Dorothy L. Sayers and The Queens of Crime
A Book Review and a Biographical Sketch (No Voiceover Yet)
The Queens of Crime Review
In The Queens of Crime: A Novel, Marie Benedict provides a true-crime, locked-room mystery set in England and France during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and investigated by perhaps the five best-known women writing mystery novels at that time. In other words, in this book Benedict offers something to attract readers of several different mystery sub-genres as well as fans of her historical and biographical novels highlighting important and perhaps overlooked historical women.
The novel opens in 1931 around the time of the creation of the Detection Club. In the novel (with a bit of chronological license from the real-world timeline), Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers join the club as founding members, and Dorothy dreams up the idea to trick the male majority of club members into welcoming 3 more female colleagues: Baroness Orczy, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. Between them, Christie and Sayers created Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Harriet Vane. The other women wrote series featuring, respectively, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Albert Campion, and Roderick Alleyn. In truth, all five women did belong to the Detection Club, but Marsh and Allingham joined later.
They soon discover that, although the gambit works to secure the initiation of more women, the ladies of the club still find themselves chatting alone in the corner and excluded from talking shop with the men of the group.
When the young English nurse May Daniels goes missing on holiday in northern France, Sayers joins her journalist husband as he covers the story. She soon sees this tragedy as a call to action. She doesn’t think the men are giving Miss Daniels the depth of investigation she deserves, in the first place. In the second, she takes the notion that the five women of the Detection Club would gain increased credibility with the men of the club if they successfully solved a real-life murder where the police had failed.
Can they do in real life what their creations do in books?
Perhaps Emma was correct when she pronounced that May’s murder needed to be solved by women, in part because only female sleuths properly credit female witnesses (Kindle location 1304).
Their quest forces these women of varying ages, backgrounds, personalities, and social standing to set aside prejudices, ego, and quirks of temperament to work together. Learning to leverage their different strengths and divide responsibilities, they raise new questions as they answer others. In so doing, they inadvertently attract the attention of powerful men with destructive secrets, and the most closely held secret of one of them is threatened with exposure along the way.
The crime they investigate did actually occur, though a few years prior to the action of this novel. Dorothy Sayers really did take an interest in the investigation at the time, though not to the extent depicted in this book. In truth, as far as my research went, the trail went cold and May Daniels never received justice in the law courts. Will Benedict’s fictional investigation give her poetic justice?
The focus on Sayers herself, through whose thoughts we experience the story, attracted me to this book. To my knowledge this is the first fictionalized attempt at depicting her life on page or screen. As such, The Queens of Crime is a good introduction to Sayers and to the women of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction beyond the celebrated Dame Agatha Christie.
“I guess the best way to describe the way I solve the murders is that I serve the work,” I [Dorothy] reply. “What on earth does that mean? Sounds very mystical,” Ngaio—of course—says. I don’t let her shake me. “I take direction from it and shape it according to that guidance. I don’t let my own predilections or potential readers’ desires dictate the course of the plot or its conclusion.” “So you let the muse direct you?” Emma asks. “That’s one way to describe it. Although for me, the muse is God rather than the ancient Greek mythological figure with a capital M. I grew up in a religious household; my father was an Anglican vicar. Those teachings have never left me, although they have taken on their own form in my adult years.” The women are quiet. Religious beliefs are a topic upon which we haven’t touched. Although why not? We are dealing with life and death as well as good and evil in the case of May Daniels. This secular age in which we live and the intellectual labors in which we engage don’t lend themselves to religion, I suppose. That is a conversation, however, for another day. Or is it? (Kindle location 3600, galley copy)
If you like cozy mysteries and/or historical fiction, this is a good book for a snow day or travel, for carpool lines, book clubs, or solitary lunches. I sincerely enjoyed reading my advanced reader copy (thanks, NetGalley and St. Martin’s) on my e-reader in the pool last autumn. Fans of Marie Benedict’s other work will not be disappointed. (Blog readers: It is not a Christian book. Sayers’s faith is mentioned respectfully. The action of this novel occurs before Sayers began her work in Christian apologetics.) If there were contemporary “queens of historical fiction,” Benedict would certainly merit a place among them. This book follows naturally from her fascinating book The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, which tells of Agatha Christie’s infamous disappearance in the context of the dissolution of her first marriage.
I do not consider The Queens of Crime a Great Book: one that repays repeated reading throughout life, leaves a lasting mark on one’s character, and merits study in English classes for decades to come. But it isn’t trying to be that. We need good as well as great books.
My hope and expectation are that this engaging, entertaining novel will attract many readers and acquaint them with these women, some of whose works are classics worth reading, rereading, and studying. I especially hope that it kindles increased interest in the life and work of Dorothy Sayers, the ringleader of the queens depicted in this book. Some of her work, to my mind, lands firmly in the Great Book category.
The mystery novels of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Baroness Orczy, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh are still widely available in print, ebook, and audiobook versions, as are the other historical novels by Marie Benedict.
Have you read it? Do you plan to? Are any of these authors new to you? I welcome your thoughts and feedback in the comments.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy Sayers was a Renaissance woman who considered herself a “dinosaur” but, from this vantage point, was far ahead of her time. One of the first women to complete a course of study at Somerville College of Oxford University, she later received an actual degree among the first women to have their certificates converted to degrees. A talented linguist, she translated French classics (The Song of Roland) and devoted her latter years to a modern translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. She worked as an advertising copywriter and devised one of the most successful Guinness campaigns of her day. She also worked in publishing until her own writing demanded her full attention.
When she decided to try her hand at detective fiction, she—true to form—began by reading and studying everything in the genre she could access. She studied G. K Chesterton’s essay on how to write in that style and taught herself the literary conventions considered normative at the time. Lord Peter Wimsey, the amateur detective she created, and his counterpart Harriet Vane (especially Harriet!) continue to entertain readers decades later. Her writing still sparkles and repays readers for the time spent traveling back to the golden age and across borders. My favorite of her detective books is Gaudy Night (affiliate link), set in a fictional Oxford college for women students.
When she felt she had exhausted what she had to offer the detective genre, she turned to explicitly Christian works. The Mind of the Maker (affiliate link).examines human creativity through the lens of the creator’s Trinitarian Creator. It anticipates the later worldview teaching and writing of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, the excellent book Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle (affiliate link), and contemporary writing on faith and creativity such as that of Makoto Fujimura and Andrew Peterson.
Curiously, she writes at some length about detective fiction in Maker. Here is one passage I flagged for future reference (and find true):
The desire of being persuaded that all human experience may be presented in terms of a problem having a predictable, final, complete and sole possible solution accounts, to a great extent, for the late extraordinary popularity of detective fiction. This, we feel, is the concept of life which we want the artist to show us. It is significant that readers should so often welcome the detective-story as a way of escape from the problems of existence. It “takes their minds off their troubles.” Of course it does; for it softly persuades them that love and hatred, poverty and unemployment, finance and international politics, are problems capable of being dealt with and solved in the same manner as the Death in the Library. The beautiful finality with which the curtain rings down on the close of the investigation conceals from the reader that no part of the “problem” has been “solved” except that part which was presented in problematic terms. The murderer’s motive has been detected, but nothing at all has been said about the healing of his murderous soul. Indeed, a major technical necessity of the writing is to prevent this aspect of the matter from ever presenting itself to the reader’s mind. (For if we know too much about the murderer’s soul beforehand, we shall anticipate the solution, and if we sympathize with him too much after discovery, we shall resent his exposure and condemnation. If sympathy cannot be avoided, the author is at pains, either to let the criminal escape or to arrange for his suicide, and so transfer the whole awkward business to a higher tribunal, whose decisions are not openly promulgated.) (The Mind of the Maker, page 85).
She also wrote a popular series of radio plays on the life of Christ for the BBC: The Man Born to Be King (affiliate link). C. S. Lewis appreciated these to the extent that he told Dorothy he made them part of his Lenten reading every year.
Sayers was not among the Inklings but was good friends with Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis. She also became close friends with Lewis’s wife Joy. Gina Dalfonzo’s excellent book Dorothy and Jack (affiliate) details their friendship, which in that day primarily developed through letters. Apparently, he did not share the degree of appreciation she had for Dante, and she thought his beloved Milton a bit overrated. Their friendship models collegial respect and philia (purely friendship) love between a Christian man and women. It is also beautiful that Joy was enfolded into the friendship for the duration of her time with Lewis.
Another recent Sayers biography, should you wish to get better acquainted with her life and works, is Dorothy L Sayers: A Biography: Death, Dante and Lord Peter Wimsey by Colin Duriez. Duriez has written about the Inklings and other literary figures as well.
Sayers’s personal life was proved unusually complicated for a Christian writer, then or now. She clung to Christ and faith in Him to the unexpected end of her life due to a heart attack at age 64. I look forward to meeting her and thanking her for serving the Lord with the abundant gifts He gave her when we are in His presence together in the endless Day of the Resurrection. I do hope you get to know her in this life too. Her prolific writing is intriguing at all times and often instructive too.
Have you read anything by or about Dorothy Sayers? If so, please add your recommendations below. If not, have I piqued your interest?
I enjoyed your review and I'm putting this on my wish-list!