5 Jun 2014

Hangman's Holiday by Dorothy L Sayers

I seem unable to find the attention span to read a full length novel at the moment (even on holiday!) - so handily I've got this collection of short stories by Dorothy L Sayers (not to be confused with the very similar sounding Busman's Honeymoon!). There's twelve stories, quite short, some with Lord Peter Wimsey, some with Montague Egg, a travelling salesman, and some without a detective.

Alas, this book is a bit unsatisfying. Short story collections are inevitably a mixed bag, and this is no exception.


Let's start with the Peter Wimsey stories - Sayers's most familiar creation, and these stories are longer than the others in this collection. What went wrong here then?
The Image in the Mirror, the first tale, is admittedly well told - most of it a monologue from a stricken man telling Wimsey how he thinks he's going mad and committing murders in his sleep. It's full of detail and is entertaining, but it's spoilt by the ending - almost as preposterous as the man's own explanation of being 'sent into the fourth dimension', but also incredibly guessable from the opening pages - even Wimsey says so, acting thoroughly bored of his own story by the explanation.
The Elopement of Peter Wimsey is very odd - Wimsey doesn't feature at the start, which is more like an MR James pastiche. The second half, as Wimsey changes tack suddenly, not just jarring but very silly. Whatever humour is might have had has been lost by time, and it feels like a waste of pages with too much scene setting.
These first two detective stories are very different to usual, so perhaps it's noble of Sayers to be exploring the possibilities of the genre. The rest of the book is more straightforward. Sadly The Queen's Square, which consists of about twenty pages of the movements of guests leading up to a murder, is infuriating. It's all just names rather than any fleshing out of the characters of the suspects (even though there must be over twenty of them!), and is impossible to follow, let alone guess the very scientific explanation. The Necklace of Pearls fares much better: although characters are still mere sketches on a page, at least it's enjoyable (set at Christmas, a time Sayers apparently hated, and you can tell!).

Onto the Montague Egg stories, then. I approached them with a heavy heart, especially seeing these stories were shorter than the rest. But as a whole, they remind me of the Poirot short stories (or similarly Christie's Parker Pyne or Harley Quinn tales) - nicely uniform in style even if they deal with exotic locations, and the perfect story for this length. There's enough variety to keep you interested too - you've got courtoom drama, identifying a murderer, murder in Oxford, and a missing person - and also a very odd story about cats that has a rather sadistic and sour end. None of them are anything special, but most are satisfying and good to read.
Montague Egg himself is defined almost solely by his profession - he's a travelling wine salesman, eager to please, impossibly sharp eyed, who just happens to come into contact with mysteries and crime! It's a very sketchy character, but it means he's very suited to short stories rather than novels.

The final two stories are thankfully the best. The first, The Man Who Knew How, has a man chasing up suspicious deaths after a chance encounter, with a twist in the tale.
And then there's the enjoyable The Fountain Plays, which dispenses of a detective and instead focuses on the actions of a murderer trying to second guess the police. They're the sort of clever stories that Hitchcock would adapt into films, or would feature as an episode of The Twilight Zone. In particular, neither of them feature acres of detail and suspects, and are all the better for it.

In summary - these stories feel different to what's typically referred to as Dorothy L Sayers's style. Her novels are full of details, in both character and atmosphere, and often eccentric. In the confines of a short story, most of that is stripped back to reveal clever solutions (almost more tricksy and involved than the explanations in her novels!) I get a sense of the writer trying to work out what stories she can tell in this format, the level in quality explained by the stories being collected over, presumably, a number of years. As a collected work, it's not the best book ever, nor is it very memorable, but you should find things in it to enjoy.