental is expressed most horribly in this macabre tale when Mr
Jennings, the drinker of the Oriental beverage, begins to see a simian devil figure and so
begins his descent into madness, and finally suicide. Sayers was a great admirer of Le
Fanu, particularly his tales of horror. She describes him as “a writer of real literary
attainment, and gifted with a sombre power which has seldom been equalled in painting
the ghastly and the macabre . . .” (“Omnibus of Crime” 86). She sets Harriet Vane to
study Le Fanu’s work in Gaudy Night and in The Nine Tailors Wimsey and Bunter both
liken the cryptic document found in the belfry to Le Fanu’s novel Wylder’s Hand (184).
Sayers’s familiarity with his work can be seen as a possible influence upon the narrative
of Strong Poison, although without the attendant horror so integral to Le Fanu’s story.
The delineation of the Orient as a threat to English identity, evident in both stories, is
part of the discourse of English imperialism. Wimsey, in his role as an “imperial
detective” must therefore police the borders of Englishness, and identify and contain
such threats to the integrity of this identity.

A Map of Adventure
The Dalgliesh and Wimsey novels present a series of maps, not only in the literal sense
of charts which form part of the text, but also in the sense of an organisation of space.
The geography of England is carefully moulded in these texts to present a primacy of
imperial and historical elements, coded for adventure. Each of these loci holds
historical currency and their reiteration creates a map of Englishness, bordered by
imperial history. Moreover they create a space in which adventure is possible. The
importance of the map in imperial discourse is emphasised by Anne McClintock when
she states that :
Map-making became the servant of colonial plunder, for the knowledge
constituted by the map both preceded and legitimized the conquest of
territory. The map is a technology of knowledge that professes to capture
the truth about a place in pure, scientific form, operating under the guise of
scientific exactitude and promising to retrieve and reproduce nature exactly
as it is. (Imperial Leather 27- 28)
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If ownership was one of the driving forces behind colonial cartography, repossession is
the impetus in the narratives of imperial detection. As Richard Phillips adds, in
Mapping Men and Empire, “Cartographers and other map-makers, including adventure
story writers, charted areas of geographical knowledge and terra incognita and through
their maps they possessed real geography” (6-7). I suggest that these post-imperial
detective stories rechart the geography of England, in order to reclaim it and to inscribe
imperial ideals thereon.
At the centre of these maps is London, the home of Lord Peter Wimsey and Adam
Dalgliesh. It is also, in many respects, the birthplace of English detective fiction,
having provided the environment for Dickens’s Inspector Bucket and Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes. The detective’s ability to navigate a sprawling metropolis has its
genesis in the nineteenth century. As Martin Priestman points out, “the fictional
detective from Poe’s Dupin to Holmes and onwards seems tailor-made to calm anxieties
about just such urban anonymity” (51). The geography of London was mapped in
imperial terms during the nineteenth century as Alexandra Warwick explains:
As London stands for empire, much of the writing by philanthropists like
William Booth as well as by fantasists like Oscar Wilde figures the city in
terms of east and west, and the west of London exists in the same
philanthropic, exploratory but essentially voyeuristic and exploitative
relation to the east as Britain to its Empire. (81)

As Warwick notes, the division of the city into the compass points of East and West was
part of the imperial discourses of tourism, travel and sightseeing.
Asa Briggs in Victorian Cities makes the point that in the nineteenth century the
residents of London’s East and West Ends had almost no knowledge of each other
(325). Citizens of London’s well-heeled suburbs such as Belgravia did not visit the East
End, any more than the poor working and underclass of the eastern branch of the city
frequented the West End. Those who did travel to the East End did so as imperial
agents; for the purposes of discovery, adventure, education or good works. Anne
McClintock links this mapping of London with the imperial project. It was, she states,
the proximity to the Thames which made the East End “the conduit to empire—a
threshold space, lying exotic, yet within easy reach, on the cusp of industry and empire”
(Imperial Leather 120). The East End can be seen as a liminal space, on the border of
the empire. It also, as Peter Ackroyd notes, has become “an enduring aspect of London
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myth” because of the killings by “Jack the Ripper” (London 273). Ackroyd states that
the deprivation of the neighbourhood came to light because of the killings, and as he
puts it, “charity and social provision followed hard upon the heels of monstrous death”
(273). The concatenation of crime, detection and the East End has remained ever since.
London, and particularly the East End, therefore offers opportunities for adventure
but it also offers, above all, a hiding place as the omniscient narrator of Sayers’s
Unnatural Death points out:
To the person who has anything to conceal—to the person who wants to
lose his identity as one leaf among the leaves of a forest—to the person who
asks no more than to pass by and be forgotten, there is one name above
others which promises a haven of safety and oblivion. London. Where no
one knows his neighbour. Where shops do not know their customers. . . .
London, whose rather untidy and grubby bosom is the repository of so many
odd secrets. Discreet, incurious and all-enfolding London. (190)

Both Wimsey and Dalgliesh travel to the dark places in the city as an inevitable part of
their role as the “imperial detective”. John Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay declares
that, “London is always to me an undiscovered country” and that it “is like the tropical
bush—if you don’t exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will
break in” (Three Hostages 79-80). The class fear evident in this statement is far more
extreme than any expression of Wimsey or Dalgliesh, yet the shared anxiety of what
may lurk in London’s depths is never far away.4 The elderly Mrs Fenton in A Mind to
Murder, published in 1963, feels “alien” in London, a city she describes as “full of
freaks and foreigners” (186). Ian Rankin’s Scottish detective John Rebus says of the
criminal he is searching for in London: “He could be anywhere, but that was relatively
unimportant. What was more important was that he could be anyone, anyone at all in
this city of ten million faces, ten million secret lairs” (46) (author’s emphasis). Within
the dark anonymity of London, the opportunity for adventure, and the threat of aberrant
behaviour, still exists.
Such an adventure occurs in Strong Poison. In this novel Wimsey and his
“assistant” Miss Murchison travel to the East End in search of criminal knowledge, in
this case, lock picking. In order to gain the services of Bill Rumm, also known as
Blindfold Bill in his criminal days, Lord Peter Wimsey and Miss Murchison venture to

4
Margery Allingham’s 1952 novel The Tiger in the Smoke features a serial killer at work among the
swirling fog of a bleak post-war London.
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Whitechapel. Wimsey explains to Miss Murchison how he came to make the

acquaintance of Bill:
I found him on my premises one night and struck up a sort of alliance with
him. Took lessons from him and all that. He was a bit shy at first, but he
got converted by another friend of mine—it’s a long story—and the long
and the short of it was, he got hold of this locksmith business, and is doing
very well at it. (133)

Wimsey has the power, it seems, to convert the criminal to law-abiding citizen, and the
irreligious to the evangelical proselyte. Wimsey, during his journey to this infamous
part of the city, demonstrates his ability in harnessing assistance at every level of
society to his detective work. Wimsey is following in the footsteps of nineteenth-
century evangelists who ventured into the East End in order to “rescue” the inhabitants
from their life of depravity.
The middle-class Miss Murchison on the other hand, not endowed with
aristocratic urbanity, finds the whole experience rather exciting. As a member of the
middle class, Miss Murchison resides somewhere between the poles of East and West
London, rendering both extremes novel. Her adventure begins when she arrives at
Wimsey’s Piccadilly flat, the opulence of which astounds her. From this haven of
luxury and learning, she travels with Wimsey to Whitechapel, for another kind of
adventure altogether. After singing hymns (and eating trotters) with the gathered
faithful in Bill Rumm’s humble home, she is given instruction in lock picking and
handed a set of picklocks to take home. The picklocks are required to open a deed box
in the office of the urbane lawyer, Mr Urquhart, who I have discussed earlier.
Throughout Miss Murchison’s time in the East End she is variously described as
“hesitating” (129), “curious” (130), “astonished” (131), and leaves with “some
surprising items of knowledge in her mind” (133). Miss Murchison’s time in
Whitechapel is as an observer of the native inhabitants; travelling by taxi, and departing
with a souvenir, the picklocks. She has enjoyed the essential tourist experience, this
time in her own city.
Adam Dalgliesh’s visit to the Cortez Club in Soho during his investigations into
the death of Maurice Seton in Unnatural Causes is a similar foray into the “native
quarter” of London. The Cortez Club is a shady establishment, set in the even shadier
Soho of the mid-1960s. Dalgliesh finds himself depressed by the “canyoned streets”,
“the grubby basement stairs” and “the silhouettes of bored girls against the upstairs
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blinds” (139) and ponders that the surfeit of sex might “drive any man into a
monastery” (140). Dalgliesh recognises that Soho is a locus of sex and crime, and
distances himself from it. Like the nineteenth-century missionaries, he completes his
work in the “dark” city, and departs.
The Cortez Club itself is a microcosm of an “other” world. Not only does it house
a black man (one of the very few mentioned in any of the Dalgliesh novels) but also a
stereotypical crime boss L. J. Luker and his moll Lil, along with Sid, the “general
factotum” (42). 5 The descriptions of these characters are based on a clear taxonomy of
class and race. Luker’s central feature is his accent; despite looking like an underworld
king his voice reveals his origins, “the small town vicarage, the carefully fostered
gentility, the minor public school” (142). Class, it seems cannot be lived down. The
same motif applies to Sid Martelli, “sired by a Cypriot bartender on a mentally
subnormal skivvy” (143). In his case, class cannot be lived up either. Even Lil, who
affects a Russian heritage, cannot evade the incisive Dalgliesh who knows “perfectly
well that Lil had been bred no further east than the Whitechapel Road” (142). The
predictive and descriptive nature of taxonomy is an essential tool for the “imperial
detective” and in this case allows Dalgliesh to identify the residents of the Cortez Club,
and dismiss them from his inquiries.
The dark places of Soho and Whitechapel offer opportunities for adventure, and
so too does Hampstead Heath. Simon Schama cites Hampstead Heath as representing
the duality of arcadia, of both “bucolic leisure and a place of primitive panic” (519) in
its swathe of uncultivated land. The Heath also carries with it its own myths and
legends. These stories largely involve an underclass of people who camped on the
Heath and often took to robbery and nefarious practices in order to survive. Their
stories run parallel to those of the rich who erected enormous edifices such as Kenwood
House upon the Heath, and then did their best to keep at bay the riffraff outside their
gates (Schama 520-523). Hampstead Heath with its ponds, its concerts and its great
expanse of grass still provides succour to the urban Londoner, making these legends
resonate even more strongly. Both James and Sayers use the setting of Hampstead
Heath in a remarkably similar way; as a space for transgressive activity, which is
eventually brought under control by Wimsey and Dalgliesh.
Sayers and James continue the tradition of nineteenth-century detective and
sensation fiction when they venture to Hampstead. Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman

5
Septimus Luker is the name of the moneylender in The Moonstone who is robbed by the trio of Indians
who are searching for the precious gem.
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in White begins on Hampstead Heath, where Walter Hartright ponders his imminent
journey to Limmeridge House. In Dickens’s Oliver Twist Bill Sikes heads for the
anonymity of Hampstead Heath after his brutal murder of Nancy. But it is Sherlock
Holmes and the indefatigable Watson whose daring exploit on Hampstead Heath best
illustrates it as a location for adventure in “Charles Augustus Milverton”. While on the
Heath, Holmes and Watson are temporarily altered from thief takers to law breakers,
when Holmes burgles the house of the blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton.
Milverton is, in Holmes’s eyes, “the worst man in London” (184), and the burglary is
justified, in the text, as a heroic and chivalric act. The adventure, for Holmes and
Watson, consists of housebreaking, witnessing the murder of Milverton, running from
the scene and lying to the police. It is very much a tale of action, concluding with a
breathtaking chase “across the huge expanse of Hampstead Heath” (202). Holmes and
Watson leave aside their respect for the law when they enter the wilderness of the
Heath. The story concludes with them having returned to their familiar routine and
environs of Baker Street, in central London, denying all knowledge of the events at
Hampstead Heath.
Wimsey’s equally thrilling adventure on Hampstead Heath take place in a short
story entitled “The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba”. In a rather unlikely
tale Wimsey takes on the identity of Rogers, an ex-footman to the Duke of Denver, in
order to infiltrate a gang of thieves. (Perhaps even more unlikely is Wimsey’s living in
a small flat in Lambeth after successfully faking his own death). This sophisticated
gang refer to one another only by their numbers and wear masks when they meet. In a
suburban villa on the Heath, isolated from the rest of London, they carry out their
unsavoury meetings in privacy. The climax of the story sees Wimsey identified as a
traitor and left for dead in the villa. The ever reliable Parker arrives just in time to
rescue Wimsey and capture the thieves.6 Just as in the Holmes story, the location of
Hampstead Heath offers adventure, but also a suspension of the rules of the ordinary
and everyday. In effect, these narratives allow the detective to travel to a site of
adventure, as their imperial counterparts do, but without leaving the shores of England.
When the adventure is complete, they return to their own homes, and resume their
orderly existence.
The housekeeper, Tally Clutton, in James’s The Murder Room ponders the
Heath’s dramatic past:

6
Hampstead Heath’s isolation is also employed by Sayers in Unnatural Death when the murderous Mary
Whittaker lures a lawyer to sign a document, in a lonely house on the Heath.
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She imagined the Tudor washerwomen . . . the coaches and carts lumbering
up from the stews of the city at the time of the plague and the great fire to
take refuge in London’s high village, Dick Turpin waiting on his horse in
the shelter of the trees. (58)

In this novel, James uses the Heath as the location of a fictitious museum dedicated to
Britain in the inter-war years. Setting a monument to Britain’s past firmly in the middle
of a London geographic icon amplifies the significance of this location. In this case the
museum and surrounds are not only a murder site, but also the venue for a very select
group of sexual swingers. The members of the “96 Club”, organised by Caroline
Dupayne, meet in her flat within the museum for anonymous sex. Like Wimsey’s
criminal gang, they wear masks. The “96 Club” comes to light when one of their
members is murdered. While the narrative is carefully non-judgemental about the club
itself, it is clear that Dalgliesh would never be a part of sexual adventurousness of this
kind. The club can only function because of its anonymity and its private meeting
place; the flat on Hampstead Heath. Once again, a secret organisation carries out
transgressive behaviour in a location coded for adventure. Dalgliesh, the “imperial
detective”, is responsible for the disbanding of the “96 Club”, and therefore restoring
order and propriety to Hampstead Heath.

Uncertain Ground
While the city of London provides opportunity for adventure, many of Wimsey’s and
Dalgliesh’s most dangerous exploits take place beyond its environs. The unknown and
uncertain terrain outside of London is experienced by Wimsey in Clouds of Witness.
Written before The Nine Tailors, Clouds of Witness is Wimsey’s second adventure and
Sayers’s second novel, and takes place primarily in an isolated part of Yorkshire. As in
The Nine Tailors the landscape is potentially lethal and this time Wimsey is almost
engulfed by it. The predilection for venturing into uncertain territory is something
Wimsey and Adam Dalgliesh share with Sherlock Holmes. Catherine Wynne argues
that Sherlock Holmes “operates as a colonial agent re-imposing order on superstitious
and unstable topographies.” She is referring particularly to The Hound of the
Baskervilles and further states that: “Viscous landscapes, be they bogs, moors or
swamps, emerge in Doyle’s fictions as a response to a colonial landscape, Irish or
Scottish” (68). The fiction of Sayers and James offers many such paludal and
interstitial landscapes representing not only the porous borders of England, but also the
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worryingly fluid borders of identity based on class and ethnicity. The weakening of
such boundaries is a source of anxiety within the texts, as their failure signals a potential
degeneration of English society.
Wimsey’s first encounter with ground which is literally unstable is almost his last.
Wandering onto the Yorkshire moor with his manservant Bunter and, crucially, without
his compass, Wimsey stumbles into the quicksand of “Peter’s Pot”. Wimsey commits
the grave error of being unprepared. Not only does he not have a compass, having
chosen a plain walking stick instead of his regular one with compass and knife hidden
within, he has no landmarks, and no map. Wimsey literally loses himself on the moor
when the mist blots out landmarks and leaves both himself and Bunter bewildered.
Although in Yorkshire, the moor recalls Conan Doyle’s Dartmoor and the lethal
Grimpen Mire in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Just as Watson sees a pony taken
horribly by the Grimpen Mire (82), Wimsey and Bunter hear the scream of a drowning
horse. This hideous reminder of their First World War service occurs as the fog rolls in,
obscuring their vision and confusing the senses. The climax of this Gothic scene is
reached when Wimsey falls into a bog.
Wimsey is dislocated by the sudden onset of fog and the unknown ground. It
almost signals his end. (The same event, it must be noted occurs in The Black Tower
when Dalgliesh almost topples over the cliff edge when a sea mist suddenly rolls in
(498). Obscurity is a feature of gothic atmosphere, wreathing in shadows, mist or fog
the hideous object of terror to which the text continually refers, but does not describe.
As Edmund Burke states: “To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general
to be necessary” (qtd in Wright 40). Sayers, and indeed James, through the invocation
of Gothic tropes envelop their “imperial detectives” in Gothic clouds which amplify the
sense of unease within the text, but stop short of creating terror. Even Wimsey,
floundering in the mire, is soothed by Mervyn Bunter’s practical assistance which
supports him until the rough and ready locals arrive to drag him to safety. Peter
Ackroyd has noted that fog and mist are a repeated trope of English writing and return
the reader to “a primeval landscape, the landscape of origin, one which arouses a native
inspiration” (Albion 75). Sayers and James re-create a peculiarly English Gothic in their
misty sites of adventure.
Susan Rowland reads Wimsey’s role in the narrative as somewhere between
Emily Brontë’s Lockwood in Wuthering Heights and Conan Doyle’s Holmes in The
Hound of the Baskervilles. She asserts that “Wimsey himself (like Lockwood) is
subjected to rescue from the metonymic and Gothic violence of the moors” (126).
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Rowland’s argument reiterates the Gothic intertextuality of this novel, which is evident
in Grimethorpe’s likeness to Brontë’s Heathcliff, and his unwelcoming house to
“Wuthering Heights”. Her point also suggests the diminution of heroism reflected in
Wimsey being rescued from an invidious situation and left weak and helpless
afterwards. His adventure in the shifting ground of Yorkshire temporarily undermines
his heroic status which he later reclaims with a daring feat of air bound bravery.
The narrative of Clouds of Witness bears a marked similarity to the classic
adventure story in a number of ways. Wimsey’s exposure to personal danger is one of
these hallmarks, as is his ability to defend himself. Early in the investigation, Wimsey
decides to interview the inhabitants of an isolated farmhouse, the owner of which is Mr
Grimethorpe. Described as, “rough harsh, and weatherbeaten, with great ridgy
shoulders and short, thick thighs—a bull-terrier with a bad temper” (91), he is clearly an
unwelcoming host. While Wimsey is conversing with Farmer Grimethorpe the latter
attacks him. However, the slighter Wimsey easily fends him off:
‘That won’t do,’ said Peter, disengaging himself with an ease which
astonished his opponent, and catching his wrist in a grip of mysterious and
excruciating agony. . . . ‘Stand still you fool, or you’ll break your arm.’ (92)

Wimsey’s adroitness in self-defence, masked by his foppish appearance, is

demonstrated frequently throughout his detective enterprises. In this instance, he is
depicted as teaching the surly farmer a lesson in manners as well as self-restraint.
Wimsey is practising internal colonisation, defined in Chapter One, but his attempts are
in vain. While escaping with his life Wimsey has no civilizing effect whatsoever upon
Farmer Grimethorpe who instead degenerates further from an aggressive thug to a man
who attempts murder.
The unheroic farmer Grimethorpe is presented in bestial terms, as a glowering,
jealous, violent and drunken ruffian who treats his wife and daughter brutally. He does
not adhere to the code of chivalry, or even evince basic politeness, codes which are the
foundation of Wimsey’s character. Grimethorpe not only serves as a foil to reflect the
refinement of the aristocratic, if at times errant, Wimsey brothers, he is also a marker of
degeneracy, a recurrent theme in late imperial adventure literature. Grimethorpe is
uncivilised, and signals the regressive state to which the English may return. Rather
than being invaded from outside forces, the state may collapse inwardly into a barbarous
rabble.
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Farmer Grimethorpe’s jealous rage is not entirely without cause. Wimsey’s elder
brother Gerald, the Duke of Denver, has been conducting an illicit affair with the
bewitching Mrs Grimethorpe. Having already captured the Duke of Denver, she has
this effect on Wimsey, his younger brother:
Medusa was beautiful, says the tale, and so was this woman; a broad white
forehead under massed, dusky hair, black eyes glowing under straight
brows, a wide, passionate mouth—a shape so wonderful that even in that
strenuous moment sixteen generations of feudal privilege stirred in Lord
Peter’s blood. (93)

The coloniser desiring the “other” is strongly suggested in this scene. The Medusa
epithet connotes a combination of terror and desire. It also implies otherworldliness,
causing Wimsey to temporarily lose his bearings. Mrs Grimethorpe’s uncanny beauty
carries with it the taint of danger, as the Medusa glare turned men to stone. Wimsey
registers this beauty, reacts to it, but brings himself under control, demonstrating the
restraint which is the hallmark of the “imperial detective”.
Wimsey’s encounter with Mrs Grimethorpe is reminiscent of Horace Holly’s
experience with Ayesha in Rider Haggard’s She. Holly’s first sight of Ayesha is a
figure wrapped in gauze, her sensuality tinged with the grave:
Then all of a sudden the long, corpse-like wrapping fell from her to the
ground, and my eyes travelled up her form, now only robed in a garb of
clinging white that did but serve to show its perfect and imperial shape . . .
(105)

When Wimsey sees Mrs Grimethorpe for the second time, he thinks, “she might have
just risen from her far tomb in the Pyramids, dropping the dry and perfumed grave-
bands from her fingers” (202). Both Holly and Wimsey are educated, analytical men,
and both are entranced by these ethereal women. The Cambridge don, Holly, falls
under the spell of the supernatural Ayesha and is entranced by her luminous beauty.
Wimsey however, has little time to gaze upon exotic loveliness as he casts “Public
School tradition to the winds” (93) and flees before the farmer’s pack of vicious dogs.
Holly, in a remote and ancient part of Africa, is smitten by the wiles of Ayesha, but
Wimsey is shaken out of a swoon and into reason by the need to protect his own life.
Wimsey and his brother, despite their lustful thoughts, do adhere to their chivalric
code in their attitude towards the beautiful but wretched Mrs Grimethorpe. After
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Wimsey discovers the vital proof that will free his brother, the Duke of Denver will not
allow him to use it, as it will prove her adultery. Unperturbed Wimsey engages the
services of a noted air ace and makes a daring aeroplane trip to the United States to find
evidence that will free his brother but leave Mrs Grimethorpe’s name unsullied. As the
eloquent barrister Sir Impey Biggs puts it, Wimsey: “is braving a peril which would
appal any heart but his own and that of the world-famous aviator whose help he has
enlisted . . . ” (236). Once again Wimsey exhibits his physical courage, chivalry and his
unparalleled ability to unlock any mystery. By the end of Clouds of Witness Mrs
Grimethorpe is free, her husband dead (run over by a taxi while attempting to shoot
Wimsey’s brother, the Duke of Denver) and the Duke freed without a stain upon his
character. Wimsey, throughout this narrative, exhibits his physical strength, rescues a
beautiful and frightened woman and restores order to his own family, ensuring that the
aristocratic name of Wimsey remains unsullied.
The perilous territory upon which Wimsey’s adventures occur lies in the heart of
England. Quicksand and fen country are every bit as threatening as the fever-ridden
swamps of Africa or Asia. The shifting ground beneath the imperial adventurer’s feet
matches the social shifts taking place within English society. The Nine Tailors can be
read as the parable of the dishonest servant and Clouds of Witness as a cautionary tale of
mixing of the classes. In both cases Wimsey is able to restore order to the house of the
Thorpes and the Wimseys respectively, but not without putting himself in great danger.
His success does allay some of the uneasiness about the changing social order of the
inter-war years. However, this disquiet becomes entrenched by the time Adam
Dalgliesh begins his own adventures, which are undertaken in remarkably similar
territory.
The recurrence of marshy terrain in the work of Sayers and James, on one level,
can be explained by the authors both having spent their childhoods in and around East
Anglia. However, the repeated linking of these topographies with adventurous
narratives requires a more nuanced explanation. The Nine Tailors, as I have discussed
earlier in the chapter, draws upon the mystery and heritage of the fen country in its
rubric. Similarly James carefully constructs East Anglian landscapes in Death of an
Expert Witness and Devices and Desires which are both connected to an earlier or more
primitive version of rural England. Death of an Expert Witness portrays the villagers
carrying out folk rituals while a sub-narrative of Protestant martyrdom runs through
both Devices and Desires and The Private Patient. Graham Swift, in his 1983 novel
Waterland, also draws upon the historic and potentially malevolent qualities of the East
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Anglian landscape. The narrator states that, “the chief fact about the Fens is that they
are reclaimed land, land that was once water, and which, even today, is not quite solid”
(7). Further connecting the land with a kind of geographical atavism he goes on to add
that the people of the fens:
. . . did not forget, in their muddy labours, their swampy origins; that,
however much you resist them, the waters will return; that the land sinks;
silt collects; that something in nature wants to go back. (14-15)

The fens, an interstitial landscape, can be read as a microcosm of England itself, a

country delineated by its ocean boundaries. The fenland too contains its own
mythology and history which stands in opposition to the metropolitan empiricism of the
“imperial detective”. The strangeness of the landscape is expressed in Death of An
Expert Witness when Dalgliesh and his assistant, John Massingham visit “Hunter’s
Fen”:
. . . the landscape looked saturated by the weeks of rain, the front gardens
sour and waterlogged, the trunks of the few stunted trees sodden as pulp. It
looked a country on which the sun could never shine. (794)

Massingham exclaims that the place is “dreary” (794) and Dalgliesh,

uncharacteristically, says “For God’s sake let’s get out of here” (799). Depicted as alien
and unwelcoming, the fenland repels the cerebral and restrained Dalgliesh. Despite his
birthplace, and that of his literary predecessor Wimsey being in Norfolk, they are
clearly not fen people. The landscape therefore is foreign to them, and at times
threatening. It is also difficult to read. As John Rignall states, of Swift’s fenland
narrative; “In all of these scenes England is not what it seems . . .” (154). Similarly in
the narratives of Sayers and James, marshy territory often signifies a weakening of the
ratiocinative assuredness of the “imperial detective”.
Stephen Knight, when writing of Australian crime fiction, has noted that the land
often has “a curious quasi-human power of its own” and asks, “Are the colonisers the
criminals that the stolen land will ironically avenge?” (“Crimes Domestic and Crimes
Colonial” 20). Knight’s argument can productively be applied to the regional
landscapes of Sayers and James. The cliff edge in James’s The Black Tower, the flood
waters in Unnatural Causes; the quicksand in Sayers’s Clouds of Witness and the great
flood of The Nine Tailors all work to threaten the life of the “colonising” detective who
in each instance is far from his metropolitan home. It must also be noted that whereas
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the “imperial detective” survives each of these onslaughts of nature, in most cases the
criminal is (literally) swept away by flood or sea water. This repeated trope implies that
the landscape, as Knight suggests, has agency. In these cases it acts as an agent of
“righteousness” in the deeply Christian fiction of Sayers and James.
In the Dalgliesh novels the liminal landscapes, between sea and coast and between
water and dry land, repeatedly operate as a site of contest between the detective and the
murderer. The coast is the scene of death in eight of the Dalgliesh novels. While this
phenomenon also occurs in the Wimsey novels, it is less pronounced. The coast, or the
shore, is the site of murder in three Wimsey novels, Unnatural Death, Have His
Carcase and Five Red Herrings, and the boggy fens of East Anglia, another in The Nine
Tailors. In addition other marshy sites, such as the quicksand of “Peter’s Pot” in Clouds
of Witness are a backdrop to adventure, as I have discussed, continuing a trope of late
nineteenth-century adventure fiction. It is no coincidence that John Buchan’s The
Thirty-Nine Steps moves to its climax on England’s sea shore, or that Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness begins on a boat near the Thames estuary. These liminal spaces
mark the blurring between metropolis and empire, and between the safety of a sea girt
nation and the threat of alien invasion at that very coastal entry point.
The significance of the re-occurrence of unstable ground can be read on the one
hand as the murderer undermining the rule of law. This is particularly true in Sayers’s
work. However in James’s fiction it extends beyond this to articulate the enormous
changes in English society and the threat to a homogenous, white Anglo Saxon culture,
the epitome of which is the poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh. P. D. James’s view of
England from her 1997 autobiography reinforces this idea:
Today the pillars of the State, which in my childhood seemed so strong, so
impervious to the erosion of time and changing climate, so firm against
tyranny and the hurricanes of social and international unrest, are
dangerously cracking: the monarchy; the church; parliamentary democracy;
the City. (“Address to the BBC Governors” 245)

James’s shifting shore is the literary expression of a deeply held view; that England is
eroding, declining and near to collapse.
Adam Dalgliesh carries out investigations both as an official detective, and like
Wimsey, as an accidental sleuth. In numerous cases, Dalgliesh’s accidental
investigations occur on the coast. Unnatural Causes, The Black Tower, and Devices
and Desires all begin when Dalgliesh is on holiday and is unwillingly drawn into a
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murder investigation. Each of these cases involves finding at least one body on the
shore. Original Sin, A Certain Justice and Death in Holy Orders depict the death or
arrest of the criminal in the sea or marsh bed. The reoccurrence of the interstitial space
of the beach is significant. In the three “holiday” cases taken on by Dalgliesh he ends
up fighting for his life in or near the sea. It is my contention that the beach represents
the edge of England and Anglo Saxon culture. Every victory to Dalgliesh is a holding
back of change yet, with it, an acknowledgement that the coming tide will swamp the
country, that the England of the past cannot endure.
The iconic status of the shoreline in James’s work is underscored in Devices and
Desires. Dalgliesh, during a moonlight walk upon the beach at Larksoken stumbles
across a murdered woman. When interviewed, by the local police about the incident, he
mentally recalls what he was contemplating during his solitary walk:
‘I was thinking about the clash of ignorant armies by night, since no poet
walks by the sea at moonlight without silently reciting Matthew Arnold’s
marvellous poem. I was considering whether I would have been a better
poet, or even a poet at all, if I hadn’t also decided to be a policeman. (195)

The line selected from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” points toward the military role
of the English shoreline which is both the defender of, and entry into, England.
Dalgliesh literally walks on the “darkling plain” (line 35) of the shore during the night,
and encounters the murdered form of Hilary Robarts. The shore is the launching point
for armies leaving England, and the last stand to fend off invaders attacking the country.
In invoking Arnold, James reinforces the ongoing metaphor of the shore and English
identity.

The Island Story

In Bleak House, when afflicted with the oppressive heat of a London summer the timid
stationer Mr Snagsby remarks, “what a thing it is in such hot weather to think that you
live in an island with the sea a-rolling and a-bowling right around you” (Dickens 213).
Britain is an island nation, and England, as I have argued, is its centre. Gillian Beer, in
her article “The Island and the Aeroplane” also considers the island’s central role in
England’s identity. England, as she puts it, is “a moated country house as well as a
fortress” (270). The motif of the country house is explored in Chapter One, but I note
here that it is a potent icon of English identity. Beer draws attention to the interaction
between water and land which constitutes an island:
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The concept ‘island’ implies a particular and intense relationship of land and
water. . . . ‘Isle’ in its earliest forms derived from a word for water and
meant, ‘watery’ or ‘watered’. In Old English ‘land’ was added to it to make
a compound: ‘is-land’: water-surrounded land. . . .The two elements, earth
and water, are set in play. (271)

England’s identity is affixed to its geography, a concept Beer explores through the work
of Virginia Woolf. She states that, “To the Lighthouse is Woolf’s island story” (272).
The Dalgliesh novel The Lighthouse is James’s island story, and she refers directly to
Woolf’s novel in the text. Maycroft, the awkward administrator, tells the police to
follow him, “To the lighthouse.” The succeeding passage makes clear that Woolf’s
novel is familiar to those gathered:
Benton opened his mouth to comment, then closed it promptly. Probably he
had been about to make reference to Virginia Woolf but thought better of it.
Glancing at Kate’s face, Dalgliesh felt that he had been wise. (116)

Woolf’s novel about an island, like Arnold’s poem about the shore, is for James an
integral part of the English psyche. Her setting of the Dalgliesh novel upon an island is
a continuation of the detective narrative’s cultural work in reinforcing this cornerstone
of English identity. It is, more importantly, a reinscribing of that identity in an idealised
location, one set apart from the disappointments of contemporary England.
The island status of Britain, Robert Colls declares, has been used to articulate four
notions of identity in terms of a: “sense of place as an administered unit, in sense of
landscape and history, in sense of Britain as a fortress to be defended, and in feelings of
hearth and home” (225). Each of these ideas is expressed in The Lighthouse which
takes Dalgliesh offshore for the first time in the detective series. He is called upon to
investigate a murder in the exclusive location of Combe Island, a haven for those “in
positions of responsibility” (6), a place where government ministers and other public
figures can find relaxation in safety. Combe Island is forbidden to casual visitors, and
has no mobile phone coverage, displacing it from the twenty-first century. It is an
island only accessible by boat through its single harbour, and is literally cut off from the
rest of the world, except by helicopter. From the elevated vantage point of the
helicopter cab, Dalgliesh reads the island as, “inviolate; no beaches, no receding lace of
foam” (96). His aerial view of the island releases his childhood fantasies:
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Bathed in autumnal sunshine there stretched a sea-estranged other world,

deceptively calm but rekindling boyhood memories of fictional mystery,
excitement and danger. Every island to a child is a treasure island. Even to
an adult mind Combe, like every small island, sent out a paradoxical
message: the contrast between its calm isolation and the latent power of the
sea which both protected and threatened its self-contained alluring peace.
(95)

James deliberately draws on the tradition of island stories so familiar to readers of

British adventure fiction. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, R. M. Ballantyne’s The
Coral Island and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island are synonymous with
adventure. Isolation, strangeness and danger are all articulated within the setting of
Combe Island.
John Buchan’s Richard Hannay experiences island adventure in the final
instalment of the five-novel series. In The Island of Sheep Hannay and his former
comrades, now middle-aged, travel to a remote island in Northern Europe to prevent a
kidnapping. Hannay’s impression of the island is one of otherworldliness:
When I came there first I thought I was getting outside the world, and then
presently I found that I was indeed outside the world in a nightmarish limbo.
Now that the nightmare had gone, the Island seemed a happy place, where
life could be worthily lived in the company of sea-tides, and friendly wild
things, and roaring mornings, and blissful drowsy afternoons. (194)

Like Dalgliesh, Hannay registers the otherworldliness of an island which, as for

Dalgliesh, proves to be a site of adventure. The Island of Sheep was published in 1936,
one year before the final Wimsey novel. It follows the classic adventure pattern, as The
Lighthouse does, of leaving home for a strange location, surmounting difficulties and
returning home.
Perhaps the closest comparison with Combe Island comes from Agatha Christie.
It is upon the unfortunately named Nigger Island that Dr Armstrong, the Harley Street
specialist muses:
There was something magical about an island—the mere word suggested
fantasy. You lost touch with the world—an island was a world of its own.
A world, perhaps, from which you might never return. (Ten Little Niggers
26)
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Christie exploits the isolation of this island to create terror in her characters and neither
Armstrong nor any of his fellow sojourners return from their island adventure. Alison
Light makes the point that while Christie plays upon the adventurous associations of an
island, well known from imperial literature, her “location is both more domesticated and
privatised . . .” (99). Combe Island represents this very transposition, from imperial to
domestic, in the work of P. D. James.
Dalgliesh, before he sets out for Combe Island, experiences a premonition. When
he departs from Scotland Yard, he senses that he may not return, and closes the door of
his office “for the first time with a backward glance, as if taking leave of a long familiar
place he might not see again” (11). The sober, introspective Dalgliesh experiencing
such a superstitious feeling is a reminder to the reader that Gothic territory is nearby, as
it is in so many of James’s novels. In this case Dalgliesh enters a location which can be
viewed as a simulacrum of idyllic England, but one which he finds “strangely
disturbing” (183). References to the “power” of Combe are prolific within the
narrative, reinforcing the importance of location in this story.
Although the island itself is scrubby and unremarkable the main building is
anything but ordinary, and creates the “sense of landscape and history” identified by
Robert Colls as part of the island myth of England. As is so often the case in James’s
writing, the house is attributed to a real architect, and in this case an existing building
when Maycroft explains: “The architect was a pupil of Leonard Stokes, and after Stokes
died, modelled it on the house he built for Lady Digby at Minterne Magna in Dorset”
(98). Minterne Magna is the home of the Churchill and Digby families, and the
architect, Stokes was part of the Arts and Crafts movement. A more thoroughly English
pedigree for a building is hard to imagine. Within the narrative, it operates as “the Big
House,” from which orders are given, food dispensed and routine maintained. Like the
museum in The Murder Room, and “Cheverell Manor,” in The Private Patient, the
house on Combe is more than a building. It is a loaded symbol of Englishness, of order
and solidity.
The history of the island is both feudal and dramatic. The last remaining member
of the Holcombe family, original owners of the island, still resides on Combe and her
patrician presence accentuates the class divisions of this small society. Emily
Holcombe and the house on the island represent an English past which is in danger of
being overwritten by contemporary mores. Holcombe states this explicitly when she
says, “we permanent residents are a coterie of irrelevant escapees from reality” and
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“like the old lighthouse, we are merely symbols, relics of the past” (234). The island
offers an opportunity to invent a perfectly stratified society, one which is no longer
possible on mainland England, and therefore reveals an intense nostalgia for an idyllic
England enjoyed by Lord Peter Wimsey but one which is no longer possible for Adam
Dalgliesh.
It is worth noting that James used an island location for her 1982 novel The Skull
beneath the Skin, the second and final Cordelia Gray outing. The setting for this novel is
Courcy Island, a privately owned island two miles off the coast of Dorset. It boasts a
Victorian castle rebuilt on medieval foundations, replete with an impressive collection
of Victorian funeral paraphernalia. The parallels between Courcy Island and Combe are
most apparent in the islands’ histories which, between them, feature plagues (ancient
and modern), torture and smuggling. The Skull beneath the Skin features a story of
German officers held prisoner on Courcy Island. A secret court martial is held among
them and a young officer found guilty of spying for the English. His punishment is to
be tied up in the “Devil’s Kettle”, and to drown horribly. As the story is told in the
crypt on the island George Ralston, who was stationed on the island at the time is,
obliquely, linked to the crime. Like Courcy Island, Combe Island bears the awful
history of German soldiers, during the same period, being burnt alive in the original
lighthouse.7 This gruesome story is amplified by the suggestion that the author and
murder victim Nathan Oliver, then a four year old, may have lit the fire. In both
instances the past is revived by the presence of these two old men, whose guilt is only
hinted at, not confirmed. Both islands are shadowed by old sins and suspicion.
On Combe Island, however, the guilt of sins past is overlaid by the contemporary
threat of disease. The unwitting agent of this menace is Raimund Speidel, a diplomat
who travels to Combe to discover the truth of his Nazi father’s death on the island.
Unbeknownst to him, he is infected with the deadly Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome, or SARS virus, and when Dalgliesh interviews the feverish Dr Speidel he is
exposed to and becomes infected with the virus. As in The Black Tower, it is a diplomat
who carries with him a foreign contagion, reiterating the porosity of England’s coastal
defences and, again, the threat of a contagion from the East. The Lighthouse was
published in 2005, two years after SARS first appeared in South East Asia. The number
of cases in England was very low, but the fear of a new virus from the East created

7
Cordelia Gray finds herself at the top of the castle in The Skull beneath the Skin where she sees a
Victorian rocking horse and a room full of toys (628). In The Lighthouse Emily Holcombe states that the
four year old Nathan Oliver played in her nursery, on her rocking horse, on the night the German officers
were incinerated (240).
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community unease, to say the least. The arrival of the virus on the island creates a
Gothic claustrophobia, as it means the residents are quarantined on an island with a
deadly virus and a murderer. Combe Island’s status as a private, inviolate part of
English territory is assailed by an ultra-contemporary menace, coupled with the threat of
the past. Dalgliesh is stricken by an illness brought from Beijing, carried by the son of a
former Nazi officer (270). Dalgliesh, as the embodiment of Englishness, is therefore
twice assaulted by the enemies of British imperialism, in a location in which these
values are sacrosanct. The narrative, a repetition of the nineteenth century fears of the
empire “biting back” as Laura Otis (31) puts it, offers the possibility of an inviolate
England projected onto an island, only to snatch it away.
In James’s island novels, the recent past and its haunting of the present is blended
into an historically detailed narrative. James grafts history onto imagination when
creating the eponymous lighthouse on Combe Island. The structure is cited as a copy of
Smeaton’s Eddystone lighthouse, the original of which was rebuilt at Plymouth Hoe in
Devon. The island, with its dark past and present day murder, is the site of adventure
for Dalgliesh’s subordinates, Francis Benton-Smith and Kate Miskin. For both of them,
it is their proving ground. Being removed from ordinary life, as has been noted, offers
opportunities for adventure heroes to show their extraordinary abilities. In this case, it
is Kate Miskin who must take over the role of leader when Dalgliesh falls ill. In charge
for the first time, Miskin must lead both her junior officer, Francis Benton-Smith, and
the inhabitants of the island. Her first thought when faced with a conundrum, is to ask
“I wonder what what AD would do first” (258). It falls to Benton-Smith to point out
that she is the one who needs to make the decision. Kate Miskin is echoing Harriet
Vane in deferring to the male detective in a time of crisis. In Have His Carcase Harriet
Vane wonders, when she finds a body on the seashore, “What would Lord Peter
Wimsey do in such a case?” (16). Kate Miskin’s elevation to power is not entirely
successful. Dalgliesh solves the mystery from his sickbed and informs Kate of the
murderer’s identity. She and Benton-Smith locate the vital evidence, but Benton-Smith,
not Kate, carries out two acts of daring while she is reduced to the role of onlooker. In
the first instance, he abseils down a cliff to retrieve vital evidence, despite suspecting
that his fellow climber, Jago Tamlyn may be a murderer. Benton-Smith succeeds
gloriously, while Kate watches like an anxious mother from the cliff top.
One of the more bizarre scenes in the novel depicts Kate Miskin, half naked,
being smothered in lubricant by her fellow officer, and being shoved through a narrow
window to gain entry to the lighthouse. This brutal rebirthing dislocates her shoulder,
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so that when it is time to tackle the murderous Dan Padgett, holding the hysterical
Millie hostage, she is literally crippled. It is difficult not to read this as the clichéd
female “twisting her ankle” at the vital moment, so often used in popular fiction. Not
only is her physical state an encumbrance, but Padgett’s rampant misogyny renders her
unable to reach him. The calm, uninjured and fully clothed Benton-Smith talks Padgett
out of a third murder, and duly makes the arrest. Kate Miskin, it seems, despite her
determination and courage can never be as effective as her male counterparts.
Dalgliesh, near death, can still provide the link in the evidence chain, and Benton-Smith
provides the muscle to back it up. The female detective is reduced to the status of a
helper.
Despite her failure, as she sees it, on the island Kate Miskin is not immune to the
influence of Combe, described elsewhere as a “fantasy Shangri-la” (40). When the
investigation is over, Dalgliesh is out of danger and the truculent murderer, Padgett,
neatly airlifted off the island, Kate relaxes. Quarantined, along with the rest of the
island inhabitants she lapses into a utopic state which reads almost as a shift in time:
“Gently and quietly Combe exerted its mysterious power” (315). Kate Miskin spends
her days walking around the island, and joining the other island residents for dinner:
During the days on Combe, Kate breathed a freer air and adjusted a wider
horizon. For the first time she knew that she was accepted as herself, a
woman, not a detective inspector. The transformation was liberating; it was
also subtly gratifying. (316)

Combe’s “mysterious power” seems to enable its inhabitants to forget their mainland
lives and to lift constraints which, in Miskin’s case, are her background and choice of
profession. Most tellingly however, what Kate Miskin achieves at the end of her brief
idyll is the acknowledgement to herself that Dalgliesh will never be hers. As Adam
Dalgliesh stands next to his now fiancée Emma Lavenham she lets go of her dream,
“with regret but without pain” (323). The novel’s final paragraph is from her point of
view and sees her “resolutely” looking toward the future.
If The Lighthouse presents an island adventure that reverses almost every thread
of consolation it initially offers, Sayers offers a short story that is an antidote to such
imperial gloom. “The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head” also presents one of
the clearest examples of the mapping of adventure onto England’s shores. In this tale
Viscount St George, nephew of Lord Peter Wimsey exclaims, “How exciting! It’s just
like a story in the Boy’s Friend Library” (188). What Lord St George experiences is
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indeed an adventure story, in which a version of empire is mapped back onto the
homeland. The adventure begins with the purchase of a book of maps, an incomplete
copy of the Cosmographia Universalis, from 1507. It proceeds to incorporate the
apprehension of burglars and culminates in a late night treasure hunt.
The map is at the centre of this story, as it is in Treasure Island and in King
Solomon’s Mines. In this case, the map of the Canary Islands in the sixteenth century
book has been carefully annotated to provide clues to a hidden treasure. The covert
cartography was carried out by a notorious old pirate “Cut-throat Conyers” who is
alleged to have sailed with Blackbeard. Leaving the sea life behind, he brings his
treasure back to “Yelsall Manor” in England, and secretes it within the grounds. In his
will he leaves only a cryptic clue advising his legatees to search for the treasure in
“Munster”. Succeeding generations search Munster in Ireland and Münster in
Germany, but it is the erudite Wimsey who points to Munster, the author of the
Cosmographia, as the vital clue. Adding to the excitement of the chase is the presence
of an evil nephew trying to snatch the treasure before the rightful owner can use it in the
cause of medical science. Before the ill-intentioned nephew can prevail, Wimsey
manages to interpret the clue, read the annotated map, and locate the treasure. In the
bounds of this country estate “Cut-throat” Conyers had constructed an artificial lake and
islands within it. It is when gazing at these ornamental islands that Wimsey realises
they resemble the Canaries, as depicted on the annotated map in the ancient map book.
The dragon on the map is the ornamental fountain and therein lies the treasure.
Wimsey, through his knowledge of Latin, ancient maps and his expertise in hunting for
treasure solves the mystery and unearths the pirate’s hoard.
This tale can be read as a metaphor for the wider narratives of imperial detection,
after the fragmentation of the British Empire. The Empire being lost, deeds of
imperialism can only be carried out at home, but in order to create a version of home
which allows for adventure, England must be remapped. In this story, the remapping is
literal. “Yelsall Manor” is a heavily mortgaged, crumbling country house. Within this
country house, the exotic geography of the Canary Islands is remade in miniature in a
boating lake, a literal creation of a space for adventure. The re-situating of an adventure
tale from the high seas to the country house is a measure of how far the empire has
shrunk. Simultaneously this short story also illustrates how an imperial narrative can be
created at “home” in England, where a ten-year old boy and his uncle can unearth
buried treasure in an atmosphere of high excitement, and a slight frisson of danger.
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While the high jinks at Yelsall Manor and the magic of Combe Island provide a
form of consolation in these detective narratives, it is only ever transitory. The shifting
ground encountered by Dalgliesh and Wimsey in many of their cases leaves a lasting
sense of unease in the world of the “imperial detective”. This sense of foreboding is
amplified through the Gothic buildings and landscapes in the texts. Wimsey and
Dalgliesh echo their imperial forbears in their encounters with apparently inferior
peoples, threatening terrain and personal danger. Wimsey and Dalgliesh carry on the
work of their imperial antecedents in a remapped England in which spaces of adventure
are carefully carved out. Wimsey and Dalgliesh act with bravery and honour but
without the utter conviction of their own superiority so integral to the ruddy jingoists of
the Haggard and Buchan stories. The adventures of the “imperial detectives” are
adumbrated with self-doubt and on occasion, disgust. Yet their adventures continue to
reinscribe imperial values upon England’s shores, even as these shores recede. Wimsey
and Dalgliesh are imperial adventurers, but their adventures are carried out at home, in
the sense of national boundaries. However, their detective work also requires them to
work at home, in the domestic sense. The way in which the adventurous detective is
reconciled with the domestic detective is the subject of my final chapter.
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CHAPTER FOUR

At Home.

“And now it was five fifteen, the autumn day would soon
be darkening into evening and this small, very English tea
ceremony was designed to propitiate the afternoon furies.
Order, routine, habit, imposed on a disorderly world.”
(P.D. James A Taste for Death, 227)

Adam Dalgliesh makes a telling statement towards the end of the novel Unnatural
Causes. He says, “I want to go home” (196). He is almost unconscious at the time,
trying to maintain his dignity while at the end of his physical powers. This request is
apparent, literally or tacitly, in both the Dalgliesh and Wimsey series of detective
novels. The search for their own home, and the interrogation of other people’s homes,
is a leitmotiv of both these detective series. The possibility of finding or forming an
ideal home, however, is an endeavour complicated by nostalgia and homesickness.
Disappointing experiences of domesticity often cause an outbreak of melancholy within
the texts, with the detective yearning for perfection which can only be found in the past,
specifically, a time when England was the centre of a vibrant empire. The
unsatisfactory present is partly ameliorated by the work of Wimsey and Dalgliesh, who
operate as housekeepers of their nation, tidying away disruption and disorder.
Throughout the narratives, both Wimsey and Dalgliesh are troubled by manifestations
of domestic dysfunction outside their own homes, which is symptomatic of a wider
social malaise. This chapter examines the way in which notions of home and the
domestic are articulated in the narratives and, in particular, the way in which English
identity and its ongoing relationship to empire is expressed through domesticity.

Home and Empire

It has been argued that British imperialism was based on the idealised notion of a
British home. The American, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in English Traits (1856),
observed of the British that: “Domesticity is the taproot that enables the nation to
branch high and wide. The motive and end of their trade and empire is to guard the
independence and privacy of their homes” (60). Emerson makes explicit the role of the
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British Empire in the provision of domestic comfort and security for its citizens, and in
so doing, accentuates the conjunction of imperialism and home in nineteenth-century
British society. John Tosh argues that by the mid-nineteenth century the idea of home
in England had “acquired immense cultural authority” (30). Such investment in the idea
of home continues long after the end of Victoria’s reign. An intertwining of home and
empire continues throughout the Wimsey and Dalgliesh narratives, where the imperial
home is presented as an ideal, but one which is rarely attainable.
Emerson suggested that the empire safeguarded the privacy of the English home.
The empire also furnished, clothed and fed it. This point was made in spectacular
fashion at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition which featured a sculpture of the Prince
of Wales, constructed entirely from Canadian butter (A.Wilson 273). Robert Baden-
Powell’s Scouting for Boys also makes explicit the idea of the empire as England’s
larder:
Shopping for mother may seem at times rather dull, but if you keep your
eyes open it can be quite a romantic tour of the Empire. Here is a list of
some things and where they come from: oranges from South Africa,
pineapples from Malaya, bananas from Jamaica, sugar from the West Indies
or Mauritius, cocoa from Trinidad or West Africa, tea from Ceylon, India or
Pakistan, coffee from Kenya, or grapefruit from Honduras.
Do you know where all those places are? Look them up on the map and
you will find that they are all British, and they are scattered all over the
world. (175)

The 1953 abridged edition of Scouting for Boys presents the confident assertion that
these colonies are British, and therefore specifically designed for providing comestibles
to the English kitchen. It also implies that domestic occupations, though they may be
dull, are quite suitable for boy scouts and that junior empire builders are required to be
proficient in a range of housekeeping skills. The ability to cook and sew is just as
necessary as the ability to identify tracks and read Morse code. Encouraging these boys
to regard the empire as their larder reinforces the idea that they too can grow up to be
housekeepers of the British Empire.
Wimsey and Dalgliesh, like the boy scouts, are involved in domestic matters, both
in the sense of national concerns as well as the more literal idea of that which occurs in
the home. The necessity for the “imperial detective” to be adept in matters adventurous
and domestic is explained by Susan Strehle when she states that:
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Empire relies on home for its symbolic representation of national values.

The “home country” becomes a model for the “outposts,” “the metropolis”
an ideal for “peripheral” and “marginal” locations. Homeland’s domestic
order is exported to the colonies in order to suppress and distance qualities
constructed as natural to “natives”—above all sexuality, but also all other
expressions of unruly physical existence. Empire spreads the ideology of
home; home symbolizes imperial values and perpetuates the power
structures that fuel empire’s advance. (21-22)

Lord Peter Wimsey and Adam Dalgliesh, in their role as “imperial detectives”, endorse
and perpetuate a particular ideology of home. They do so through examining the homes
of others, and in the construction and development of their own home. Crucially, their
own domestic attributes and arrangements provide a model for an idealised version of
home and it is against this that all other homes are measured.
Rosemary Marangoly George suggests that some of the connotations of home
include, “the private sphere of patriarchal hierarchy, gendered self-identity, shelter,
comfort, nurture and protection” (1). This provides a useful starting point in a
discussion of domesticity in the fiction of both Sayers and James where “shelter,
comfort, nurture and protection” are only possible in a home containing a union of
equals. Both Wimsey and Dalgliesh wish for and move towards this version of home.
Along the way other homes are measured, not just by their physical structure, but also
by the morality of their inhabitants. The appearance of a home is often a direct
reflection of its residents and of the strength of their relationship to one another. Within
these narratives unsatisfactory domestic arrangements reflect larger societal problems:
problems which create anxiety within the text.
It is not just “home” which requires defining in the context of this argument, but
also a particular concept of domesticity, a product of Victorian England according to
John Tosh. He defines it as:
. . . not just a pattern of residence or a web of obligations, but a profound
attachment: a state of mind as well as a physical orientation. Its defining
attributes are privacy and comfort, separation from the workplace, and the
merging of domestic space and family members into a single commanding
concept (in English, ‘home’). Domesticity in this sense was essentially a
nineteenth-century invention. (4)
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This nineteenth-century concept is attached to, and an integral part of, the idea of home
in the Wimsey and Dalgliesh narratives. For a home to be endorsed within the text, an
appropriate form of domesticity must be practised therein. The English notion of home
and of domesticity, both forged in the mid-nineteenth century, indicates the value
system upon which the characters of Wimsey and Dalgliesh are based. They are
“imperial detectives” at home, and away from home.

The Home of the “Imperial Detective”

As a symbolic representation of English values, the homes of the detectives stand out in
conspicuous relief. Theirs is the template against which other homes are measured, as
Wimsey and Dalgliesh spread the ideology of home through their prescriptive appraisal
of other people’s houses. It is this paradigm of the English home through which all
homes are read and assessed, and it is rife with imperial values. A home which does not
match the imperial pattern represents not only a singular domestic failure, but a wider
social malaise. The detective’s role is to identify these anomalies, right them where
possible and continue to reinforce the imperial values for which they stand. Wimsey
and Dalgliesh are, therefore, detectors of “suitable” homes and domesticity.
Wimsey and Dalgliesh occupy homes which reflect their superior status in
society. Their homes are exclusive in the sense that admittance is strictly regulated.
Rosemary Marangoly George makes the point that “the notion of the ‘home’ . . . is a
select pattern of inclusions and exclusions. Home is a way of establishing difference”
(2). Wimsey and Dalgliesh are differentiated from their friends, colleagues and
compatriots by their elevated status. Wimsey begins his detecting career as a bachelor
in a well-appointed modern flat on Piccadilly, and evolves into a married man with a
house in Audley Square and another in the country. Dalgliesh is an aloof widower, who
finally finds love and marriage with the Cambridge academic Emma Lavenham. The
description of the bachelor residences of Wimsey and Dalgliesh reveals an ordered
tranquillity and, at the beginning of each series, a carefully enforced solitude. It is made
meticulously clear, in each case, that the detective is single by choice, and that he is a
man highly desirable to women. Wimsey, part of a triumvirate including valet Mervyn
Bunter and his friend, the policeman Charles Parker, is a husband waiting for a wife.
Dalgliesh, for most of the series, is a self-contained widower whose love of privacy
prevents him committing to another marriage. The punctilious domesticity of the
detective is a register of both his intelligence and capacity for nurturing, while never
undermining his heterosexuality.
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Wimsey’s second floor flat, at 110A Piccadilly, overlooks Green Park and is
furnished lavishly, but is overtly masculine. It is the locus of Wimsey’s bachelor life, a
residence which reveals not only his intellectual and musical abilities, with the library of
books and the baby grand piano, but also a distillation of the best of British culture.
Charles Parker in Whose Body? views the library, with its Chesterfield sofa, gold
chrysanthemums and wood fire as, “not only rare and unattainable, but friendly and
familiar, like a colourful and gilded paradise in a mediaeval painting” (23). The middle-
class policeman Parker recognises Wimsey’s flat as the zenith of English aristocratic
bachelor life, and simultaneously acknowledges his own inability to attain it. The
“rare” and “unattainable” qualities of Wimsey’s residence reflects the uniquely
privileged position he enjoys as a member of the aristocracy, one denied to Charles
Parker. The barriers of class, in the Wimsey novels, are as carefully guarded as are the
homes of the upper classes.
Adam Dalgliesh lives high above the Thames. His flat, in a converted warehouse,
above a suite of offices, affords him privacy as he is the sole residential tenant. The
location of his home is as suggestive as is its isolated nature. His flat is located in
Queenhithe, a fecund symbol of imperial history linked to Alfred the Great, Ethred the
Archbishop of Canterbury, Queen Matilda and King Henry I. It is “a place where
merchandise has been landed for over 1,000 years” (Thompson 22). Dalgliesh literally
dwells in the shadows of empire, immersed in the fragrance of England’s past, with its,
“smell of spice, fugitive as memory” (Holy Orders 45).1 Peter Ackroyd describes the
history of the Thameside docks, and poignantly, the reduction of these docks from a
“vast army of one hundred thousand workers” at the beginning of the twentieth century
to their closure in 1981 (Thames 201). Dalgliesh lives above the river, a symbol of both
the glory and decline of England’s empire and a location which resoundingly affirms his
English identity. It also posits Dalgliesh as a metaphorical lock-keeper, one who is
witness to the flood tide of change.
In their elevated apartments, Wimsey and Dalgliesh are rarely affected in any way
by the crimes they investigate. They are safe within their walls. Like Mr Wemmick in
Great Expectations, they are able to pull up the drawbridge upon the world. Their
homes represent the inviolate dwelling striven for by the British public. When a
reporter sneaks into a service lift in Busman’s Honeymoon, it is a trifling inconvenience
swiftly dealt with by the loyal Bunter (28). Even the discovery of a corpse at “Talboys”

1
This is reiterated in The Murder Room. “The building had originally been a spice warehouse and a
pungent evocative aroma had permeated the wood lined walls . . .” (284).
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later in the novel is more inconvenient than frightening, as the murder occurred before
Wimsey occupied the house.2 Dalgliesh is never incommoded by such invasions. This
safety is something denied to the people who work for and with the detectives. In
Murder Must Advertise Charles Parker is coshed at his flat in Great Ormond Street by a
jealous man seeking revenge against Wimsey. Kate Miskin has her flat violated by the
murderer in A Taste for Death when her grandmother is shot and killed in front of her.
Wimsey and Dalgliesh, safe in their own homes, venture forth to investigate the homes
of others, to examine, evaluate and classify their contents. Their domestic security is
guaranteed by their elevated place in society, literally and figuratively, and with it
comes the authority to pass judgement upon the domestic arrangements of others.
Both Sayers and James are careful to construct Wimsey and Dalgliesh as desirable
heterosexual males, a notion which is constantly reinforced throughout the narratives.3
However, this does not automatically indicate that heterosexuality is a requirement in
forming a satisfactory home. In the writing of both Sayers and James, same-sex
households are often portrayed as places of satisfying domesticity. The long
“friendship” between Clara Whittaker and Agatha Dawson in Sayers’s Unnatural Death
is one such example. While sexual otherness is a characteristic of a number of
murderers in the work of Sayers and James, homosexuality is by no means an automatic
marker of criminality. Sayers expresses some ambivalence about the matter personally,
in terms which are especially difficult for the contemporary reader to defend. In a letter
to Dr Eustace Barton she describes “inverts” as “unfortunate” and notes that “inverts
make me creep”, as do “lunatics and imbeciles.” However, she points out that, “the
normal person often makes the invert creep” and that a friend of hers “who was rather
that way” broke off all communication following Sayers’s marriage, because the friend
found marriage repulsive (“To Eustace Barton” 1: 289). Lord Peter comforts the
unhappy Ann Dorland in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club when she explains an
unsatisfactory relationship with “one of those people” by saying, “They can’t help
themselves” (220). Sayers depicts herself, in her letter, as staunchly heterosexual, in
spite of her, ambiguous at the time, attire of tailored suits and short hair. The depiction
of same-sex relationships was more problematic in the inter-war years than it is in the

2
Wimsey does reveal to Miss Murchison during Strong Poison that he once found a master lock picker,
“Blindfold Bill” on his premises. Under the influence of Wimsey, he was transformed into Bill Rumm, a
law-abiding locksmith, and evangelical Christian family man. (See Chapter Three).
3
In Unnatural Causes, when Inspector Reckless asks Dalgliesh whether Justin Bryce is “a queer”, his
testy reply is, “we surely haven’t yet reached the point when every bachelor over forty is automatically
suspect?” (47). The reader, I think, can assume Dalgliesh is defending himself.
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world of Dalgliesh, but neither he nor Wimsey take a strong position on the question of
alternative sexuality.
P. D. James, despite her indubitably straight detective, provides numerous
examples of same-sex households. Shroud for a Nightingale depicts the comfortable
solidity of nurses Muriel Beale and Angela Burrows, friends who have shared a flat, but
not a bed, for twenty-five years. Their relationship is likened to a marriage, but is
“essentially innocent” (2), presumably of lesbian sex. This couple is an almost identical
replica of the elderly nurses Dot Ambrose and Beatrice Sharpe in the 1963 novel, A
Mind to Murder. As the series progresses openly gay couples occur more frequently,
almost always as background characters. In A Certain Justice the gay couple Erik and
Nigel carry out domestic duties for Hubert Langton, an elderly barrister. Erik and Nigel
are experts in domesticity, and despite this potentially clichéd rendition of gay men, are
sympathetically portrayed (226). However, Emma Lavenham’s friend Clara provides
the most convincing endorsement of same-sex relationships. Clara and her partner
Annie provide a balanced, loving relationship which co-exists with that of Dalgliesh and
Emma. Dalgliesh attends the private ceremony “of Clara and Annie’s civil partnership
(sic), a quietly satisfying celebration . . .” (Private Patient 113). This relationship is
ratified not only by Dalgliesh, but by the ultimate compliment, in P. D. James’s writing,
of being associated with Jane Austen. The home of Clara and Annie is described as “a
place where no one entered without—in Jane Austen’s words—the sanguine expectation
of happiness” (112). Austen is again invoked at the very end of the novel as Annie
quotes from Emma when describing the wedding between Dalgliesh and Emma
Lavenham, a profound ratification in James’s writing (394).

Homesickness
For Wimsey and Dalgliesh, the ideal home is something for which they strive and
towards which they move throughout each series. Concomitant with this desire for a
home is the occurrence and recurrence of homesickness and nostalgia. Marangoly
George says of homesickness that it “can cut two ways: it could be a yearning for the
authentic home (situated in the past or in the future) or it could be the recognition of the
inauthenticity or the created aura of all homes” (175). In the Wimsey and Dalgliesh
novels homesickness is often registered as a desire for a home associated with the past.
However, both Wimsey and Dalgliesh also express a desire for a future home with the
appropriate partner. Marangoly George’s second point regarding the inauthenticity of
the home also registers, within these texts, as a point of anxiety, one triggered by the
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presence of inauthentic or undesirable domestic spaces. Before examining the way in

which the detective forms his own home, I will address the question of homesickness
and nostalgia, notions which are woven into the fabric of these narratives.
John Tosh argues that during the nineteenth century, “Home came to be identified
with childhood, innocence and roots—indeed with authenticity itself” (5). This
Victorian ethos is continued within the Wimsey, and particularly the Dalgliesh,
narratives but with varied inflections. For Wimsey, childhood is associated with his
beloved mother, the Dowager Duchess and the house at “Duke’s Denver”, the family
estate. The estate becomes a place of respite in Whose Body? when, after Wimsey’s
attack of neurasthenia, his mother insists upon his retiring there (138). Similarly
“Duke’s Denver” becomes a place of refuge for both Harriet and Wimsey at the end of
Busman’s Honeymoon (367). While awaiting the execution of Frank Crutchley,
Wimsey and Harriet flee to the Dower House at Denver, where they are ministered to by
Wimsey’s mother. This is a temporary stop before they take up their married life in
their new home at Audley Square, Belgravia. Seen through Harriet’s eyes “Duke’s
Denver” is something of a dream, described more than once as a “storybook” home
(370; 373). There are deer in the park, peacocks on the terrace and more than one
family ghost in the house. The building is described as a mixture of architectural styles
but, most importantly, as thoroughly English. The motifs of family chapel and vault,
faithful servants and bucolic reverie are present in this brief chapter, but “Duke’s
Denver” represents a childhood to which Wimsey cannot return.
In the Dalgliesh narratives, nostalgia is a frequent and painful occurrence for the
“imperial detective”, a reminder of his rectory childhood spent in East Anglia, a
sanctified location from which he is permanently exiled. Early on in the series, as he
approaches his beloved Aunt Jane’s home at Monksmere, he is daydreaming about the
domestic idyll he will enjoy there:
There would be a driftwood fire in the wide hearth scenting the whole
cottage, and before it the high-backed armchair once part of his father’s
study in the vicarage where he was born, the leather smelling of childhood.
There would be a sparsely furnished bedroom with a view of sea and sky, a
comfortable if narrow bed with sheets smelling faintly of wood-smoke and
lavender, plenty of hot water and a bath long enough for a six-foot-two man
to stretch himself in comfort. . . . More immediately, there would be tea
before the fire and hot buttered toast with home-made potted meat.
(Unnatural Causes 14)
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Dalgliesh’s vision of home is infused with the longing to return to childhood, to be

comfortable and to be spared responsibility. The associations are all sensory; the smell
of childhood, the confines of a narrow bed. They suggest a restraint, a comfort gained
from asceticism rather than overindulgence. The clichés of the English home, inherited
from the “Golden Age” of detective fiction, reinforce the cosiness of this vision and
ultimately of course its impossibility. This scene is one of many in the Dalgliesh series.
It is repeated in A Taste for Death (227), Devices and Desires (24), Original Sin (446),
Death in Holy Orders (85) and The Lighthouse (203), all of which contain
reminiscences of his rectory childhood, all tinged with the pain of loss. The very fact of
such seriality reiterates the significance of the interrelation between childhood, nostalgia
and a scene of visibly English domestic calm.
The link between childhood and nostalgia is elucidated by Roberta Rubenstein
who suggests that “the meaning of nostalgia itself has changed over time, essentially it
has come to signify not simply the loss of one’s childhood home but the loss of
childhood itself” (4). Rubenstein’s sense of exile, as experienced by Dalgliesh when
recalling these childhood moments, speaks of a wider sadness not only for his own past,
but for the world in which his childhood was experienced. This sentiment is directly
expressed, not by Dalgliesh, but by the young, terminally ill Ursula Hollis who thinks of
her childhood as something as “remote now as a distant once-visited alien shore. She
couldn’t return because she no longer knew the way” (Black Tower 327). The path back
to childhood stands as a metaphor for a return to an idealised England, both of which
are unreachable. In the case of Dalgliesh, his rectory childhood, so firmly identified
with the Church of England, renders his musing akin to a threnody for an icon of
national identity.
Childhood and home were almost sacred to the Victorian middle classes, as John
Tosh has explained. The particularity of Dalgliesh’s nostalgia points to a specific
version of home, a rectory childhood in the Norfolk fens. But, in the act of
remembering, Dalgliesh must always acknowledge the loss of what he is recalling, the
loss of something of great value. Roberta Rubenstein elucidates this point when she
describes nostalgia as:
. . . a kind of haunted longing: figures of earlier relationships and the
places with which they are associated, both remembered and imagined,
impinge on a person’s emotional life, affecting her or his behaviour toward
current experiences and attachments. Implicit in the deeper register of
nostalgia is the element of grief for something of profound value that seems
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irrevocably lost—even if it never actually existed, or never could have

existed, in the form in which it is “remembered.” (5) (author’s emphasis)

Rubenstein’s definition of nostalgia could have been written for the character of
Dalgliesh. The introspective widower, who nurses his melancholy solitude until he
meets Emma Lavenham in Death in Holy Orders, is a figure whose past defines his
character. However, as I have suggested, his even earlier memories of childhood
rectory teas and the predictable rhythm of village life align his personal nostalgia with a
wider imagining of England, one fixed in a rural Edwardian society. Nostalgia is
experienced far more intensely by characters in the Dalgliesh novels than by those in the
Wimsey novels. This may be due to the greater chronological distance from an
idealised pre-War England, which ended in 1914. Although the Wimsey novels signal
the War as the end of a “golden” era, they do not evince the acute nostalgia evident in
the Dalgliesh narratives. Rather, the Wimsey narratives contain a more muted
disappointment about behavioural standards in current society, articulated almost
casually by Wimsey when he muses, “nothing was what it had been; he thought it must
be due to the War” (Bellona Club 40). Dalgliesh occupies an England in which the
empire is definitively and irreparably finished. Wimsey, by contrast operates in an era
of decline, yet with it a faint hope, that England may yet recover its imperial strength.
The association of an idyllic England with the past is portrayed in Sayers’s third
novel Unnatural Death when Detective Inspector Charles Parker and Lord Peter
Wimsey visit the village of Crofton. The utopic character of this modest hamlet is
suggested on the journey when Parker, observing the imperturbable Bunter trying to
read yet another obscure road sign, is reminded of “Alan Quartermaine (sic) trying to
trace the features of the departed Kings of the Kukuanas under their calcareous shrouds
of stalactite” (128). Wimsey’s detecting is married to imperial adventure in this phrase,
as is the idea of a journey to a potentially exciting location. Crofton does not contain a
diamond mine or exotic women yet it does exude a Shangri-La quality, because it
represents an idyllic past. On his first morning in the village Wimsey is impressed with
what he finds:
The rainy night was followed by a sun-streaked morning. Lord Peter,
having wrapped himself affectionately round an abnormal quantity of bacon
and eggs, strolled out to bask at the door of the ‘Fox-and-Hounds’. He
filled a pipe slowly, and meditated. Within, a cheerful bustle in the bar
announced the near arrival of opening time. Eight ducks crossed the road in
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Indian file. A cat sprang up upon the bench . . . A groom passed, riding a
tall bay horse and leading a chestnut with a hogged mane; a spaniel
followed them . . . (135-6)

This passage focuses on propriety with animals and people in their supposedly rightful
places. Tranquillity, order and social stratification are assured. Crofton is described as
a small village in the Midlands and as such can be seen to represent the “heart” of
England.
Thus Crofton is firmly located in the past. The people interviewed are middle-
aged, or positively ancient, as in the case of the old groom and his wife who resembles,
“a dried-up pippin” (139). The village also contains a shining example of an English
hostelry where “everything is upholstered in horsehair and it is never too late to obtain a
good meal of cold roast sirloin and home-grown salad” (131). After Parker and
Wimsey enjoy such a repast they retire to their shared room, “where the sheets smelt of
lavender” (134). The fragrance of lavender suggests halcyon domesticity, a precursor to
Wimsey’s wedding night with Harriet, and to Parker’s with Lady Mary, Wimsey’s
sister. It also provides a link to Dalgliesh’s childhood nostalgia and illustrates the
essential elements for an authentic English home.

Difficult Relations
The writing of Sayers and James offers two versions of home. The version approved by
the detective is the authentic expression of traditional English domesticity, a rendering
of Englishness often at odds with the demography of England today. Contrasted with
this is the aberrant home which, by its failure, registers the schisms in English society.
The sphere of domesticity in their work reflects wider concerns about the state of the
nation. National identity is as important in these homes as gendered identity, England is
home, and Englishness is performed in their homes. Satisfactory domestic
arrangements, in the eyes of the “imperial detective”, also require an adherence to
accepted notions of gender and identity. As I suggested earlier, same-sex relationships
are not automatically a sign of criminality, and in many cases are endorsed by the
detective. However, the relationships approved within the schema of the text are those
in which both partners are nurtured and happy within their roles. It is characters who
act outside of accepted societal norms, or as Susan Strehle puts it, whose “unruly
physical existence” (21) provides a threat to society, which are of concern to the
“imperial detective”. As the agent of internal colonisation (defined in Chapter One),
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taking place within the shores of England, the “imperial detective” has the mandate to
instil his code of behaviour and set of values upon the colonised; that is the non-
English, working class and of course the criminal “others.” Flouting of such codes is
often an indicator of criminality or dysfunction in the narratives of Sayers and James
and something which causes unease to the “imperial detective.” 4
In both the Wimsey and Dalgliesh series the worst offences committed against the
idea of home are carried out by criminals who are coded as especially malevolent.
Mary Whittaker in Sayers’s Unnatural Death is a character who manipulates both
identity and gender roles in her attempts to commit and cover up a murder. Described
by Nina Auerbach as “the most cosmically evil character in the Wimsey series . . .”
(193), Whittaker is troublesome in a number of respects. She is not only the sole female
murderer but also the only serial murderer in the entire Wimsey series. Mary Whittaker,
during the course of the novel, murders her elderly aunt, her former maid and her close
friend. In addition she attempts to murder the lawyer, Mr Trigg, as well as making
attempts upon the life of Lord Peter Wimsey and Miss Climpson. The clues to her
criminal nature are gleaned by Wimsey, with the assistance of his “agent”, the spinster
Miss Climpson. Mary Whittaker is described by Miss Climpson as having a
countenance displaying, “an unattractive mingling of recklessness and calculation”
(261) and by Wimsey as, “Greedy and malicious” (276). Between them, Wimsey and
Miss Climpson detect the inauthenticity, and finally the murderous nature of Mary
Whittaker.
Miss Climpson is particularly skilled in the reading of domestic matters. Like her
fictional contemporary, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Miss Climpson notices
seemingly insignificant details which often turn out to be vital clues.5 Stephen Knight
describes Miss Marple’s detecting ability as intrinsically linked to the idea of home:
Miss Marple’s busy, humble personality enacts with great success the idea
of domestic watchfulness, though she is something of a leader, much better
at observation and analysis than the other spinster watchwomen . . . (Form
and Ideology 130)

4
A number of James’s novels depict characters who play with gender and sexual identity. Sally Jupp in
Cover Her Face, Sylvia Kedge in Unnatural Causes, Julius Court in The Black Tower, Dominic Swayne
in A Taste for Death and Caroline Amphlett in Devices and Desires, all pretend to be something they are
not in order to carry out their mischievous or murderous plans. All except Swayne die horribly.
5
Miss Climpson actually pre-dates Miss Marple by a number of months. Miss Marple first appeared in a
short story “The Tuesday Night Club” in Royal Magazine in December 1927 (Christie, Miss Marple and
Mystery 304), three months after the publication of Sayers’s Unnatural Death on 16 September of that
year (Reynolds, Life 234).
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While Miss Marple and Miss Climpson practise “domestic watchfulness” in an

exemplary fashion, it is a practice also carried out by Wimsey and Dalgliesh whose
ability to read domestic situations is often integral to the success of their investigations.
Knight also makes the important point that in Christie’s work, through its careful
construction of detail, “the bizarre and the bathetically ordinary mix in a bland illusion
that can both excite and console” (Form and Ideology 126). The “imperial detective’s”
ability to unravel this combination of the strange and the everyday is crucial to their
success.
Unnatural Death sees Miss Climpson and Wimsey combine their domestic
expertise in order to bring Mary Whittaker to account. Miss Climpson initially alerts
Wimsey to the questionable nature of Mary Whittaker. In particular Whittaker’s taking
up with the young and gullible Vera Findlater is objectionable to Miss Climpson. Miss
Climpson, having lived in many boarding houses and places similarly replete with
single women, is presented as an authority on the subject. In a letter to Lord Peter she
describes the relationship between Mary Whittaker and Vera Findlater:
. . . Miss Findlater has evidently quite a “pash” (as we used to call it at
school) for Miss Whittaker, and I am afraid none of us are above being
flattered by such outspoken admiration. I must say, I think it rather
unhealthy—you may remember Miss Clemence Dane’s very clever book on
the subject—I have seen so much of that kind of thing in my rather
WOMAN-RIDDEN existence! It has such a bad effect, as a rule, upon the
weaker character of the two— . (84) 6

The so-called “pash” does indeed have an unfortunate effect upon the weaker Miss
Findlater, as she is later murdered by her unscrupulous friend Mary Whittaker.
Crucially, it is Miss Climpson’s ability to detect from within a domestic situation; in
this case a vicarage sewing party, which provides vital clues to the identity and nature of
Mary Whittaker.
Mary Whittaker compounds her offences against “home” when she creates the
false identity of “Mrs Forrest”, and an equally false residence in South Audley Street.
She invites Wimsey, who is also operating under an alias, of Mr Templeton, to visit her.
The flat, Parker has informed Wimsey, is “furnished by contract from a Regent Street

6
The book is probably Regiment of Women, described in Stephan Clarke’s The Lord Peter Wimsey
Companion as “a devastating study of a girls’ school.” Clemence Dane was the pseudonym of Winifred
Ashton, a fellow member of the Detection Club.
164

establishment” (75). Adding to the theatrical nature of her “home” is Mrs Forrest’s
pantomime appearance. She is described by the narrator as resembling, “a young prince
out of the Arabian Nights” (171). Although Wimsey does not recognise Mrs Forrest as
Mary Whittaker, he does recognise her behaviour as melodramatic. The visit becomes
even more extraordinary when Wimsey realises that Mrs Forrest wants him to “make
love to her” (173). Wimsey kisses her forcibly and the kiss reveals much:
He knew then. No one who has ever encountered it can ever again mistake
that awful shrinking, that uncontrollable revulsion of the flesh against a
caress that is nauseous. He thought for a moment that she was going to be
actually sick. (174)

A less accomplished lover than Wimsey may have taken this personally, but to
him it is proof of artifice. His expertise in love-making alerts him to Mrs Forrest’s
inauthenticity, if not her criminality, something which the pedestrian and pure Charles
Parker could never hope to do.7 Wimsey tells Parker later in the investigation that he is
sure that Mrs Forrest had never had a husband, let alone a lover because “you can’t
mistake real inexperience” (210). As Wimsey leaves Mrs Forrest’s flat he sees in her
face, “such a fury of fear and rage as turned his blood to water” (175). Wimsey has
escaped from the lair of the Medusa. When Wimsey finally does make the connection
between Mrs Forrest and Mary Whittaker he realises that she was planning to murder
him with an injection of air. In other words, he has narrowly escaped being penetrated
by the criminal and sexual “other,” embodied in the person of Mary Whittaker.8 Mary
Whittaker’s transgressions against home are extreme, and signal the wider threat to
society of the failure of this construct. She flouts her responsibilities as a niece,
employer, friend and nurse. Her suicide in a police cell leaves Wimsey feeling “cold
and sick” (277), signalling that her malignant behaviour has a visceral effect upon the
“imperial detective”.
Like Sayers, James situates one of her most troubling characters, Garry Ashe, in a
deeply dysfunctional domestic environment. A Certain Justice, published in 1997,
maps a version of domesticity which entirely eschews the conventional requirements of
7
Wimsey’s experience as a lover is intimated in the “biography” written by his Uncle Paul Delagardie
(Unnatural Death 282). It is further reinforced on his wedding night with Harriet Vane in Busman’s
Honeymoon (69).
8
This is just one of Sayers’s inventive, if unrealistic murder methods. P. D. James has pointed out that
for this method to be effective, the required size of the syringe would be such that the “patient would be
more likely to die of shock on beholding it than from any effects of injected air” (Talking about Detective
Fiction 92).
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home. It is a place of fear and violence, of sexual abuse and excess. It is filthy,
decaying and literally condemned by society and, pivotally, its inhabitant, Garry Ashe,
is a psychopath. A social menace, devoid of morals and of empathy, Ashe is the
ultimate threat to home, his psychological state placing him beyond its nurturing reach.
At the same time, his outward appearance masks his psychopathic nature, allowing him
entrance to other people’s homes. James appears equivocal about the genesis of his
psychopathy. Ashe can be read as a failure of home and of society, and simultaneously
as a threat to these constructs. The narrative relates his abusive childhood as well as his
perpetuation of the cycle of violence upon his foster families. The manner and location
of Ashe’s death reinforce his position on the fringes of society. Ashe dies in his
favourite place, a marshland, a liminal space between sea and shore. When, at the
climax of the novel, Dalgliesh gives Piers Tarrant the order to fire on Ashe, it is the only
occasion in the entire series when Dalgliesh orchestrates the death of a criminal.
James has been described as a “condition of England” writer, in the vein of the
classic realist nineteenth-century novelists (Rowland 196). Louise Harrington further
suggests that James can be regarded as:
. . . a successor not only to Christie and Sayers, but also to Gaskell and
Dickens: all of her work is concerned with the state of modern Britain, the
decline of traditional Englishness, and an elegiac recognition of the wilful
absence of faith. (497)

Embedding James in the tradition of classical realism suggests a way of reading

domestic detail in her narratives. Catherine Belsey in Critical Practice argues that:
Classic realism cannot foreground contradiction. The logic of its structure—
the movement towards closure—precludes the possibility of leaving the
reader simply to confront the contradictions which the text may have
defined. . . . When contradiction exists in classic realism it does so in the
margins of a text which . . . is unable, in spite of itself, to achieve the
coherence which is the project of classic realism. (68)

The marginalia of the Dalgliesh novels is instructive, therefore, in revealing the

contradictions of the narratives. Domestic details reveal insoluble narrative elements
which, while existing on the edges of the text, gain momentum with each appearance in
the series. In the case of Garry Ashe it is the very worst version of home, in the
Dalgliesh series, which most clearly denotes a link to the fate of England as a nation.
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Ashe not only murders his aunt, Rita O’Keefe, (despite being found not guilty, he
clearly is), but also his former carer Michael Cole, seemingly the only person who loved
him as a boy. He also murders Janet Carpenter, and almost cuts his “girlfriend”
Octavia’s throat, before being gunned down by the police. In what is a very
complicated plot, Ashe is paid by Janet Carpenter to court Octavia Cummins, the young
naive daughter of the barrister Venetia Aldridge. When Ashe invites Octavia to his
home, its description is filtered through her point of view. She smells “years of
inadequate cleaning, of rotting food, of unwashed dishes” (83) but notes that Ashe has
attempted to impose order on his aunt’s chaotic home. The tour of the house continues
with a further descent into hell, symbolised by his aunt’s bedroom, “The room was
bathed in a red light. . . . The air was suffused with redness. It was like breathing
blood” (84). The nadir of the tour is the couch. Here, as Ashe tells Octavia, his aunt
Rita had sex with clients while he watched (85). Ashe then takes Octavia to his
darkroom and develops a photograph of his aunt lying on the couch, her throat cut. The
climax of this surfeit of symbolism occurs when Ashe produces a ruby ring for Octavia,
and Octavia recognises it from the photograph of the murdered woman. When
questioned, Ashe bluntly denies its provenance, and Octavia meekly accepts the ring
with its “blood-red stone,” (92) metaphorically binding her fate to Hades.
Garry Ashe shows the naive Octavia his home as a test of her gullibility. She,
portrayed as desperate for affection which her mother cannot provide, accepts him
wholly, despite his hideous dwelling and odd behaviour. Octavia, the innocent, travels
from her mother’s expensive and well-kept house in an exclusive suburb to this
dilapidated and fetid location with Ashe, very much as the colonial tourist might do, an
idea I discuss in Chapter Three. In this case however, Octavia sides with the “other,”
with the psychopathic Garry Ashe, ignoring her mother’s warnings about his
murderous, incestuous character.9 Venetia Aldridge’s lack of warmth and love for her
daughter is the reason, the text implies, for Octavia’s emotional immaturity. In
addition, Venetia’s failure to provide an appropriate home for her daughter, it seems,
leaves Octavia unable to recognise Ashe’s home as a distortion and perversion of
domesticity. However, Venetia too is a product of an emotionally stunted family,
suggesting strongly that the failure of home has repercussions across generations.
Ashe is not only a symbol of the failure of an individual home, but also of a
cultural canker corroding English society. As Ashe takes Octavia into the hall he shows

9
Venetia tells her daughter that Ashe and his aunt “almost certainly” (67) were lovers, information which
Octavia ignores.
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her the walls of the passage, “views of mountains, lakes, cathedrals, piazzas” pasted
over with pictures of, “naked women, legs parted, naked breasts and buttocks, pouted
lips and male torsos with genitalia caged in shiny black pouches” (83). Octavia
expresses praise for this creation and asks Ashe where he found the pictures:
‘Magazines mostly. Auntie’s men brought them in for her. Some I stole.’
‘From libraries?’
She remembered reading about two men who had done that, a playwright
and his lover. They had covered their flat walls with prints from stolen
library books and had been found out. Hadn’t they gone to prison? (84).
(italics added)

The italicized words were added by James to an earlier draft, (Girton MS) making it
clear that she is referring to the playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell.
Orton and Halliwell did go to prison for stealing and defacing library books. Orton
altered the text, or in fact invented text for the inside cover of novels. Orton’s work was
said, by Halliwell, to be “a criticism of what the books contained. . . . The target for
most of this mischief was Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey Whodunits” (Lahr 95).
Given James’s well documented admiration of Sayers this offence is indeed serious.
Orton and Halliwell were sentenced to six months incarceration after being found guilty
of “stealing seventy-two library books and, ‘wilfully’ (the word was carefully typed
over ‘unlawfully’ in the court citation) damaging a number of books which included the
removal of 1,653 plates from art books” (Lahr 94). Orton and Halliwell shared a bedsit
in Islington, the walls of which were covered by a collage of these stolen illustrations.
Kenneth Halliwell, who eventually murdered Orton, regarded the collage as an art work
for which he hoped to gain recognition. This did not come to pass. Instead he is
remembered for the especially brutal murder of Orton. James’s reference to Orton and
Halliwell suggests a parallel with the relationship between Ashe and his aunt Rita
O’Keefe, one conducted outside of the notions traditionally associated with “home”.10
Using Marangoly George’s definition of “shelter, comfort, nurture and protection”(1),
clearly these versions of home are bereft of any of these qualities. The violence bred in

10
There is also an implied parallel between the house of Garry Ashe and that of the serial killers Fred and
Rosemary West. Over a twenty year period Frederick West murdered at least 12 young women,
including his first wife and two of his daughters. Rosemary West, who also operated as a prostitute, was
a willing accomplice in many of these crimes. The bodies of some of the victims were buried on the
premises. (See Geoffrey Wansell, An Evil Love.)
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such domestic situations points to a textual anxiety about the failure of home in James’s
England.
There is also an identifiable literary antecedent for Ashe and his relationship with
Octavia. P. D. James cites Graham Greene as one of her major literary influences (as
noted in my Introduction) and this is evident in the storyline of A Certain Justice which
is similar to Greene’s Brighton Rock.11 Greene’s protagonist, Pinkie Brown, shares
Ashe’s psychopathic nature.12 Brown’s childhood home of Paradise Piece in Brighton
is the literary predecessor of the domestic squalor experienced by Garry Ashe. It is also
a symbol of the afterlife of suburban misery, which no amount of urban regeneration
can entirely erase. Both products of unsatisfactory homes, Pinkie and Ashe lure naive
girls into a sham romance and use them to their advantage. Pinkie marries the young
waitress Rose in order to ensure that she cannot testify against him in a murder case.
She misinterprets his deviousness for love and almost dies as a result. Pinkie, like
Ashe, dies a violent death. Both Octavia and Rose survive their murderous lovers, but
not without scars. In both cases, a dysfunctional home produces not only an amoral
killer, but also their willing victim, implying that English society pays a high price for
the failure of home.
The postscript to the character of Ashe is his link to Inspector Kate Miskin.
Octavia Cummins, despite being almost murdered by Ashe, still holds romantic feelings
for him. She confides to Kate Miskin that Ashe “never had a chance” (472) because he
began life in the Ellison Fairweather buildings, a place of “shouting, ugliness, stinking
flats, [and] broken windows” (473). Kate Miskin, an escapee from the same domestic
war zone, feels contempt and pity for Octavia’s naivety. Miskin, whose character is
repeatedly related to her housing-estate childhood, is nevertheless proof that an
underprivileged child can make good. There is an overt textual message that poor
housing is not an excuse for “unruly” behaviour, and that England still offers
opportunities for those who wish to be self-reliant and honest.
James articulates this idea most emphatically in The Private Patient when the
investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn, herself a product of a childhood marred by
violence, muses:
But this is where I came from, these are my people, the upper working class

11
James states that this novel “adumbrates Greene’s preoccupation with the moral ambiguity of evil
which is at the heart of his creativity…” (Talking About Detective Fiction 14).
12
Margery Allingham’s 1958 novel Hide My Eyes features the character of Gerry, a young man who
commits murder without guilt, and is described as a “cold-blooded monster” (224). His actions are very
like those of Pinkie and Garry Ashe, but he does survive to face arrest.
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merging into the middle class, that amorphous unregarded group who
fought the country’s wars, paid their taxes, clung to what remained of their
traditions. They had lived to see their simple patriotism derided, their
morality despised, their savings devalued. They caused no trouble.
Millions of pounds of public money wasn’t regularly siphoned into their
neighbourhoods in the hope of bribing, cajoling or coercing them into civil
virtue. If they protested that their cities had become alien, their children
taught in overcrowded schools where ninety per cent of the children spoke
no English, they were lectured about the cardinal sin of racism by those
more expensively and comfortably circumstanced. (34) (author’s emphasis)

It is difficult not to read this as authorial intrusion, given James’s politics. The use of
“alien” to describe the state of English cities reflects the ongoing concern of
multiculturalism. The people of “Middle England” can no longer recognise their own
country. And yet, as James’s points out, these people express their Englishness
precisely in their adherence to law and order, claiming this as an ethnically English
characteristic. In addition, the text implies, criminals such as Garry Ashe are not
entitled to the mitigating excuse of a deprived childhood because characters like Kate
Miskin and Rhoda Gradwyn can rise above such disadvantages. “Unruly” figures like
Ashe threaten not only the English home, but the orderly English way of life endorsed
by these texts.

Unsatisfactory Homes
Throughout the series, Wimsey and Dalgliesh encounter homes which, while not as
depraved or corrupt as that of Whittaker and Ashe, still register as unsatisfactory. The
home of George and Sheila Fentiman in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is a
site of tension and despair which Wimsey finds “tiring” (70). Dalgliesh finds the
tasteless and cheap furnishings in the Pullen house, “profoundly depressing” in Cover
Her Face (138). The homes of Celia Calthrop in James’s Unnatural Causes and Agatha
Twitterton in Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon are depicted as lacking a vital element, in
this case, a satisfactory partner. A romance novelist and spinster, Miss Calthrop has
converted a stone cottage into a showpiece for her readers. Rosemary Cottage is
described scathingly as inauthentic and ridiculous, as is the character herself. Her house
has been transformed from “a pleasing if shabby stone house to the romanticised ideal
of her readers.” Reinforcing her aesthetic shortcomings the interior is “pretentious and
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tasteless” (16). Celia Calthrop’s idea of an authentic English cottage includes a

thatched roof, herb garden, artificial pond and a dovecote, described variously as,
“sinister”, “malodorous” (16) or in some way blemished. Underlining Miss Calthrop’s
superficial nature is her inability to recognise the intrinsic worth of Jane Dalgliesh,
Adam Dalgliesh’s closest living relative, doubly damning her judgement.
Celia Calthrop’s home is portrayed as false and ridiculous, a trompe l'œil rather
than an authentically English home. Unlike the unquestionably English stately homes,
James’s “Cheverell Manor” and Sayers’s “Duke’s Denver” discussed in Chapter One,
Calthrop’s home is derided for a lack of authenticity. Rather than reflecting a truly
English character, covered with the patina of age and good taste, she has created a
flawed pastiche of English culture. She too is described as childless, afflicted with, “all
the yearning of frustrated motherhood” (29). Her maternal instincts are denied her, and
her romantic life too is unsatisfactory. After Maurice Seton’s bizarre death (he is found
dead in a dinghy, minus his hands) she recalls her feelings for him, feelings which were
not reciprocated:
Perhaps it had never been love as she imagined love to be. But it had been
as close as she would ever get to that longed-for, elusive, oft-imagined
cataclysm. She had dealt with its counterfeit in nearly forty novels; but the
coin itself had never come within her grasp. (54)

The irony of Celia Calthrop’s loveless life is evident. Her life and her house are painted
in terms of hollowness and inauthenticity, and it must be said, some pathos.
Agnes Twitterton in Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon is also characterised through
her home. The spinster’s house is a cottage with “three yellow-brick sides and a red-
brick front, like the uglier kind of doll’s house” (48). James uses this same description
in Unnatural Causes when Sylvia Kedge’s house, Tanner’s Cottage, is described as a
“squat, ugly doll’s house” (186). Kedge too is an unhappy spinster, but one who
becomes a murderer. The more law-abiding Miss Twitterton in Sayers’s narrative
describes her own house as “a little lonely” (49). Agatha Twitterton is unmarried and
unhappily so. Her lack of fulfilment, in the terms of the text, is both sexual and
maternal and is manifested in her dwelling, a house which is ugly, and ultimately unable
to provide safety and nurturing. Miss Twitterton occupies a liminal space in her social
strata. She, as Frank Crutchley viciously points out, is the daughter of a cowman who
married above his station (276). Miss Twitterton in her unhappy spinster status,
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however, is always marked as yearning for something more and her house is a reflection
of her desiccated life.13 Her blighted romance with the unscrupulous murderer Frank
Crutchley is amplified in its pathos by its contrast with the passionate relationship of
Harriet and Peter Wimsey. Miss Twitterton’s flaw, like Celia Calthrop’s, seems to lie in
her inability to accept her single status. Sayers’s Miss Climpson and James’s Jane
Dalgliesh, by contrast, act as the exemplars of a single woman living a satisfactory life.

Other People’s Houses

In order to carry out their imperial duties in the domestic context, Wimsey and
Dalgliesh need to be just as capable of examining the minutiae of a suspect’s room as
they are grappling with them in a lethal struggle. Rosemary Marangoly George states
that:
In fact, imperial literature can be read as the imagining of one’s (domestic)
ideology in an expanded space. . . .What becomes clear however, with the
advent of the imperial novel is that the tales and tasks of home-making
(understood to be gendered female) are not very different from the tales and
tasks of house-keeping on the national or imperial scale (usually gendered
masculine). (4-5)

According to George, therefore, the colonial administrator and the colonial housewife
carry out the same functions, on a different scale. Putting the native population to work
in the home or in the fields maintains the same imperial power balance, ensuring that
the colonisers maintain the upper hand. Following on from this argument, one can gain
insight into the seemingly paradoxical roles of Wimsey and Dalgliesh in recognising
that carrying out a British regime of domesticity in the home is as much a part of
imperialism as using the labour of colonised people in agriculture or industrial tasks.
The promulgation of British values is the result.
Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, in their 1898 domestic handbook, The
Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, state emphatically that “an Indian household
can no more be governed peacefully without dignity and prestige, than an Indian
Empire” (9). The authors make the coupling of housekeeping and empire even more
explicit in their preface. They complain that it is now difficult to determine the fair
price of a household commodity because lax housekeepers pay too much, and these

13
Jill Paton Walsh rescues Miss Twitterton from eternal spinsterhood by providing her with a Polish
husband in Presumption of Death.
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women are in fact, “sinning against a society the great mass of which is poor beyond
belief” (vii). In the same passage the authors refer to their intended audience as
“housemothers” assuming that these women are both housekeepers and mothers.
However, the political aspect of housekeeping is made explicit in their advice to new
brides in India; that their activities affect the native population as well as themselves,
and that their role as British housemothers carries the responsibility of fairness to the
population of colonised people. They are, in other words, as much a part of the imperial
enterprise in India as are those colonists who work outside the home.
Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner provide advice for the British in India, but
14
Isabella Beeton directs advice to those at home. She provides information on the
management of servants and states that:
‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’ saith the proverb, and ‘order’ is in the next
degree; the housemaid then, may be said to be the handmaiden to two of the
most prominent virtues. (287) (author’s emphasis)

The “imperial detective,” like the housemaid, works on restoring cleanliness and order
after the crime of murder. On the most basic level, the detective finds and arrests the
culprit, thereby removing the contagion of criminality from society, cleansing it of
maleficence. As David Grossvogel suggests, when writing of Agatha Christie’s work,
“The pity of murder is that, as slugs ruin lettuce beds . . . murder spoils what was
otherwise good” (256). It is the detective’s role to remove the “slugs” and restore
goodness, or at least order, to the society in which it occurred. An examination of the
methodology of the detective reveals many parallels with the work of domestic servants.
When the detective approaches the scene of a crime, he looks for what is missing,
askew or in other words disordered. The process of looking for clues involves
searching for dust, footmarks, fingerprints, just as a housemaid does. The ability of the
detective to find these domestic aberrations indicates that he too knows how a house
should be, and that his work is to return it to its ideal state.
Wimsey, like a well-trained housemaid, can assess a room or crime scene with
unerring accuracy. He practises his own form of “domestic watchfulness”, just as Miss
Climpson and Miss Marple do. Lord Peter’s first investigation, in a flat in Battersea,

14
Flora Annie Steel was “an independently minded Scotswoman who married a civil servant and
accompanied him to India in 1868.” Jenny Sharpe further reports that Steel learned to read and write
several languages while in India, and berated other colonial women for not doing the same. Steel clearly
took her role as an Imperial “housemother” seriously, stating in her autobiography that hundreds of Indian
women gathered to farewell her when she left India (Sharpe 92).
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sees him discussing the problem of soot; “I see you’re troubled here with the soot
blowing in. Beastly nuisance, ain’t it? I get it, too—spoils all my books, you know”
(Whose Body? 17). The soot turns out to be a clue, of course, but Wimsey frames it in a
domestic context, demonstrating that he knows how to read for cleanliness, as well as
crime. Soon afterwards Wimsey scrutinises Sir Reuben Levy’s bedroom, paying close
attention to the missing man’s hat, boots, and hairbrush. Wimsey extracts a vital clue
from these personal belongings and the investigation gathers pace. His acute
percipience is contrasted with his friend Charles Parker, who gathers evidence in a
slower and more pedestrian fashion.
Many of Wimsey’s cases are solved through his assessment of a domestic scene,
and his unerring ability to identify that which is out of place. Like a housekeeper, he
looks for dust (Gaudy Night 301), he examines linen (Clouds of Witness 83) and
clothing (The Nine Tailors 143) and he finds footprints which do not match (Whose
Body? 57). While inspecting the lecture room in Gaudy Night Wimsey demonstrates his
considerable domestic acumen. He discovers dust on a door sill but concedes that the
linoleum has been “honourably swept and polished” (301). Having made his appraisal,
he then orders Bunter, his manservant, to clean the doors to which fingerprint powder
has been applied, just as a housekeeper would instruct a maid. Wimsey’s acuity is a
combination of domestic knowledge and finely honed skill. As Wimsey says of himself
he was, “Built noticin’—improved by practice” (“Footsteps that Ran” 148).
Such attention to domestic detail opens up the interstices of the everyday. The
Wimsey and the Dalgliesh novels are part of a series, both of which build and repeat
ideas and motifs as the narratives progress. Laurie Langbauer makes the point that it
was the combination of the series and the everyday which drew her to Victorian novels
as an adolescent reader. The attraction of the books for her was, “That they were so
long already and seemed to go on forever in a series meant I was plunged into a world
whose repetitiveness and minuteness of detail substituted for a dailiness I felt at the time
I lacked . . .” (1). This combination of attention to the everyday, and the promise of an
ongoing narrative is one also offered by the detective series, and one which builds and
extends notions of an English identity which is elucidated through a particular version
of domesticity.
Lord Peter Wimsey, despite being endowed with the highly competent valet
Mervyn Bunter, is capable of enacting this version of domesticity in his attention to
everyday household tasks. His ability to recreate what Laurie Langbauer has termed
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“dailiness” enables Wimsey to solve a crime. Langbauer makes the point, through
Anthony Trollope’s writing, that the everyday is a construct:
As an exercise in ordinary language, Trollope’s novels define the everyday
not as the real, however, but as a medium, a formal quality. The everyday is
not so much the province of a certain social position or class, but the culture
that fosters them, the glue that holds them all together. (96-97)

It is this “glue” that is of interest to the detective. In his collection of evidence he asks
the suspects about their daily activities. In examining the victim he asks “What did s/he
eat? Where did s/he go? What was his or her routine?” Henri Lefebvre states that
“violence, death, catastrophe” are the antithesis of the everyday (11), yet in detective
fiction the catastrophe of murder is solved through the accumulation of, as Langbauer
puts it, “minute details” and of the reconstruction of the last movements, meal or
clothing of the deceased. This “dailiness” is integral to the construction of a noticeably
English practice of domesticity within the detective narratives of both Sayers and
James.
Five Red Herrings, published in 1931 is, of all Sayers’s books, the closest to a
“clue puzzle”, a form which “invited and empowered the careful reader to solve the
problem along with the detective” (Knight, Form and Ideology 107). The mystery is
built around the intricacies of Scottish railway timetables and the daily routine of the
suspects involved. Set in Galloway, it depicts Lord Peter Wimsey holidaying among a
community of painters. It is the only novel in which Wimsey encounters murder
outside of England and it begins with all the trappings of a colonial adventure story.
Wimsey, the English tourist, motors through the Scottish countryside, mapping the area
as he goes. As a tourist he is differentiated from the local inhabitants by his “correct”
speech against their Scottish dialect. However, the crucial detective work carried out by
Wimsey is not through surveying, or charting vast stretches of Scottish coastline like
Buchan’s Richard Hannay, but rather by cataloguing the elements of a murderer’s
breakfast. It is through the exact reconstruction of domestic details that Wimsey, and
only Wimsey, arrives at the identity of the murderer.
Despite his aristocratic upbringing, Wimsey understands domesticity. He
demonstrates this on several occasions, serving Bovril to the distressed Sheila Fentiman
in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (184) and discovering the vital clue of the
Bradenham ham in Unnatural Death (67). In the course of his investigation in Five Red
Herrings, he interviews Mrs Green, who is the housekeeper of both Campbell, the
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murder victim, and his neighbour, Ferguson. Ferguson is the murderer. Ascertaining
who eats kippers and who eats eggs and bacon is the turning point of the mystery.
Wimsey makes this clear when, at the end of the novel, he carries out a re-enactment of
the murder, cooking and eating both breakfasts. In doing so Wimsey is replaying the
everyday actions of the murderer and creating a narrative from the seemingly
insignificant details of his domestic life. His knowledge of domesticity combined with
his attention to the minute details of the everyday reveals that the murderer can only be
Campbell’s neighbour. The sundry other clues of printing implements, car magnetos
and painting impedimenta confirm Wimsey’s theory which rests, quite literally, on the
kitchen table.
Along with the ability to appraise the minutiae of a room Adam Dalgliesh, like
Wimsey and indeed all sound fictional detectives, has extraordinary visual powers.15
He uses these powers to make an instant, and covert, assessment of a room:
Dalgliesh had developed a knack of taking in the salient features of a room
without that preliminary frank appraisal which he himself would have found
offensive from any stranger, let alone a policeman. It was odd, he
sometimes thought, that a man morbidly sensitive about his own privacy
should have chosen a job that required him to invade almost daily the
privacy of others. But people’s living-space, and the personal possessions
with which they surrounded themselves, were inevitably fascinating to a
detective, an affirmation of identity, intriguing both in themselves and as a
betrayal of character, interests, obsessions. (Taste for Death 240-1)

The self-aware Dalgliesh recognises that his role leans towards voyeurism but, the text
infers, his moral compass will always prevent this eventuality. Part of his essential skill
as a detective is the ability to look without being seen. With it comes the ability to
discern character and its complex parts from inspecting a person’s home. Dalgliesh can
conduct surveillance in front of his suspects, so acute is his vision and so vast his bank
of knowledge. His skill, like Wimsey’s is one carefully honed through practise and
experience.
Along with his superior vision, Dalgliesh, like Wimsey, harbours more ordinary
abilities of a domestic nature. During Devices and Desires, Dalgliesh supplies the

15
I am referring to Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and
Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff who are all endowed with extraordinary vision. For a discussion of the
historic link between the heightened vision of the detective and photography, see Ronald Thomas,
Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (111-130).
176

exhausted policeman Rickards with a meal he has cooked himself. He points out to
Rickards that learning to cook is crucial for someone who does not wish to be
“dependent on someone else for one of the essentials of life” (312). Dalgliesh’s
domestic abilities ensure his independence. In his professional life however, Dalgliesh
does depend on his colleagues, and the Scene of Crime team, to do much of the physical
work of dusting, photographing and measuring of the scene. He, like a housekeeper, is
in charge of these people, and he makes the decision as to when the corpse is removed,
and the site cleared. In other words, he gives the orders that result in the murder scene
being tidied, cleaned and returned to normal.

Keeping House
Wimsey and Dalgliesh keep house for England. In doing so, they keep the peace and
maintain order. Robert MacDonald cites General Gordon as one imperial servant who
was mythologised in this fashion. The story of his life was “a touchstone of the sacred
mission of empire, a key to imperial meaning. Here surely was one of those
Englishmen whose duty, as Baden-Powell put it, was to clean the world” (88). While
the world has been reduced to the confines of England for Wimsey and Dalgliesh, they
carry out a similar role. Within the texts they also encounter those with the official title
of housekeeper, and these characters say much about the state of the English nation.
The role of the housekeeper is to maintain domestic order and in Wimsey’s world they
do it with aplomb. The housekeeper at “Duke’s Denver” has the reassuring name of
Mrs Sweetapple, and knows more of the Wimsey family portraits than does Lord Peter
(Busman’s 372). The formidable Mrs Mitcham in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona
Club is sure of her own status, and absolutely sure when it comes to the status of others.
After being questioned by the affable policeman Charles Parker Nellie, the young maid,
suggests that he is a gentleman. Mrs Mitcham quickly corrects her error, relegating
Parker to his proper status, saying “No, Nellie—gentlemanlike I will not deny, but a
policeman is a person, and I will trouble you to remember it” (169).16 The officious
housekeeper, Mrs Gates, in The Nine Tailors is equally concerned with class and
perceives it as her duty to communicate this to the rest of the community. These
women are contrasted with those who are “daily women” like the loquacious Mrs
Ruddle in Busman’s Honeymoon or Emily, the maid in The Nine Tailors, whose class

16
Mrs Mitcham here is at odds with Lord Baden-Powell, who states in Scouting for Boys that “A London
policeman, for instance, is a gentleman, because he is well disciplined, loyal, polite, brave, good-
tempered, and helpful to women and children” (146).
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and influence are inferior to that of the imposing housekeepers. Cut to an identical
pattern, the housekeepers Wimsey encounters are as predictable as a railway timetable,
and therefore no cause for concern.
The rigid figures of Mrs Mitcham and Mrs Gates are absent from Shrewsbury
College, Oxford and, perhaps as a result, domestic harmony is undone. Annie Wilson,
the “scout” or servant in Gaudy Night is the instigator of a number of social crimes.
Before arriving at the college, she has already transgressed class lines by marrying a
young scholar, thereby moving above her station. When her husband’s budding career
is ruined by a (quite justified) charge of plagiarism he commits suicide, forcing Annie
into service. Annie, totally unsympathetic to the principle of academic rigour, exacts
her revenge on the scholarly community of women at Shrewsbury College. Her
principal target is Miss de Vine who uncovered her husband’s scholastic crime, but the
entire college is in her sights, including the temporary visitor, Harriet Vane. Annie
writes “poison pen” letters, desecrates the chapel and library and creates a climate of
tension and fear. The learned peace of Oxford is disrupted by a dishonest servant who
unpicks the fabric of Shrewsbury from within. When she is brought to account it is not
by Harriet Vane, the alumna of Shrewsbury, but by the Balliol graduate Wimsey.
Wimsey, in his identification of the troublesome servant, restores order to the
community of Shrewsbury College.
Annie Wilson uses her position of trust to create terror within her employer’s
house. Agatha Christie, almost twenty years later, presents her antithesis, the
housekeeper Lucy Eyelesbarrow, who is the heroine of 4.50 from Paddington. Lucy,
who holds a First in Mathematics from Oxford (551), decides that domestic service is a
more promising career than academia and becomes a sensation within wealthy society.
Her reputation boasts that “once she came into a house, all worry, anxiety and hard
work went out of it” (552). Lucy, with Miss Marple’s guidance, is also, literally, an in-
house detective during the novel. From within “Rutherford Hall”, an iconic country
house, she is able to obtain information which would otherwise remain hidden, and
thereby assists Miss Marple in solving a murder. Christie’s novel was first published in
1957, two decades after the final Wimsey novel, and just predating Adam Dalgliesh.
Lucy is described as somewhere between a mirage and a magician which suggests that
domestic harmony might be more of a dream than a reality for Christie. Significantly,
Lucy Eyelesbarrow reinforces the importance of domestic detail in the narrative of
classical detection, as part of the creation and re-creation of a recognisably English
identity.
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In the post-war world of Adam Dalgliesh the dream of domestic peace has lurched
towards a nightmare for most characters. Housekeepers, however, are a consistent
presence in the Dalgliesh narratives, appearing in almost every novel. They operate, I
contend, as a signal of the state of the nation. In the early novels these women often
resemble Sayers’s Mrs Gates or a servant from Wimsey’s world. Martha Bultitaft in
Cover Her Face presents a grimmer version of the matronly cook Mrs Pettican from
Sayers’s Strong Poison. However, as the series progresses these women metamorphose
into caricatures of their 1930s compatriots. The eccentric Miss Collins is described as
having taken on a “calculated persona” in Shroud for a Nightingale (114). Mrs Demery
in Original Sin and Mrs McBride in A Taste for Death are equally pantomime in their
Cockney sparrow dialect and faux Irish brogue respectively. Although these characters
are confident within their world, they are exaggerated in their patois, as if acting out
their role.
Such jaunty characters, however, are replaced by a much more uncertain woman
as time goes on. In the later novels of P. D. James the housekeeper is middle aged or
elderly, middle class, well-spoken and often reminds Adam Dalgliesh of his clerical
childhood. When, in A Certain Justice, Dalgliesh meets Janet Carpenter, he thinks of
her in literary terms:
Here was one of Miss Barbara Pym’s excellent women, a dying breed no
doubt, even in country parishes, but once as much a part of the Church of
England as sung evensong, an occasional irritant to the vicar’s wife, but an
indispensable prop to the parish; Sunday school superintendent, arranger of
flowers, polisher of brass, scourge of choirboys and comforter of favoured
curates. Even the names came back to him, a sad roll-call of gentle
nostalgic regret: Miss Moxon, Miss Nightingale, Miss Dutton-Smith. (192)

The housekeeper is inextricably bound up with nostalgia because she is a “dying breed”
and the death is deeply regretted. She symbolises an England past, not only the England
of Dalgliesh’s clerical childhood, but more generally of an apparently calmer, more
civilized and safer England.
However, Dalgliesh misrecognises Janet Carpenter. Although he initially regards
her as a familiar figure, he is unaware of the grief and rage with which she is burdened.
Janet Carpenter experienced, within a short time, the death of her son, the murder of her
young granddaughter and subsequently, her daughter-in-law’s suicide. Carpenter is
murdered by Garry Ashe, but not before she writes a detailed account of these events,
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and most significantly of her psychological and religious pain. Janet Carpenter states
that she “knew with certainty that God was dead” (380). Dalgliesh’s “excellent
woman” of the parish is not only exiled from life, but from God. In the world of
James’s fiction, this is the worst possible fate to which one can be consigned.
Within the parade of “excellent women”, however Janet Carpenter is the
exception. The others are exactly what they seem to be. Dalgliesh is comfortable in the
presence of these women and they with him. After all, he has his own housekeeper.
Although she is mentioned only once, in The Black Tower, Mrs Mack demonstrates the
qualities of absolute reliability and honesty upon which, in James’s fiction, this
construct rests (560). Meg Dennison in Devices and Desires, Mrs Buckley in A Certain
Justice, Margaret Munroe in Death in Holy Orders, Tally Clutton in The Murder Room,
and Mrs Burbridge in The Lighthouse all fit the title of “excellent women”. Of the five I
have named, two are murdered and one only just survives an attempted murder. Even
the seamstress, Mrs Burbridge, has her intricate clerical embroidery despoiled when the
murderous Dan Padgett spreads the newly finished cope over a bloody corpse
(Lighthouse 253). These characters are always white, widowed, and motherly and are
depicted as attempting to make their way in an increasingly foreign country. They
respond to Dalgliesh as a figure of certainty and reliability, one of the last recognisable
figures from their past lives. Their lives are defined not only by their personal pasts, but
by the nation’s history. They are characters in exile, dislocated from contemporary
English society.
Exile and isolation are encapsulated in the story of Mrs Buckley, motifs replicated
in the stories of all the “excellent women” encountered by Dalgliesh. The widow of an
Anglican minister, Mrs Buckley sells her home in Cambridge and gives the money to
her son, who promptly emigrates to Canada. She then moves to a cottage in
Hertfordshire, her childhood county, a decision that proves to be a mistake. Mrs
Buckley’s new home, and her happiness in the new parish, is threatened by the new
estate “on the fringes of the village” (208). The vicar’s attempts to lure the young
people from this new estate include the singing of “Happy Birthday” during church
services; a disruption of the liturgy and solemnity of her Anglican faith. This departure
from tradition alienates Mrs Buckley from the institution to which she is most attached.
Mrs Buckley’s Anglican faith, like that of the other “excellent women” is fundamental
to her Weltanschauung. The adulteration of her Anglican faith is symbolic of the
erosion of English values in contemporary society. This idea is made explicit in
Devices and Desires when Meg Dennison, housekeeper to the elderly Reverend Copley
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and his wife thinks: “Sometime she saw the three of them as expatriates, stranded in
some remote colony, obstinately adhering to old customs, a lost way of life, as they did
to old forms of worship” (121). England itself has become a “colony”. Once again, the
state of the Anglican Church, and the disruption of its traditions alienates those it has
traditionally served, and by implication exposes the cracks in English society.

The Marriage Act

Although the housekeeper charts the state of English domesticity and its wider society
throughout the novels, it is the detective’s own intimate relationships which most
clearly evince imperial standards of domesticity. Within the Wimsey and Dalgliesh
series, the sanctioned version of home, for the detective, is firmly bound to the idea of
marriage. In order for an authentic home to be achieved, a marriage of partners of equal
status, each fulfilling their prescribed gender role, is necessary. The last four Wimsey
novels, and the final four of the Dalgliesh series chart the courtship, engagement and
finally marriage of the “imperial detective”. The way in which these relationships
unfold is as significant as their final union. Both pairings create a marriage of canonical
Englishness. However, despite Wimsey and Dalgliesh being the most sensitive and
gentle of men, they both meet their “significant other” in situations decidedly to the
woman’s disadvantage. The way in which the detective operates as an imperial lover
thus requires examination.
Wimsey first sees Harriet Vane in the dock in Strong Poison where she stands
accused of murder. He is simultaneously smitten with desire and convinced of her
innocence. Wimsey presents himself to Harriet as a champion on her behalf. His offer
to free her from wrongful imprisonment is coupled with an offer of marriage. She,
worn out with life, rebuffs his advances, and when finally freed, is left bitter by the
weight of her gratitude toward him. Harriet is literally trapped when Wimsey first
begins to court her, something which accentuates the imbalance of power between them.
The subsequent novel, Have His Carcase, redresses the discrepancy temporarily as
Harriet assists Wimsey in a murder investigation as a colleague, rather than a love
interest. Harriet continues to refuse his offers of marriage or any kind of gift from him,
convinced that she cannot take up the role of the beggar maid of King Cophetua and
rely on his largesse (172).17

17
Harriet’s friend Eiluned Price says that Wimsey is too decent “to do the King Cophetua stunt” (Strong
Poison 224), which is of course, correct.
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Throughout Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, and most of Gaudy Night, Harriet
stands resolute in her decision to be self-reliant. When she does relinquish this status, it
comes about in a remarkable fashion. In Gaudy Night Harriet, reluctantly, calls in Lord
Peter to resolve the mystery at Shrewsbury College. They take a drive out in the
country which results in a self-defence lesson in a field, with all the undertones of
sexuality which may result from such a scene. Following this bizarre occurrence,
Wimsey stops at a leather and harness shop. He purchases a brass studded dog collar,
ostensibly to protect Harriet from strangulation by the unidentified troublemaker within
Shrewsbury College. Wimsey explains to Harriet that the collar is “too stiff to squeeze
and . . . [will] turn the edge of a blade” (364). Wimsey then says:
‘The man was very much interested,’ he observed, ‘in my bull-terrier bitch.
Extremely plucky animal, but reckless and obstinate fighter. Personally, he
said, he preferred greyhounds. He told me where I could get my name and
address put on the collar, but I said that could wait. Now we’re out of the
town, you can try it on.’ (365)

And she dutifully does. Harriet, from her rampart of self-sufficiency, dissolves into an
imperial subject, harnessed and owned by her master. Wimsey’s denotation of her as
his “bitch”, along with the present of a studded dog collar, immediately raises questions
of sadomasochism and fetishism. The collar, like a slave collar of the nineteenth
century, can be read as a fetish object of an imperial past. This curious incident is at
odds with the carefully balanced relationship Sayers establishes between Harriet and
Wimsey.18
A way of unpacking this conundrum is through reading it as an instantiation of
Wimsey’s imperial masculinity, which can only be effected in opposition to Harriet’s
submissive femininity. Susan Strehle states that imperial homes “subordinate women,
for women are constructed as inferior . . .” (53). She further argues that “Imperial
homes, then, define “us” as white, wealthy, reasonable, stable, and male, supported by
“them” in various serving roles” (54). Taken together, the scenes of Wimsey’s self-
defence class and purchase of a dog collar reinforce his imperial manliness and his
superiority over Harriet, setting up the template for the imperial home they will form
together. He is physically stronger, more adept and experienced at self-defence and,

18
It is worth noting that neither Nina Auerbach in Romantic Imprisonment , Gill Plain in Women’s
Fiction of the Second World War nor Susan Rowland in From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell broach
the puzzling incident of the “dog collar”, in their otherwise incisive readings of the relationship between
Harriet and Wimsey.
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crucially, able to tame the “shrew” (Harriet is an alumnus of Shrewsbury College) with
the dog collar. Harriet’s accedence to this arrangement is confirmed as Wimsey notes
the collar is “the only thing you’ve ever let me give you” (365).
Gaudy Night is the third of four novels featuring Harriet Vane, during which she
devolves from an independent writer earning her own living, to a married Lady (she is
now addressed as Lady Peter) whose writing must compete with her husband’s needs.
Nina Auerbach makes the point that it is through marriage that the character of Harriet
is defused and gradually erased:
In the course of Busman’s Honeymoon, the contours of Harriet’s world
shrink to the dimensions of Peter’s needs. She obliterates herself
systematically in order to fill his needs, disappearing finally into the placid
sewing sphinx of the “Talboys” idyll. (194)

Harriet’s detection is now confined to the wayward habits of her young sons, and
matters to do with the house. Gill Plain concurs with this assessment when she states
that during Busman’s Honeymoon, “Harriet rejects her independence and non-
conformity for submission and marriage” (57). At the end of the series, Harriet
occupies the role of the wife and helpmeet of Lord Peter Wimsey, completing his
transition from bachelor to head of the family home.
Harriet’s sudden and surprising acceptance of her suitor can perhaps be explained
by the location of the exchange. Oxford is the closest version of home available to
Harriet, and a place where she feels she belongs. Oxford is also depicted in terms of
sanctuary. At the beginning of Gaudy Night, Harriet sits in her London flat. The view
is of the square and gardens below her, but what she sees is Shrewsbury College,
through the filter of the past:
Memory peopled the quad with moving figures. Students sauntering in
pairs. . . .Tall spikes of delphinium against the grey, quiveringly blue-like
flames, if flame were ever so blue. The college cat, preoccupied and
remote, stalking with tail erect in the direction of the buttery. (7-8)

Harriet’s flat in Mecklenburg Square melts into the college of her undergraduate years,
a place of innocence. It is a picture which transcends worldly problems, banishing them
from Donne’s paradise of knowledge, quoted by Sayers as an epigraph to the novel. In
the final pages of the novel, Wimsey proposes marriage in the knowledge that the
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answer Harriet gives him will be final (439). Harriet, once more a citizen of Oxford,
healed of her worldly scars, says yes, using the Latin phrase “Placet” (440).
For both Wimsey and Harriet, Oxford is a haven. Only in this city can Harriet put
aside her obligation to Wimsey because as graduates of the university Wimsey and
Harriet are on an equal footing. Oxford is the result of the weaving together of
academia, Anglicanism and Englishness. As Harriet muses when attending the
University Sermon:
Here were the Universities and the Church of England kissing one another
in righteousness and peace, like the angels in a Botticelli Nativity: very
exquisitely robed, very cheerful in a serious kind of way, a little mannered, a
little conscious of their fine mutual courtesy[. . . . ]But it was delightful to
believe, if only for an hour, that all human difficulties could be dealt with in
this detached and amiable spirit. “The University is a Paradise”—true,
but—“then saw I that there was a way to hell even from the gates of
Heaven” . . . (263-264)

The first quotation is from Donne, which graces the very first page of the novel. The
second is from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The binding of literature, academia and
Protestantism occurs in this passage which also makes the point that, like the original
Garden of Eden, it too contains a serpent, this time at work in Shrewsbury College. For
Harriet Vane, in spite of the disturbances in her old college, her return to Oxford is a
triumphant one, culminating in her acceptance of Wimsey as her husband.
Earlier in the novel, Harriet Vane admits to Miss de Vine that if she ever gave
way to Peter she would “go up like straw” (431). When embarking on her honeymoon
night, Harriet does completely give way and calls him “My Lord” (Busman’s 66).
Before this intimate encounter, she addresses as him Mr Rochester (Busman’s 30), when
he presents her with an expensive mink coat. Mr Rochester is Charlotte Brontë’s
metonymic romantic hero. But he is also a figure prolific with imperial innuendo, as
both a beneficiary and victim of British imperialism. His arranged marriage to Bertha
Mason, daughter of a West Indian planter, brought him wealth but also a wife suffering
from “hereditary” insanity (Jane Eyre 345). Harriet again calls Wimsey Mr Rochester
when, on their honeymoon, she enquires about her new financial status. Wimsey,
assuring Harriet that she has money settled on her, asks the reason for the enquiry:
Because, Mr Rochester, I wasn’t going to be married in grey alpaca. And I
spent every blessed thing I had to do you proud, and then some. . . .That’s
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right, laugh! I did kill my pride—but, oh, Peter! It had a lovely death.
(Busman’s 260)

From her former state of financial independence, Harriet has become part of the
Wimsey family and estate. Harriet has skipped from a woman fiercely protective of her
independence to a wholesale embrace of her new aristocratic state, with scarcely a
backward glance.
Wimsey, unlike Rochester, does not require maiming or blinding to level his
status with Harriet. However, his latent neurasthenia does make him vulnerable, and at
the end of Busman’s Honeymoon Harriet is finally afforded the role of the feminine
nurturing partner. Wimsey solves the case of the murdered Noakes and Frank Crutchley
is arrested. Crutchley, a singularly unrepentant criminal, refuses to forgive Wimsey,
and the guilt Wimsey carries drives him towards a neurasthenic episode. During this
episode the role of nurturer finally shifts from Bunter, who saw him though all previous
episodes, to Harriet and it is significant that it occurs in a house which is hers as much
as it is Wimsey’s. When Wimsey visits Crutchley on the eve of his execution in order
to ask his forgiveness, “Talboys” is described in terms of a trusted friend: “The old
house was Harriet’s companion in her vigil. It waited with her, its evil spirit cast out,
itself swept and garnished, ready for the visit of devil or angel” (392). The cleaning of
the house, exorcising traces of both the victim and his murderer is almost ceremonial,
and Harriet in her new role as Lady, that is Lady Peter and Lady of the House, awaits
anointment. The final scene in which Peter breaks down in tears in her embrace sees
her fully robed and crowned in her role as wife and companion. She has become the
imperial wife.
Wimsey and Harriet’s marriage is described in terms of national as well as
personal affirmation. While watching Wimsey interacting with members of the village
community Harriet realises that this is where he belongs. Despite:
. . . all his cosmopolitan self-adaptations, all his odd spiritual reticences and
escapes, he yet carried about with him that permanent atmosphere of
security. He belonged to an ordered society, and this was it. More than any
of the friends in her own world, he spoke the familiar language of her
childhood. (98)

She then thinks to herself, “I have married England” (98). Wimsey has become
metonymic for his nation. Harriet’s declaration to herself continues her thoughts from
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the earlier novel Gaudy Night. When Wimsey is invited to dine at Shrewsbury College
Harriet thinks, “He and I belong to the same world, and all these others are the aliens”
(319). Her relationship with Wimsey creates a union of national and personal
significance. Wimsey is equally expansive in his impassioned declaration of his
feelings for Harriet. After experimenting with poetic quotations, including lines from
Donne’s “Anniversarie”, he declares that the poets have taken all the best words,
stating, “And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that?—I love you—I
am at rest with you—I have come home” (Busman’s 288). Wimsey has found a home
with Harriet, but she, marrying a Lord, has also found a homeland.
Adam Dalgliesh, like Wimsey, has his first romantic encounter of the series
during a murder investigation. Deborah Riscoe, daughter of the murderer, Mrs Maxie,
begins a relationship with Dalgliesh in Cover Her Face, after Mrs Maxie has been
arrested. The painfully introspective Dalgliesh sustains this romance for the first three
novels until Deborah Riscoe ends it (by letter) and moves to New York. It is the lack of
commitment from Dalgliesh rather than a lack of attraction to him that forces her hand.
The only other woman mentioned in Dalgliesh’s company is the girl detective Cordelia
Gray. Cordelia’s two recorded cases in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, published in
1972 and The Skull beneath the Skin in 1982, are remarkable for her lack of success, and
for the presence of Dalgliesh in the wings. However, Cordelia’s lack of prowess as a
detective can be read as directly proportional to her importance as a romantic figure in
the series. She acts as a foil for Dalgliesh, a man of poetic and of policing excellence.
She also becomes a kind of shadow of Dalgliesh, living in an apartment overlooking the
Thames, part of a converted warehouse, and designed to meet her need for privacy.
This flat, with its smell of spice and its imperial past, is the precursor of Dalgliesh’s
home. Cordelia, too, loves the river, as does Dalgliesh’s subordinate Inspector Kate
Miskin. And, like Miskin, she loves Dalgliesh. Looking at her bedroom Cordelia
thinks, there is “only one man she ever pictured there and he was a Commander of New
Scotland Yard. She knew that he, too, lived in the City; they shared the same river”
(582). Cordelia’s brief flight of fantasy is accompanied by a self-admonishing
argument that Dalgliesh was merely a father figure, rather than a love interest twenty
years her senior. Nicola Nixon, in her insightful discussion of the disappearance of
Cordelia, concludes that the message from James is that “proto-feminists like Cordelia
in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman had better stay home, ‘warmly cocooned’ (Skull 54)
inside their (ideologically) refurbished Victorian homes; for home is, evidently where
they belong” (44). Cordelia, located in her facsimile of Dalgliesh’s home, is effectively
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erased from the series. The last mention of the girl detective occurs in A Taste for
Death when Conrad Ackroyd tells Dalgliesh he has been seen dining with Cordelia
Gray. She is not mentioned again. It seems that the character of Adam Dalgliesh has
overwritten her, his apartment replacing hers, and her character made redundant.
The other female detective in the series, Kate Miskin, appears for the first time in
A Taste for Death, the novel in which Cordelia Gray is last mentioned, and can also be
read as an overwriting of the girl detective. Miskin, an Inspector of the Metropolitan
Police, is Dalgliesh’s subordinate and part of his exclusive team. Despite her exemplary
record, Kate Miskin ultimately fails when forced to step into the role of Dalgliesh, as
discussed in Chapter Three. She is the embodiment of the welfare state, and, crucially,
of an unsatisfactory home. Brought up by her grandmother in the Ellison Fairweather
buildings, this estate becomes metonymic of social despair as the series progresses.
Consistently described in terms of squalor, the estate is rife with violence and fear.
There is barely a description of the building without the accompanying reminder of its
urine stench, which becomes a motif for the failure of social housing. Kate Miskin’s
escape from this locale acts as a homily for self-reliance, always underscored by the
apparent menace of the welfare state.
Even though she moves to a Thames-side flat, sharing the view of the river with
Dalgliesh, as Cordelia does, Kate never leaves her first home entirely. Her life is
marked by a sense of inferiority, which she struggles to suppress. This is usually
invoked by the contrasting of her comprehensive school education with the Oxford and
Cambridge experience of fellow officers, Adam Dalgliesh, Piers Tarrant and Francis
Benton-Smith. Miskin seeks a substitute for home in her institutional life, finding a
version of domesticity in her police routine. The evening meetings held during a case,
for Kate, “hold the warmth and security, the sense of being valued, which in childhood
she had never known” (Private Patient 196). The Lighthouse, the preceding novel,
contains an almost identical sentiment. A combination of firelight and the smell of wine
and coffee creates “that comfortable, unthreatening domesticity she had never known as
a child, and which she imagined must be at the heart of family life” (185). Kate Miskin,
always the outsider, can only “imagine” home and can only experience it when near the
unattainable Dalgliesh. The repetition of Dalgliesh as “home” for Kate amplifies his
status as the apotheosis of English values, aligning him once more with his predecessor,
Lord Peter Wimsey.
It is neither Kate Miskin nor Cordelia Gray, however, to whom Dalgliesh finally
plights his troth. Instead it is Emma Lavenham, a beautiful young academic from
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Cambridge who attracts his attention. Emma is iconic as a figure of womanhood,

bearing the name of Jane Austen’s heroine and teaching English literature in that most
revered of institutions, Cambridge University. 19 Their first encounter takes place in a
location which, for Dalgliesh, is both a scene of childhood memories, and a brutal
murder. When Dalgliesh first sees Emma it is within the cloister of St Anselm’s
Theological College:
. . . as he reached his door their eyes met and for a second held as if in
mutual amazement. The light fell on a face of grave and astounding beauty,
and he experienced an emotion that now came rarely, a physical jolt of
astonishment and affirmation. (107)

This is compounded later in the novel when he realises, “she’s kind as well as clever
and beautiful. His heart lurched, a sensation as unfamiliar as it was unwelcome” (181).
The encounter takes place in a sacralised location. St Anselm’s is not only an Anglican
theological college, it is also the site of summer holidays enjoyed by the teenage
Dalgliesh. An historic English building on a friable headland, endowed with Anglican
history, art and theology, it is steeped in Englishness. Within this sacralised space,
Dalgliesh allows himself to contemplate a different life, and to leave his self-imposed
solitude to create a marital home.
Soon after his first meeting with Emma, a murder takes place, rendering her,
technically, a suspect in the crime. It also leads to the first embrace between Dalgliesh
and Emma which takes place next to the bloody battered body of Archdeacon
Crampton. Shocked and frightened, Emma finds refuge in the arms of Dalgliesh.
Dalgliesh musters his accustomed restraint and recognises that Emma is reacting from
shock, not desire. However, Dalgliesh offers to watch over Emma later in the
investigation, because she is sleeping in an unlocked flat. He allays Emma’s concerns
by stating that he would ask Kate Miskin to do the task, were she available. As she is
not, Dalgliesh and Emma spend their first night together, he chastely in a chair and she
in the bedroom.
It is obvious that Emma is never a suspect in the murder of Archdeacon
Crampton, or the suspicious death of Ronald Treeves, allowing Dalgliesh to muse over
her loveliness while still solving both cases. Their courtship is sanctified by the figure
of the elderly priest Father Martin, who encourages Dalgliesh to pursue Emma, and at

19
James’s address to the Jane Austen Society “Emma Considered as a Detective Story” is included as an
appendix to Time to be in Earnest. It displays her great admiration for Austen.
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last throw off his single life. Dalgliesh and Emma continue their courtship in a
markedly Victorian fashion, with heartfelt letters and meetings at train stations. There
is less of the anguish felt by Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey in this relationship,
perhaps because Dalgliesh did not save Emma Lavenham’s life. The conflict in their
romantic story emanates instead from Dalgliesh’s self doubt, and his anxiety that his
career as a police officer may force them apart. The pairing of Dalgliesh and Emma is
carefully balanced; her University career is given as much credence as his police work.
But he is older, richer and, most significantly, a successful poet, implying that his status
is ultimately superior to hers.
Emma’s independence is symbolised by her home in Cambridge, and her
academic position at the University. Whereas Cambridge is her home, London belongs
to Dalgliesh. After Dalgliesh proposes marriage to Emma, via letter, at Liverpool Street
Station, she accepts him. Emma says:
‘We could wake to the sound of fountains in Trinity Great Court.’
Releasing her hands, he bent and took up her case. He said, ‘But I have
the Thames running under my windows.’
Still laughing, she tucked her arm in his. ‘Then let’s go home.’ (Murder
Room 371)

Emma’s acceptance of Dalgliesh’s home as hers, in the final lines of the novel, is
underlined by her choice of the river Thames, over the fountains at Trinity. In accepting
his home as hers, she is also symbolically tying herself to that enduring symbol of
Englishness, the River Thames.
The river has significance for Wimsey too, but in a more removed sense. Its
tributary, Oxford’s Cherwell, is the place where Harriet Vane realises her love for him,
and is the beginning of their romance proper. However, even as they plan their outing
on the river there is recognition that this symbol of Oxford is also a marker of what has
been lost:
Harriet smiled to herself as she went to change for the river. If Peter was
keen on keeping up decayed traditions he would find plenty of opportunity
by keeping to a pre-War standard of watermanship, manners and dress. . . .
A pair of grubby shorts or a faded regulation suit rolled negligently about
the waist was the modern version of Cherwell fashions for men . . . (273)
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Harriet and Peter, of course are beautifully attired when they make their way onto the
river, but in doing so they acknowledge their anachronistic behaviour. Harriet states
that she is “Hand in hand with a statelier past” and that Wimsey’s politeness is
“obsolete” (273). The Great War is the precipice over which the standards of yesteryear
tumbled, a proposal examined previously in Chapter Two. In spite of such traditions
being extinct, Wimsey and Harriet nevertheless have their love sanctified by pledging it
within the confines of Oxford, and particularly upon the river Cherwell.
The Cherwell, as Peter Ackroyd notes, is one of the main tributaries of the
Thames (Thames 48). It is therefore part of the great stream of history, so often extolled
by English artists. Ackroyd’s biography of the Thames extends his earlier biography of
London in illustrating the historical, economic and cultural significance of this
waterway:
The Thames is a metaphor for the country through which it runs. It is
modest and moderate, calm and resourceful; it is powerful without being
fierce. It is not flamboyantly impressive. It is large without being too vast.
It eschews extremes. It weaves its own course without artificial diversions
or interventions. It is useful for all manner of purposes. . . . It creates
harmony out of apparent discord, and in that capacity alone it has done more
to establish the idea of Englishness than any other national feature. (9)

Clearly P. D. James agrees with Ackroyd. Her reiteration of the “strong brown god” of
T. S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages” (line 2) reiterates the power of the Thames as a symbol
of Englishness throughout the Dalgliesh narratives (Original Sin 152; Private Patient
114). She celebrates the Thames as an icon of Englishness in Original Sin and A Taste
for Death, both of which contain multiple references to England’s past through its
river’s history, as well as affording Dalgliesh a brief taste of riverside respite.
Although A Taste for Death is centred on the Berowne house in central London
significant events occur on the river, not the central Thames of London, but its upper
reaches near Cookham. Cookham is a location which, as Ackroyd notes, illustrates,
“the enduring importance of the river in the characterisation of national life” (Thames
9). Millicent Gentle, a romance writer of advancing years, lives in a cottage on the
riverbank, close to the Black Swan Inn. When Dalgliesh goes to interview her, he
experiences the magic of river life:
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more
frequently in memory than in life. The rich colours of grass and earth were
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intensified by the mellow light of a sun almost warm enough for spring and
the air was a sweet evocation of all Dalgliesh’s boyhood autumns;
woodsmoke, ripe apples, the last sheaves of harvest, and the strong sea-
smelling breeze of flowing water. The Thames was running strongly under
a quickening breeze. (397)

Dalgliesh is not the first English artist to find Cookham such an earthly delight.
Jonathan Schneer points out that both William Morris and Stanley Spencer viewed this
location in the same way: “In Morris’s work it is an essential part of the heaven England
could yet become in spite of all; in Spencer’s it is a crucial aspect of the heaven England
already is, if we could but see it” (193). Dalgliesh finds a sliver of perfect happiness in
that most English of locations, the bank of the river Thames. But this scene also brings
about nostalgic thoughts for Dalgliesh who so often associates perfection with the past,
and particularly with his childhood home. It affords him “a minute of tingling
happiness so unexpected and so keen that he almost held his breath as if he could halt
time” (397). Arresting time is linked with a wish to return to the past. The frequent
recollections of his childhood suggest that, until he meets Emma Lavenham, the past is
“home” for Dalgliesh, an idyll encapsulated in the ordered ritual of rectory life.
But it is Paul Berowne, the murdered baronet, who experiences utter peace in the
home of Millicent Gentle, described by Betty Richardson as “the archetypal Wise
Woman of this tale” (107). Millicent Gentle’s cottage is the ideal English home in
miniature. It is small, cosy, has flowered wallpaper, a dog and a fireside. Miss Gentle
makes cocoa for the MP, provides him with her father’s dressing gown (a garment
which must be at least several decades old) and seats him by the fireside for a cosy and
relaxing chat. When interviewed by Dalgliesh after Berowne’s murder, Miss Gentle
remarks that he reminds her of Berowne, thereby collapsing the patrician politician into
the poetic policeman, creating a composite character signifying English civility and
intellect. The location of this oasis of domestic peace on the riverbank amplifies its
textual resonance, reinforcing the idea that an idyllic version of Englishness can still be
found, however fleetingly. However, Millicent Gentle’s role as a romance novelist
underscores the artificial or impermanent nature of the ideal home, suggesting it is a
textual mirage bound to flicker out and die.
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Restoration
The house in which Wimsey and Harriet spend their chaotic honeymoon presents a
much more solid version of English life. Away from the Thames, and located near a
rural village in Hertfordshire, the Elizabethan farmhouse “Talboys” is a locus of the re-
establishment of English values in Busman’s Honeymoon. Despite the theatrical nature
of the text, partly due to it being an adaptation from the 1936 play of the same name,
there is a distinct narrative of restoration and permanence in the novel. Susan Rowland
suggests that this novel is able to “re-sacralise the country house as a source of
conservative and nostalgic Englishness by linking the political and literary traditions of
pastoral to more progressive notions of marriage relations” (76). In doing so Rowland
is echoing John G. Cawelti who has argued that many writers of “classical detective
stories reflect the nineteenth-century novel in their treatment of society in the form of
nostalgic fantasies of a more peaceful and harmonious social order associated with the
traditional rural society of England” (98). Wimsey’s marriage to Harriet is able to
withstand murder, domestic disruption and a return of Wimsey’s neurasthenia, all
experienced within a few days. However, I would argue that another more literal
narrative of rebuilding the country house is contained within the novel, and that this too
reaffirms the notion of the English home as central to national ideals.
“Talboys” lies near the village of Pagford, close to where Harriet Vane grew up.
It is her memory of “strawberries and seedy cake” (38-39) provided by the kind, elderly
owners of the house which stays with her into adulthood. She provides the image of the
house, and Wimsey uses his considerable business sagacity to purchase it. Their
introduction to “Talboys” is unpropitious, as the house is both locked, and unprepared
for their arrival. The house itself is unwelcoming; dark, furnished without care or style,
and impractical, rendering Bunter’s domestic duties arduous. Things go from bad to
worse when the corpse of the previous owner, Mr Noakes, is found in the cellar. The
house, neglected by a man whose frugal ways left him few friends, is described by
Wimsey as “a lovely body, inhabited by an evil spirit” and by Harriet as having been
“starved and insulted and ill-treated” (82).
The narrative of restoration begins the next morning when the local builder arrives
to sweep the chimneys. Tom Puffett vociferously defends the “Tooder” (82) chimney,
and sets about attempting to restore it to working order. The Tudor age places the house
within a revered age of English history; the Elizabethan age of exploration and trade, an
age of empire. As Simon Schama puts it, “It was at this time, in the first half of the
sixteenth century, that the court historians began to develop a literature of the ‘origins of
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Britain’ and to emphasize the autonomous, peculiarly insular destiny of its history”
(153). The “island story”, discussed in the previous chapter, is invoked in reinforcing
an imperial identity for England. By association, ownership of such a house confers this
privileged identity upon Harriet and Peter Wimsey.
Wimsey, having taken financial ownership of the house, takes moral possession
when he declares his intention of finding the missing chimney pots which have been
sold off by the parsimonious Noakes (362). Wimsey states, in effect, his plans to return
the house to an authentically English dwelling. Wimsey also sketches out plans for a
bathroom, and talks of employing Mr Thipps (from Whose Body?) who, he says, “has a
very real feeling for period stuff”. Wimsey then stamps his authority upon the house
when he states, “While I live . . . no owner but ourselves shall ever set foot in it” (363).
Harriet’s dream will be realised by Wimsey’s financial and architectural connections,
forming not only a home, but a thoroughly imperial English home in which to continue
the Wimsey name.20
Harriet and Wimsey’s story ends with the planned restoration of their country
house. The story of Dalgliesh and Emma concludes with their marriage in the closing
pages of James’s most recent, and probably final, novel The Private Patient. Their
wedding, with echoes of Wimsey and Harriet, takes place in Cambridge; Emma wearing
cream silk and roses rather than Harriet’s gold lamé. Both weddings are solemnized in
a spiritual and cultural locus of intellectual Anglicanism. Just as Oxford was of great
significance to Sayers, Cambridge holds a special place in P. D. James’ life. Educated
at Cambridge County High School for Girls, James also met her beloved husband in this
city. She is an Honorary fellow of both Downing and Girton Colleges and donated her
papers to the library at Girton. Like Sayers, she has an immense respect for both the
Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but her choice lies with the latter. The wedding
of Emma and Dalgliesh in a college chapel at Cambridge recreates Sayers’s image of
the church and universities “kissing,” a solemnization of endorsed English values. It
also suggests that not only this novel but the Dalgliesh series, in the best Victorian
tradition, has ended with a marriage.
Both Wimsey and Dalgliesh move from single, sedulously controlled lives to
passionate marriages with women who share their intellectual abilities, and their moral
values. The ceremonies take place in the numinous spaces of Oxford and Cambridge

20
Wimsey’s mother, the Dowager Duchess, points out that Wimsey as a member of the aristocracy is
duty bound to make a home for his wife, rather than the reverse. She notes that it is only the aristocracy
and the clergy to whom this mandate applies (Busman’s 20).
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respectively, cities which are effulgent with a combination of ecclesiastical and

academic virtues. The two universities represent a version of England in which reason
and passion, learning and love can combine, creating the perfect Anglican marriage.
The homes Wimsey and Dalgliesh create through their ideal marriages become a refuge
into which they disappear, moving from the imperial adventures of their detective work
to a form of domesticity firmly rooted in the nineteenth century.
The yoking of home and empire is expressively displayed in the detective
narratives of Sayers and James. The preferred home, within the texts, is demonstrably
English and the mode of domesticity equally illustrative of ideologies of imperial
English culture. Both detectives assess and prescribe the dwellings of others, judging
them by their own apparently impeccable standards. Wimsey and Dalgliesh evolve
from solitary bachelors to become the heads of households, in their roles of husband,
and in Wimsey’s case, father.21 These domestic idylls are set against unsatisfactory
examples of domesticity, where conventional family or gender roles are flouted. Sayers
and James both close off their series by consigning their heroic “imperial detectives” to
enduring matrimony. Both Wimsey and Dalgliesh, after enduring danger, heartache,
homesickness and uncertainty, are finally given their reward. They are allowed to go
home.

21
The birth of Wimsey and Harriet’s first child is described in the short story “The Haunted Policeman”.
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Afterword.

Throughout this project I have traced the path of the “imperial detective” in the fiction
of Dorothy L. Sayers and P. D. James. Along the way the imperial legacies which, as
Simon Gikandi has said, “have come to haunt English and postcolonial identities” (19)
have acted as markers. Such ghostly cultural constructs include the country house and
the cricket field but also the collections of imperial ephemera which lie in the margins
of the texts, a reminder of what England once was. The “imperial detectives”, Lord
Peter Wimsey and Adam Dalgliesh enact an idealised form of Englishness in narratives
which are concerned with the national, the military, the provincial, the foreign and
finally, the domestic. These narratives are part of a continuum which began with
Sherlock Holmes in 1887 and continues during the inter-war years through the character
of Lord Peter Wimsey. It is a finite lineage, however, and it ends with the last Adam
Dalgliesh novel, The Private Patient in 2008. P. D. James has expressed reluctance, at
the age of ninety, to begin a novel she may not be able to finish (Interview, Koval).
Consequently, having argued in my introductory remarks that anxiety about the state of
the British Empire called forth the figure of the “imperial detective”, in my concluding
chapter I propose that the disappearance of the Empire draws the final curtain upon that
construct of English literature, but not without leaving behind a legacy.
Part of the legacy is the ongoing re-inscription of Edwardian and late Victorian
values upon English life. This concern is evident in the production and reproduction of
classical English detective narratives in the twenty-first century. The yearning for an
idyllic England represented within the narratives of imperial detection continues, but in
an altered form. Colin Dexter’s characters have been revived in the recent television
productions of Lewis, which is a continuation of the Inspector Morse series. The
continued making and airing of television versions of Agatha Christie’s work also
speaks of the popularity of the form. Such cultural productions link back to the genesis
of English detective fiction in the nineteenth century. Caroline Reitz claims that: “ It is
in their insistence that detective stories ‘make sense of England’, and their
representation of a resulting ‘imperial Englishness’ that Dickens and Collins have the
greatest influence on the detective genre and on the English reader” (45). The
 195

continuation of English classical detective fiction, even after the demise of the “imperial
detective” is part of the process, of “making sense” of England, as I shall explain.
Throughout the writing of Sayers and James, their complex negotiation of English
identity is accompanied by the recurrence of nostalgia. This is most evident in a
repeated yearning for pre-World War One England, idealised by the questionable
notions that imperial England was a strong, stable, racially homogenous and agreeably
class stratified society. This politically ideological fantasy is the foundation upon which
classical English detective fiction rests. P. D. James, in her 2009 study of the craft,
notes the re-publishing of some of the “Golden Age” writers in the early twenty-first
century:
It is highly unlikely that these emotionally unthreatening and nostalgic
detective stories would be written today except as ingenious and clever
pastiche or as tributes to the Golden Age. How strongly the typical
mysteries of the interwar years linger in memory; invariably set in large
country houses in the depths of winter, cut off from the outside world by
snowdrifts and fallen telegraph wires and with a most unpleasant house
guest found in the library with an ornate dagger in the heart. (Talking about
Detective Fiction 155) 1

As a reader, James positions herself as nostalgic for this England, at the centre of which
is the country house, symbol of imperial English solidity and endurance. But James
overlooks the fact that a version of these stories is being reproduced at the very time of
which she writes. These productions are both pastiche and tributes in part but, most
significantly, form an ongoing discourse of nostalgia in which the desire for an idyllic
England is repeatedly expressed. Such manifestations of classical detective fiction
occur in both written and screen media, and the attention they gain, as I will
demonstrate, indicates the continued investment of the English public in a fantasy of a
racially homogeneous, class stratified version of England.
James herself has contributed to a “tribute” to the “Golden Age”. Having
endorsed the first of the Wimsey sequels, Jill Paton Walsh’s 1998 novel Thrones,
Dominations (Earnest 157), she provided assistance with a plot line for the third of the
continued series, The Attenbury Emeralds (Paton Walsh vii). However, the work of
another author, Caroline Graham in her “Inspector Barnaby” series, provides a
continuation of many of the motifs of the fiction of Sayers and James. More cogently,
1
James is describing the plot of Ngaio Marsh’s 1942 novel Death and the Dancing Footman.
196

the television adaptation of her work, Midsomer Murders, provides an indication of the
cultural capital invested in classical detective fiction in contemporary England.
Caroline Graham’s first novel of the series, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, was
published in 1987. It is self-consciously referential; not only of detective fiction, but of
Englishness itself. The investigation takes place in a picturesque village, featuring a
house known as “Beehive Cottage”, described as “The sort of house that turns up on
This England calendars and tourist posters. The exile’s dream of home” (41). Graham
acknowledges the theatricality of the England she creates, likening it to a picture from
This England magazine. But in citing the term “exile”, and applying it to a house
within an English village she reinforces the idea of England being “foreign”, repeating
an ongoing concern from the Dalgliesh novels. For all the hoarding and archiving of
English culture in these productions of classical English detective fiction, there runs the
concurrent acknowledgement that the endeavour is futile. The dream, of a perfect
English house in an idyllic English village, is one which reaches back to an Edwardian
England, the construction of which itself was a fantasy. Agatha Christie acknowledges
this in The Body in the Library when Dolly Bantry dreams of prizewinning sweet peas.
Her reverie is interrupted by the housemaid, who bursts in to tell her of the body in the
library (7). Dreams of an idyllic England, the text implies, are interrupted by the
demands of the present.
However, the cultural importance of contemporary productions of classical
English detective fiction can be measured by the controversy generated by the television
version of Caroline Graham’s detective novels. In March 2011 the producer of
Midsomer Murders, Brian True-May, when speaking of the programme’s success said:
We just don't have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the
English village with them. It just wouldn’t work. Suddenly we might be in
Slough. . . . And if you went into Slough you wouldn't see a white face
there. We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way.
(Barnes)

True-May’s comments, which posit classical detective fiction as the “last” outpost of
Englishness, by implication, in the sea of multicultural Britain, created a storm in the
press. True-May was suspended from his role as series producer and the television
station ITV professed outrage and quickly distanced itself from his comments (Barnes).
While some sections of the media took the opportunity to claim political correctness as
“sinister” (Letts), the controversy also generated discussion about English identity and
 197

multiculturalism. The extensive media coverage about the story can perhaps be partly
explained by the popularity of the series, described by True-May as one of the most
successful television series of all time.2
However, True-May’s comments, and the resulting discussions, are also part of
a discourse detectable in the narratives of James and Sayers: the notion that Englishness
is threatened by the aftermath of empire in the form of immigration, and simultaneously
that English society craves a “bastion” of whiteness into which to retreat. True-May’s
metaphorical bastion stands alongside those erected in the fictions of Sayers and James,
textual edifices and topographies in which an idealised Englishness can be enacted.
And the pinnacle of English security, the castle, citadel and bastion of domesticity, the
English home is, as I stated in the previous chapter, the logical end for both the Wimsey
and Dalgliesh series. The end of the “imperial detective”, presaged by the marriage of
Lord Peter Wimsey, is confirmed by the wedding of Adam Dalgliesh, in the final
chapter of the very last novel.
The passing of the heroic, chivalric, anachronistic “imperial detective” is marked
by an elegiac tone among reviewers. As Marcel Berlins states:
It is possible that The Private Patient will be the last collaboration between
Baroness James of Holland Park, usually accorded the even grander title of
Queen of Crime, and the most misspelt senior policeman in crime fiction.
But I wouldn’t bet on this being the end of the wonderful partnership.

The reviewer both claims and disavows the end of the series. He ends his article by
citing Dalgliesh as “one of the great police detectives in the history of crime fiction”
and James as “the most literary of crime writers”. Dalgliesh, along with his creator, are
described in superlatives, accentuating their significance as the reviewer bids farewell.
But even with the passing of the heroic “imperial detective”, the cultural
reconstruction of England continues. Caroline Graham’s Inspector Barnaby does not
inherit the mantle of the “imperial detective”, due to his unheroic ordinariness. While
he shares the chivalric manners of his predecessors along with an unquestionably
English heritage, Barnaby is happily married, uninclined towards melancholy and
eschews daring feats of bravery. He does, however, inhabit a very similar world to that
depicted in the narratives of Sayers and James. Barnaby’s investigations take place in
rural villages, stately homes, village cricket clubs, fetes, churches; in fact anywhere

2
Ironically, it is outdone by Star Trek and the X-Files (Singh), suggesting that perhaps alterity in Britain
is less of a concern to television producers if it is interplanetary rather than international.
198

which would please readers of This England. The success of the series suggests that in
the twenty-first century this fictional detective is indeed, to quote Reitz, “making sense
of England”.
For Wimsey and Dalgliesh, their role as “imperial detective” ends with a
retirement into matrimony. The Elizabethan country house of Harriet and Peter
Wimsey and the Thames-side flat of Adam Dalgliesh and Emma Lavenham are spaces
redolent of imperial history, closed off from the disappointments of contemporary
England. Sayers and James, in ending the series in the Victorian manner with a
marriage, after a great number of deaths, pay homage to the era from which their
detectives emerged. And, with the retirement of the last “imperial detective”, there is a
tacit acknowledgement that the glory days of the British Empire are, finally, consigned
to the past.
 199

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