Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night

Sarah Harrison: Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: And I’m your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic …

Sarah Harrison: … but not a toxin …

Carolyn Daughters: And join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.

Sarah Harrison 00:53
Carolyn, I’m excited about our episode today. We’re going to talk about Harriet Vane.

Carolyn Daughters  00:58
Oh, that’s why we’re here.

Sarah Harrison  00:59
We’re also here to talk about our amazing sponsor, Linden Botanicals, a Colorado-based company that sells the world’s healthiest herbal teas and extracts. Their team has traveled the globe to find the herbs that offer the best science-based support for stress relief, energy, memory, mood, kidney health, joint health, digestion, and inflammation. U.S. orders over $75 ship free. To learn more, visit lindenbotanicals.com and use code mystery to get 15% off your first order. Thanks, Linden Botanicals! Carolyn, we have such a great guest. I’m excited to introduce him today.

Carolyn Daughters  01:49
I am as well. Today, we’re doing some more Dorothy Sayers, who I’ve come to love. We do have a listener of the episode. Our listener is Ed Brock from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Sarah Harrison  02:08
Thank you, Ed. You must have done something wonderful.

Carolyn Daughters  02:13
He’s a wonderful person. Listeners, we also want to give you your own shout out. Like, Ed, you, too, can get a sticker. It’s possibly the world’s greatest sticker.

Sarah Harrison  02:28
It’s definitely the world’s greatest sticker.

Carolyn Daughters  02:30
All you have to do is comment on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube. Or write us a note on our website.

Sarah Harrison  02:40
We got such a cool note this time. I can’t wait to share it once we get into the episode.

Carolyn Daughters  02:44
I can’t wait to hear it myself. And another way you can get a sticker is if you review us or rate us on your favorite podcasting platform. We’re on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, basically all of the platforms.

Sarah Harrison  02:58
Man, I’m gonna be honest. I can’t see who writes the rating, so you won’t get a sticker for that. But, I mean, go ahead and do it.

Carolyn Daughters  03:07
If you do it, just shoot us a quick note to say you love us. Tell us you gave us an amazing rating.

Sarah Harrison  03:15
Five-star rating.

Carolyn Daughters  03:15
We’ll gonna give you a shout out and a sticker. So Sarah, tell us more.

Sarah Harrison  03:21
I’m happy to introduce our guest today. Zoltan James is the pen name of Z.J. Czupor. He writes mysteries, thrillers, and the occasional poem, and he’s proud to be represented by Terrie Wolf, founder and owner of AKA Literary Management. He has a monthly column, On Tour with Dead Writers. That sounds cool. It’s about famous mystery writers, and it’s available exclusively on the Rogue Women Writers blog. Check it out — we’ll post the link in the show notes. We’re gonna find out a lot more about Z.J. today. We’re really excited to have him.

Carolyn Daughters  04:05
Today, the three of us are going to discuss Gaudy Night, and we’re going to sprinkle in a little Strong Poison, both from Dorothy Sayers, both starring Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.

Sarah Harrison  04:17
Strong Poison the book. We’re not sprinkling strong poison.

Carolyn Daughters  04:19
We are Tea Tonic and Toxin, so Strong Poison could have gone either way. Just to be clear, Gaudy Night is the third classic mystery to feature Harriet Vane, companion sleuth to the dashing, perennially popular private investigator Lord Peter Wimsey from the writer widely considered to be the greatest mystery novelist of the Golden Age. We can discuss that as well. I want to hear Z.J.’s opinion, as he wrote a cool article about it.

Carolyn Daughters  04:42
Gaudy Night is by Dorothy L Sayers. Here’s the story in a nutshell. When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the Gaudy, the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks, scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies, and poison pen letters, including one that says, “Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup.” Some of the notes threaten murder. All are perfectly ghastly. Yet in spite of their scurrilous nature, all are perfectly worded, and Harriet finds herself ensnared in a nightmare of romance and terror with only the tiniest shreds of clues to challenge her powers of deduction and those of her paramour Lord Peter Wimsey.

Sarah Harrison  05:41
Awesome. Should we read a summary for Strong Poison or no? Carolyn and I both read and I’ll go ahead and throw our comment out there. We got the coolest comment, not only from a listener and subscriber but a former guest. You may recall Dan Drake, who was on our Nine Tailors episode. He strongly recommended that Strong Poison should be read prior to Gaudy Night. So Carolyn says go-dee. I say gow-dee. What do you say, Z.J?

Z.J. Czupor  06:09
I say ghaw-dee.

Sarah Harrison  06:11
So we’ve got everyone represented here.

Carolyn Daughters  06:12
If you have a fourth pronunciation, write and tell us about it.

Sarah Harrison  06:16
Please write it out phonetically so we know what you mean. Otherwise we’re going to think you’re saying it the same way as we are. I’ll be honest. I read Gaudy Night years ago as my first Sayers book. I struggled with it. And that is where Dan said, you gotta read Strong Poison first. I started reading Gaudy Night a second time, and I struggled again. So I went back and read Strong Poison. It’s delightful. Maybe my favorite Sayers.

Carolyn Daughters  06:49
It’s my favorite. And I did the same thing. Sarah said, Hey, we heard from Dan. I’m reading Strong Poison. I’m like, Well, I’ve got to read it as well. I’m so glad I did. We’ll have to discuss this, but it’s so different than Gaudy Night. I want to talk about that.

Sarah Harrison  07:10
Let me read the back of the book Strong Poison. “Mystery novelist Harriet Vane knew all about poisons, and when her fiancé died in the manner prescribed in one of her books, a jury of her peers had a hangman’s noose in mind. But Lord Peter Wimsey was determined to prove her innocent, as determined as he was to make her his wife.” So that turned out to be a really long project.

Carolyn Daughters  07:38
It is. It’s five years later when Gaudy Night starts.

Sarah Harrison  07:47
Z.J., welcome to the podcast. We’re so excited to have you.

Z.J. Czupor  07:51
Thank you so much. It’s great to be here with you.

Sarah Harrison  07:54
Now, you wrote a really cool article that I started reading. I read the whole thing, the Queens of Crime, and Dorothy Sayers is one of those. Can you tell us about that?

Z.J. Czupor  08:07
As some background, I started doing a monthly column called Mystery Minutes for the Rocky Mountain chapter of Mystery Writers of America. I would do a presentation each month about a mystery writer — most of them had passed away — about their successes and failures and so on. As I dug into more writers, I kept coming across really fascinating characters and the interesting lives that they lived. Then I came across the Queens of Crime. That was the first time I had heard that term. It refers to Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Margery Ellingham, and Josephine Tey. Or maybe Ngaio Marsh instead of Josephine Tey. There’s a bit of controversy about which of them should be the fourth one.

Carolyn Daughters  09:02
Ngaio Marsh, the writer from New Zealand. The perfect group for Harriet Vane to belong to.

Z.J. Czupor  09:05
Correct, yeah. So Dorothy Sayers was included in that group, and that’s when I first started learning about her and presented that to the group. She became one of many that I’ve now written about and researched.

Sarah Harrison  09:21
Is this article available online? Can folks find the Mystery Minutes anywhere, or do you have to be a member of the Mystery Writers of America?

Z.J. Czupor  09:30
There’s an interesting story about that. As I was presenting these to the group every month, everybody kept saying how much they enjoyed it. They told me I ought to do a book. So after a couple of years, I had a good stable of stories, maybe 30 or so. I put them together as a book proposal and presented them to my agent, Terrie Wolf, and she loved it. And so it’s now being considered for publication. I was publishing these stories every month with Rocky Mountain Mystery Writers of America and with the Rogue Women Writers. But after discussions with Terrie, we decided that the book would have a better chance of getting published if the content wasn’t so readily available online.

Carolyn Daughters  10:15
Right. If some of the material was fresh and some people hadn’t yet had access to it.

Z.J. Czupor  10:20

Correct. So we pulled that off of Rogue Women Writers, and we changed it up, and now it’s called On Tour with Dead Writers. It’s a little shorter version. It’s more of a puzzle, like, Who is this, that kind of thing. But that’s how it started.

Sarah Harrison  10:37
Cool, all right, folks. So you cannot find this article anywhere until you buy Z.J.’s book when it comes out.

Z.J. Czupor  10:47
Well, let’s hope so. Fingers crossed.

Sarah Harrison  10:49
Well, I’m just assuming.

Carolyn Daughters  10:54
It seems like a meaningful, worthwhile project.

Z.J. Czupor  11:04
Well, I think so. And also, if I can offer a little more background, the whole genesis of that idea came from David Morrell, the guy who created Rambo.

Sarah Harrison  11:16
Really?

Z.J. Czupor  11:17
He did a half-day teaching session here in Denver.

Sarah Harrison  11:23
I love Rambo, don’t get me wrong.

Z.J. Czupor  11:25
David is a very intellectual writer. He’s a former college professor. He was teaching this session, and he said, regardless of what genre you’re writing in, you ought to know the history of that genre. You ought to know whose shoulders you’re writing on, and how all these tropes and cliches and plot points came about, because that’s how we are today.

Sarah Harrison  11:57
Yes, agree.

Z.J. Czupor  11:58
I had never considered that, and so that started me on this journey to really dig into mystery writers and find out who they were and how they did it.

Sarah Harrison  12:07
And to track the story arcs of certain characters like Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. That’s an excellent plug for subscribing to the podcast. We’re like the Cliff Notes.

Carolyn Daughters  12:17
That’s true. Years and years ago, this woman approached me. She was had written a poem and it had won some award. She asked me to read it. I read it and thought, Okay, this poem needs some work. I asked her, Who else do you read? What other poets do you enjoy? What poems do you love? She said, Well, I don’t read poetry. That’s surprising, I said. Surely you’ve read some poetry. But she couldn’t name even one poet.

Z.J. Czupor  12:51
Oh my gosh.

Carolyn Daughters  12:52
And to me, the poem that I read reflected that. And so the more we understand where we’re coming from. If you’re going to write a memoir, you might read a couple memoirs. If you are writing mystery, you might read some mysteries. Most of us are not a Bronte sister, where we emerge fully formed, able to tell this story without full immersion in a particular form. Learn everything. That’s what we’re doing with the history of mystery. We’re learning everything we can about mystery.

Z.J. Czupor  13:34
It’s interesting in terms of Dorothy Sayers’ time, she was taking the idea of mystery, which, prior to her writing, was based on puzzles, and she moved it off of that and made it more character driven. She tried to really flesh out her characters much more than Agatha Christie did. Agatha was more about making it interesting and seeing if you could solve the mystery before the detective. And I have to admit, like you said earlier, Sarah, that reading Gaudy Night was not easy because of the style that she wrote in, whereas today things are much looser, breezier. We don’t take so much time describing locations and how people look and talk, where that was pretty standard in the 1930s.

Carolyn Daughters  14:35
Dorothy Sayers lingers. This is the second time I’ve read Gaudy Night, and I was maybe halfway through it, and I thought, how does this book last another 250 pages? To be honest, I enjoyed the whole book, but at times I thought, surely this mystery cannot continue for another 250 pages.

Sarah Harrison  14:57
And it’s like not even a murder.

Z.J. Czupor  14:58
That’s right.

Sarah Harrison  14:59
But the second time I did enjoy it a lot more, because it became the fourth book with Harriet Vane. And Dorothy Sayers self-refers a lot. She’ll just make a reference. The first time I read it, I didn’t know who Miss Clemson was, or Miss Murchison, but this time I had read Strong Poison, and so those characters suddenly they came to life. Gaudy Night had all of this depth that you would not have gotten if you didn’t know who these characters were. And she referred to The Nine Tailors. She referred to a lot of her previous books.

Carolyn Daughters  15:37
And her characters.

Z.J. Czupor  15:40
I’ll add to that all the other characters at the college reunion. You almost need a playlist.

Carolyn Daughters  15:49
I wrote out a character list, a short list, and the last item on my list is approximately 4 million other people.

Sarah Harrison  15:58
I do feel like that was really intentional in this book. There’s a passage, and I wish I had written it down at the time. I have way too many underlines in my book, but it was something like, Harriet Vane was working on her own book. She was frustrated with it because she said it was too symmetrical. It was such a neat little puzzle. The characters were too two-dimensional, unrealistic. She’s like, that’s not what the world is like. The world is like this university, where a million people are going in and out, and you can’t keep track of them and you don’t know how to solve it. I think she was challenging herself to write a book more close to real life than the clever, little puzzle mystery.

Carolyn Daughters  16:43
And she references the detective mystery writing form. Harriet Vane is our protagonist, and most of the thoughts are channeled from her by the third-person narrator. And she is a mystery novelist, so she’s a writer, and she tends to look at her mysteries as jigsaw puzzles. Hey, how do I come up with this really cool plot, which is common, right? I mean, Agatha Christie, bar none, is the master of this form, but Lord Peter Wimsey challenges her at one point and says, Hey, you have this protagonist in your mystery novel. What if you complicate him and make him human? It’s almost like Dorothy Sayers is explaining to readers what she’s doing in this book. It’s meta, almost. She’s taking a step back, and after Strong Poison, I think, Dorothy Sayers decided she had to complicate Lord Peter Wimsey in particular ways in order to allow him to grow as a character and allow him and Harriet to grow together in Gaudy Night. Does that sound in the ballpark of right?

Z.J. Czupor  18:01
It does. From what I’ve read, is that when she first she Dorothy Sayers, first began writing Peter Wimsey, he was sort of one dimensional, but he becomes much more of a three dimensional characters as her novels progress, and her biographers have said that She puts a lot of herself into Harriet Vane for a couple of reasons, if we can talk about that. One is that she’s as you were explaining earlier. She’s expounding about her view of writing and how to how to form these mysteries and so on. And that’s really her speaking through Harriet Vane, but then with Harriet’s conversations with her classmates and the and the faculty at the school, then we get into these conversations about the role of women and feminism and all these other issues of the day, which Were fascinating in its own right. Plus, was trying to make the point that with Peter progressing as a much more complex, three dimensional character, so does Harriet, and she begins to talk about and let through Harriet talk about the role of women, which I thought was fascinating, especially in that time of the 30s.

Carolyn Daughters  19:23
Do you think Dorothy Sayers is channeling herself into this Harriet Vane character? I mean, is she not?

Z.J. Czupor  19:32
Somewhat. She has admitted that, but not totally, and it gives her the opportunity to talk about social, economic, cultural issues of the day, through Harriet Vane.

Carolyn Daughters  19:47
And also to have this whirlwind … I say whirlwind, but it’s five years … romance. She rebuffs Wimsey for five years, but he just keeps coming. It feels like Pride and Prejudice territory now, right? So there’s this amazing die hard, one-sided romance happening here. There’s some of the speculation, and Z.J., you would know much more than I would, that she fell in love with her own detective and said, Here’s this character, Harriet. Let me put her at Oxford, where I went to school and was one of the first women graduate.

Sarah Harrison  20:45
I recently heard she went before they even had degrees, so they had to go back and retroactively give her a degree. Incredible. Was done?

Z.J. Czupor  20:52
she got the degree, but she couldn’t accept their certificate for another five years, because she was a woman.

Carolyn Daughters  20:59
And smarter, surely than probably most of the graduating class, right?

Z.J. Czupor  21:04
I think so. I think she finished first in English and English languages.

Sarah Harrison  21:09
Which is frustrating. I’ll just put this out there, because she never translates her Latin. It just expects you to know Latin or google it. I mean, she didn’t know you could Google.

Z.J. Czupor  21:26
Back to your earlier point, Carolyn, when she wrote Strong Poison, she was writing about her real-life love affair with a writer by the name of John Cormos. He was Russian and immigrated to the U.S. She wanted to consummate that affair. He did not. He said, I don’t want children, but I’m happy to have our relationship. Because of her religious views, she did not want to use contraception, so the affair fell apart. So she’s referring to him in Strong Poison. He’s Harriet’s lover who dies, Boyes. And Harriet’s accused of that murder.

Sarah Harrison  22:26
That’s fascinating. It gives her a special insight, I think, into the feelings of Harriet Vane.

Z.J. Czupor  22:34
Ten years after their affair, John Cormos wrote a book and included their affair in it.

Sarah Harrison  22:43
Oh, what did he say? Did he kill her?

Z.J. Czupor  22:50
He didn’t kill her off. But he pretty much said, I would like to have you as my mistress, but I don’t want to be married.

Sarah Harrison  22:59
Oh, that’s accurate.

Carolyn Daughters  23:02
Let’s talk about that just a little more, because this hearkens back to Strong Poison, which is an earlier book. It’s wonderful. Read it. It’s great. It’s half the length of Gaudy Night, and it’s delightful. I left Strong Poison thinking I can have five more of these books about and I want to talk about these women, but I want to, before I get into the women of the cattery, I will leave that lingering for a moment. So Phillip boys is Harriet Vane is seeing this man. Philip boys, they live together, but they are not married. And it initially he is not willing to get married. Then eventually he decides, hey, I do want to get married. So maybe Sarah, maybe Z.J., both of you together, explain to me what’s going on there. Because eventually, when he says to her, I would like to get married, she says, No.

Sarah Harrison  23:58
Yeah, that court really didn’t buy it, the way she portrays it. The way she portrays it is he said like he was almost morally against marriage, like he just did not believe in it. But that turned out that he was just seeing if she was good enough to marry, and then he sort of deigned that she was which she took as being just like awful. And I agree with her that he lied. He was testing her. He was condescending to her.

Carolyn Daughters  24:32
Because if you say yes to this man, your whole relationship will have been bent, will have been based on this test that he had put you through.

Sarah Harrison  24:41
Were you worthy of me? Yeah.

Z.J. Czupor  24:44
Well, to add that dimension of real life, and Dorothy and John Cormos, who’s the Boyes’ character, and they broke up. He had said something about he wasn’t sure he wanted a relationship with her, because she was also a writer, but then he went off to California and eventually married another writer. So I think, no wonder she killed him in the book.

Carolyn Daughters  25:12
Now we’re getting into Gaudy Night, right? So Philip Boyes, or, taking a step back, Dorothy Sayers in her real life – are these men making decisions based on not just the career ambition of the woman, but how successful she is? Because who is more successful than Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers? So if you’re with Dorothy L Sayers, if you walk into a room, aren’t you the guy with Dorothy L Sayers?

Sarah Harrison  25:46
It depends on the room, if you read Strong Poison, because a lot of the rooms and I thought this was a super interesting contrast. Mystery writers were not well-respected by the social elites, the intellectual elite, even though she had an Oxford degree.

Carolyn Daughters  26:03
Some still aren’t right, yeah. We can say things have changed, and in some ways they have. In some ways they have not.

Sarah Harrison  26:09
Boyes’ friend in Strong Poison, I forget his name, but he was just unbearable. He would go on and on about Boyes’ genius.

Carolyn Daughters  26:18
Ryland Vaughn.

Sarah Harrison  26:20
Vaughn, right. And he asked her opinion for writing. Well, Harriet Vane makes four times the money, doesn’t she? H was just really condescending, really dismissive.

Carolyn Daughters  26:32
But this Vaughn guy was saying, boys is this genius and she’s just this mystery writer.

Sarah Harrison  26:39
Content to adore him, yeah. Why are women trying to do things? But then that contrasts and this, I want to hear more about how she wrote, like her perfect man and Wimsey, because she really did. Her favorite compliment from Wimsey in Gaudy Night is when he wants to talk characterization and like, make her characters more realistic. And she’s like, I didn’t know he took my work seriously. Like, that’s a revelation in that moment, and it’s a huge contrast to Strong Poison.

Z.J. Czupor  27:12
Dorothy is an interesting character in her own right, because a lot of her writing is also satirical. And she’s in many ways, pointing fun at society, sometimes when she’s bringing in these aspects of dialog and characterization, character conflicts. When she was first writing Strong Poison, she was working for an advertising agency in London, and she actually got some notoriety because she developed a campaign for Guinness beer.

Carolyn Daughters  27:46
Guinness is mentioned in The Nine Tailors.

Sarah Harrison  27:53
Yeah, it was the first bottled beer, I believe, in The Nine Tailors.

Carolyn Daughters  27:56
Did they cut her a check, I wonder?

Z.J. Czupor  27:58
Dorothy came up with a campaign using a toucan, the colorful bird, yeah. And if I can find it here, yeah, it’s interesting. The slogan she came up with was really quite clever.

Sarah Harrison  28:13
Z.J. brought his own notes. I am so excited about that.

Z.J. Czupor  28:16
So she said, if he can say, as you can, Guinness is good for you, how grand to be a toucan. Just think what toucan do.

Sarah Harrison  28:25
She should have won something for that. That’s great. 

Carolyn Daughters  28:29
“Guinness Good For You” is still an advertising slogan.

Z.J. Czupor  28:34
And Guinness kept the toucan in their campaign for many years after. But the point I was going to make is that while she was doing that. She still wasn’t making a whole lot of money. I mean, she was a struggling writer, and she admits that she creates Lord Peter Wimsey as this wealthy, well to do, well-educated, athletic, almost James Bond kind of character who can do no wrong. And same with Harriet Vane. Harriet is a somewhat successful writer of mysteries, and so Sayers is projecting her wishes onto these characters, where she said, Whenever I got a hole in my rug, I had Lord Peter Wimsey go out and buy a new carpet. Or if I couldn’t afford bus fare, I would have Lord Peter Wimsey drive his Bugatti or whatever he was driving. She had these dreams of being successful, but she also had a reason to make money, and that’s why she was writing mysteries. That’s the secret I alluded to when we were talking before we went on air.

Carolyn Daughters  29:45
Various characters in Strong Poison are part of the Cattery, which is ostensibly a typing bureau. But really, they are, for all intents and purposes, a detective agency funded by Lord Peter Wimsey. The women in the Cattery have the makings of first-class sleuths. I loved these characters, particularly Kitty Clemson and Joan Murchison. I could read a whole series with them. If reading today, I’d be like, are there more? Can I read more?

Sarah Harrison  30:34
Yeah, it would definitely be a spin off TV show the Cattery.

Carolyn Daughters  30:38
Hey, Hollywood, take note, this is an amazing idea for a television show, the Cattery. I mean, that would potentially have been a money making venture. Did she understand the potential appeal or draw of these characters?

Z.J. Czupor  30:59
I think she understood the draw of Peter Wimsey, because he became very popular. And after her second novel, people started comparing her to Agatha Christie for the quality of her riding and the quality of her plotting. And I think she began to get the sense that, man, I need to ride this gravy train and keep these stories going. And what she did.

Sarah Harrison  31:23
It’s interesting. You talk about the fantasy of Dorothy Sayers, but she writes a lot of that resentment into Harriet Vane as well. I wrote down one particular quote about Peter. She would rather have him secure and happy so that she might resent his happy security when she goes to see his nephew, St George. He has just wrecked a sports car. She’s like, he’s not going to get any sympathy from me. I had to work for a living. She brings up working for a living quite often.

Carolyn Daughters  32:00
So interesting, because she positions herself differently from Lord Peter Wimsey and his family and their inherited wealth. And then there’s a whole other layer of the scouts. A scout is a servant, a housekeeper, a servant at Oxford like Annie. Annie looks at Harriet and says, you’re privileged, and you’ve had all these opportunities I’ve never had, and Wimsey, you’ve had all these opportunities. So there’s all these gradations or layers of people seeing themselves as stripped of privilege and seeing somebody else filled with it.

Z.J. Czupor  32:39
One of the main comments and criticisms of stories of the golden age of detective fiction is that they were focused on high society and but the reading public loved it because it gave them an opportunity of escapism and being able to see, gee, how the other side lives. And here’s high society characters creating murder and havoc, and we get justice, yeah. And so there’s a satisfaction from that as well.

Sarah Harrison  33:13
She develops Wimsey through the books. Reading Strong Poison made me want to go back and read all the books in order, because of the way she layers the characters. You may just get a slice in each book, but take taken together, they’re very rich. Wimsey in particular. She plays both sides so expertly. He starts out as just an aristocrat, then we find out in Strong Poison that he’s made an entire office building that’s both like a charity and a prosecution enterprise. The Cattery, right? This is so sad and tragic. They’re called the superfluous people of society, these women who are widows or single spinsters, and he employs them all. He’s giving them all a salary, and then they’re also part-time spies as well as typists. And the people they spy on the most are people that are trying to take advantage of these types of women. So they infiltrate and then they’re prosecuted for fraud, and Wimsey runs the whole thing. So it’s charitable on a grand scale to prosecute this. You find out so much good about Wimsey. And he’s so self-denigrating. He’s like, yes, yes, I’m rich. I love the family name. I retain all the good manners. And maybe he retains the good and he criticizes the bad. She just writes him into the perfect line there.

Carolyn Daughters  34:47
Yeah, so interesting. Both he and Harriet Vane seem aware of the privilege that he’s been born into.

Sarah Harrison  34:52
He doesn’t throw it down the toilet.

Carolyn Daughters  34:56
He’s doing really interesting things with it, because that’s also called into question in. Gaudy Night, where she’s at the Gaudy event, which is this big entertainment where all these people come together, who are graduates of Shrewsbury, at Oxford, and people start questioning at this event. Well, is he a dilettante? Is he just bored? Does he care? Is he all about the mystery and doesn’t care about the human beings? And we learn, through her, her defense of him, which is not strident, but which is clear. But we also learn throughout the book and through other books. No, this is not just he’s bored and he just figured, Hey, what the heck? I’ll just solve some crimes. He’s actually passionate about this work that he’s doing, and it does drive something inside him.

Z.J. Czupor  35:46
It does. And I recall a line, I think it’s from the book where Harriet talks about she was curious that all of these people had more interest in Lord Peter Wimsey than her, and that part of that was because of Wimsey, supposed celebrity status that she had created. But I think it’s also a comment on women at the time were secondary to men in the society, and only were starting to get there’s legislation that allowed women to start serving on juries and take professional careers. And so this was the dawn of the world opening up to allow women to do more things, whereas before, they were pretty much relegated to either working at home or maybe, maybe in factories for the war effort.

Carolyn Daughters  36:43
Whereas in Strong Poison, Miss Clemson’s on the jury, right?

Sarah Harrison  36:48
She was a jury, and she got hated the jury, because she was the one that made them a draw. They couldn’t convict because she refused,

Carolyn Daughters  36:58
Right? So initially, Harriet Vane is on trial, and it’s a hung jury, and they say, well, we can’t reach a conclusion, so they determine, Okay, we’re going to have to prosecute a second time at a later date. And so women are now on the jury, and if, if Miss Clemson is there that her name? Yeah, Miss Clemson. Miss Clemson’s any evidence they’re making an impact, right? Like she, she basically said, I have nowhere else to be. We can. We can come back every day. We can stay here for 12 hours straight. I’m good. And so several other people are looking at their watches and saying, like, Oh, wow. Like, look at the time, and so she’s able to influence the direction, and rightly so, because, of course, Harriet was not guilty of the crime that she was accused of.

Sarah Harrison  37:51
I love your point, Z.J., about her being surprised, like Peter’s garnering more attention. I think Sayers does a great job of handling that in such a multifaceted way. On one hand, it is a sexist issue, and maybe a famous man will always be more famous than a famous woman at the time. But also, I think Harriet gets a little self-realization that she was being very self-centered. She was just obsessed with the fact that she had a lover, they weren’t married, and she was in a trial. She continues to be obsessed with the scandal of that, and it’s a long time before she realizes nobody’s really caring as much as she cares.

Carolyn Daughters  38:35
Except for the poison pen writer.

Sarah Harrison  38:38
But the poison pen writer is sending notes to undergraduates who have done nothing. Yes, it’s surprising she doesn’t get more.

Carolyn Daughters  38:45
That’s true. She gets surprisingly little flack for her history.

Sarah Harrison  38:53
Well, in the book, also felt like this whole journey, Harriet Vane has this internal opening to her own mind, where she goes from resenting her one-downedness to Peter. He’s good at everything he saved her life. She owes him everything. She hates stupid gratitude and all of that. And at the same time, she wishes Peter would just come in and fix everything she cannot handle it. She’s got, for each of our feelings, like the counter-feeling. And I thought Sayers did a really interesting job talking through this

Carolyn Daughters  39:27
One-downedness. What do you mean by that?

Sarah Harrison  39:38
Well, so, I made up it up. So this is not sure where to start, but I’ll start with today, right? So I was listening to another podcast. What I know, I know listeners only listen to other podcasts when you’re through with ours, but I have listened to all of ours. So I was actually a finance podcast. It was so bizarre. But they were talking about how a hero makes a victim and how too much generosity puts people on the receiving end when maybe they don’t want to be? And I was like, Wow, that really relates to Peter Wimsey, talking about today and understanding Harriet’s feeling a little more of always being one down in the relationship. She talks about how his mind is so brilliant, how he’s so rich, how he can just her mind’s an open book to him.

Carolyn Daughters  40:39
She’s always going to come second in whatever race they’re in.

Sarah Harrison  40:43
Exactly. And so she always feels one down and obligated.

Z.J. Czupor  40:46
That’s why she can’t accept his marriage proposal right away, because she doesn’t feel his equal.

Sarah Harrison  40:52
She doesn’t really feel that he could feel she’s his equal either. So she doesn’t feel it in her heart. Maybe it’s some imposter syndrome or whatever. But also, she doesn’t seem to take his overture seriously.

Carolyn Daughters  41:05
She also doesn’t have many examples, Harriet in the book of relationships, where a man saw his equal across the room and said, My goodness, let’s get married, like, let’s have a relationship. No, she usually sees somebody who’s looking for somebody who maybe is bright, but is a bit lower down on the intellectual rung. Most men, according to Harriet Vane, are not looking for their intellectual equal.

Z.J. Czupor  41:32
Well, I think you bring up a great point, Sarah, in that if you now take it up to a 30,000 foot level and look at that. What Dorothy Sayers is doing is she’s creating conflict. There’s conflict within Harriet’s own mind. There’s conflict with her relationship with Peter Wimsey. There’s conflict with her relationship with her alumni. And so from that 30,000 point of view as a writer, Sayers is brilliant, because that conflict is what keeps you reading. Because how is this going to be resolved? And you want, you want to pull for her. You want to pull for Peter. So just from a technical point of view in terms of writing, I think she was brilliant, how she did that.

Sarah Harrison  42:23
And I respect it so much more. The sound the second reading and the first reading, I was like, Harriet Vane, what’s the problem? I don’t see the problem. But after reading Strong Poison and maybe reading this one a little bit more closely, I understand the problem a little bit more. And she says at one point, and things I probably didn’t catch before. Like, she believes Peter sees her. When he looks at her, he sees a reflection of like, his own generosity and his own heroism in saving her. And she doesn’t like she doesn’t as she also mentions feeling she talked herself into Boyes, she tried to manufacture feelings that maybe weren’t there, and she doesn’t want to do that with Peter out of a sense of gratitude, yeah. So I that nuance I definitely missed on the first reading.

Carolyn Daughters  43:12
It does help to understand more about the trial and everything we learn in Strong Poison. That does help inform Gaudy Night, I felt that very strongly.

Sarah Harrison  43:23
I mean, in a certain way, each book stands on its own, but in another way, I think they don’t. I think you should read off in order and like, because she’s, she’s writing a book, but she’s also writing a chapter in a bigger story arc of this series.

Carolyn Daughters  43:40
Z.J., can you talk about this a little bit like, let’s, let’s look at Dorothy Sayers compared to say Agatha Christie, maybe other authors as well, maybe Ngaio Marsh, maybe Marjorie, all Ingham, but like Dorothy Sayers is evolving the characters who appear in each of these books, such that when you meet Lord Peter Wimsey in Gaudy Night, he’s different than he was in Whose Body, which is her first book. Harriet Vane changes through the books as well. Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie, sure. I mean, he can change a little, maybe by curtain, or some other at some other point in time. But for the most part, we know who Poirot is, and so there’s a comfort level into coming in and be like, I know him. It’s like, I know what I’m gonna get, whereas with Wimsey, we don’t always know, because he actually is evolving. These authors are very different, it feels to me.

Z.J. Czupor  44:39
I agree. I’ve read some reviews of Christie’s work on Poirot, and they characterize Poirot as being rather one dimensional, because he doesn’t change very much. But you’re right. He’s comfortable. We know what we’re going to get, but with Wimsey, yeah, he continues to involve. Evolve like a human being? Yeah, and I think that goes back to Dorothy’s overarching view of life, and she was basically a humanist, and she believed that individuals, whether man or woman, should be acknowledged for who they are, as individuals and not as a class of characters. So I think there’s something there about Dorothy that she’s taken from her real life. She’s evolving as she’s writing these novels. Every writer is different. Every writer puts in their own personal experiences, whether they want to admit it or not, but they do, and I think that’s what she was doing. She was evolving along with these characters.

Sarah Harrison  45:52
That’s a great point. And I read, in your article, in other places about this being, it’s important because it’s the first feminist detective novel, and yet you wrote in your article that she never referred to herself as a feminist. She was, again, like, I think you were just alluding to focused on the individual.

Z.J. Czupor  46:14
Exactly. She made some great points in her life and with essays about her opinions about this, and she has a great quote, If I can read it.

Sarah Harrison  46:29
Yeah, please,

Z.J. Czupor  46:31
It talks about her views. She’s so upset with how people want to pigeonhole her, on her, on her opinion, and she says, I’m occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction. From the woman’s point of view to such demands, one can only say, Go away. Don’t be silly. You might as well ask, what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle?

Sarah Harrison  47:10
That does sound so Harriet Vane. What did you call them? What kind of idiots?

Z.J. Czupor  47:16
Congenital imbeciles.

Carolyn Daughters  47:19
Does that mean they couldn’t help it? It’s like they had no choice in the matter.

Z.J. Czupor  47:24
Yeah, but she had a command of the English language and used it to create great effect in her satire and in her direct descriptions of life and culture as she knew it at the time.

Sarah Harrison  47:39
I feel like she wrote that into Wimsey a lot, too, one of my favorite conversations, after her first visit to Oxford, and she’s chatting with Wimsey, and she’s bringing up all these poor women who are ruined by marriage. And he never disagrees, but he would. He subtracts the male female angle, and he takes the principle. So he’ll be like, Oh yes, I know a man who was a great artist, and when he was married, his wife ruined him and ruined his art. And now, and I loved how he would always take the counterpoint, agree with the principal, but then maybe reduce importance the gender differences there.

Z.J. Czupor  48:22
Sayers was often vocal about not trying to reduce this whole idea of feminism and humanism into a bumper sticker or a short slogan. Because when you do that, that requires some explanation. And then she would go on and then define 520 pages.

Carolyn Daughters  48:51
You had mentioned, Z.J., that Lord Peter Wimsey is popular. People want to read about this guy. That’s why Sayers is writing multiple books with him as the protagonist. He can be endearing and charming and frustrating for a reader, in particular when he’s just swimming in privilege and we see him spending inordinate amounts of money. And he’s got a butler, Bunter, who’s amazing.

Sarah Harrison  49:22
He tells him the truth. I mean, Bunter gives him a cold shower of criticism daily.

Carolyn Daughters  49:30
You could make a whole series from Cattery and Bunter. They’re two separate series. For example, on the second to last page of Gaudy Night, Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are exchanging phrases in Latin. The savvy reader realizes, Oh, he’s basically giving her another opportunity to marry him, and she’s basically saying, Yes, I will. Yes, it pleases me, is what she’s saying. Were readers then annoyed by every chapter beginning with a quote from a poet? And like, were readers back then, annoyed or frustrated by this. Or did they find this endearing? And what about readers today? In your opinion? Do readers come to this and say, Ah, John Donne, has the quote here. Or, Robert Herrick, or whoever has the quote here. And then the Latin is strewn throughout, and so many just casual references, very academic. What was the thought then, and what is the thought now?

Z.J. Czupor  50:39
That’s a great question. I think what was going on then is that authors went to great pains to try to help readers understand the milieu that they were about to enter into. And authors in those days, oftentimes you find those older books that they have a cast of characters in the beginning, which is kind of like a playbill when you go to the theater and or they might have a map. We still see maps occasionally. But this idea of putting Latin quotes in front of chapters and or other quotes, I think that was a signal to the reader that I’m smart, and I think you need to pay attention here. And I think, if you don’t understand the Latin, you can look it up, or somebody can read it to you and then, and that’ll help educate you a little bit more. So it wasn’t hand feeding people the information. Now today we see maybe a quote at the beginning or prior to the prologue or whatever that has some relevance to the story, which I think is interesting. Sometimes, it’s well done; other times, you wonder, what does this really mean?

Carolyn Daughters  52:01
Yeah, and does it really relate to the chapter of the book? And if so, how. So you have this intellectual exercise of figuring out the relation which I was, I was invested in that in this book, where many quotes started it, and I would look at the quote and say, Why did she choose this quote for this chapter? And in many cases, I said, “You know what? I have a day job, and I’ve got other books to read, and so I put time into it, but I’m not going to pretend that I just stopped the clocks. And was like, let me figure this out.

Sarah Harrison  52:38
It’s complicated stuff. It was another growth area for me as well. We recently interviewed David Ignatius, and at the beginning of all of his chapters, he had interesting quotes, and I could see the connection. A lot of Sayers’ quotes are so erudite or archaic or Old English. Harriet Vane might understand them, but I don’t. They’re old for her time, so they’re double old for our time. At first, I would read them and dismiss them, but as I started going, I would really start working, like, what is the theme here? And they did relate, but they were difficult for me, and I can’t always tell, like, Sure, it was closer in history to them than it was to us, but it may have still been hard to reach for the average reader.

Carolyn Daughters  53:28
Okay, you have a Herman Melville who writes Moby Dick, and many chapters are cytology chapters about whales. Some people argue that you don’t have to read those chapters if you don’t want to. You can actually skip them. I’m just going to put this out there. Feel free to shoot me down. You could read Dorothy L Sayers without fully immersing yourself into the introductory poems, and when they break into Latin, or all the various things that some of the characters do. You could just say, “Some of this I don’t understand, and I’d have to devote another 20 hours to researching all of this to understand it.”

Z.J. Czupor  54:15
Yeah, whereas in that, that period in the 30s and the education she received at Oxford. I mean, that was probably second nature, especially to the upper class who were reading her novels. Probably the middle class who might have been reading her novels, probably would do what we do, skip over that part.

Sarah Harrison  54:35
You do have the character of St George. And I know we’re running out of time, so I’ll wrap this up. But you do have the character of St George, who at one point says, Oh, I only know one quote, so thank goodness it applied in this situation, whereas Harriet Vane and Peter are constantly quoting back and forth. So I think you, in so many ways, you are mid transition in this book of a lot of things changing and a lot of different axes.

Z.J. Czupor  54:58
And Dorothy Sayers continued to evolve. To your point Carolyn, when she’s using archaic Latin phrases, juxtaposed that with her later in her career, when she wrote a book about Jesus, sure, and she wrote it in a colloquial language, and she got a lot of flak for that, because people were upset to hear Jesus talking in common day language?

Sarah Harrison  55:23
Interesting. Truly, that mass used to be in Latin, right?

Z.J. Czupor  55:28
Well, Latin, or Old English, you know, that stilted language, and so she actually trailblazed the change in how religion was written about after that.

Sarah Harrison  55:43
Yeah, I thought that was fascinating. This whole conversation has been really interesting in listeners. We do want to continue it into a second episode if Z.J. will permit us.

Z.J. Czupor  55:55
Be happy to. We have to reveal the secret in the second episode.

Carolyn Daughters  55:59
Yes, we have a secret we’re gonna reveal. And then Sarah and I have a million questions we put together, and we’ve asked exactly zero of them thus far. So in the next episode, I’m just gonna rattle off questions and have you guys just tell me what you’re thinking.

Sarah Harrison  56:13
We have buzzers.

Carolyn Daughters  56:15
It’s gonna be like a quiz show. Why would you not come back to the next episode?

Sarah Harrison  56:23
Awesome. Tune in, folks. To tune in, tune your tuners. Stay tuned for more discussion of Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Harriet Vane.

Carolyn Daughters  56:30
What is this tuner?

Sarah Harrison  56:34
I always use archaic radio language, much like Dorothy Sayers. We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, it would mean the world to us if you would subscribe, and then you’ll never miss an episode. Be sure to leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to Tea Tonic and Toxin. That way, likeminded folks can also find us. We’re on all the platforms.

Carolyn Daughters
You can learn more about Gaudy Night and all our 2024 book selections at teatonicandtoxin.com. You can also comment, weigh in, and follow along with what we’re reading and discussing @teatonicandtoxin on Instagram and Facebook. And you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Finally, please visit our website, teatonicandtoxin.com to check out current and past reading lists and support our labor of love, starting at only $3 a month.

Sarah Harrison
We want to thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. We absolutely adore you. Until next time, stay mysterious.