In summary: Clouds of Witness features Sayers and her aristocratic detective at or near their best—or most unbearable, depending on how it hits you. This is a literate (even pretentious) and witty mystery story which also shows Sayers’ burgeoning skill as a novelist. If you like this, you should read the rest of the Wimsey stories. If you don’t, switch to another series. (Spoilers inevitably follow below.)
Since it’s just you and me here in the absolute privacy of my blog, where no one ever comes, I’ll admit the truth: most mystery plots aren’t that interesting to me. Sometimes the plot is an amazing performance that’s worth visiting and revisiting: Agatha Christie has a few of these (e.g. And Then There Were None); so does Donald Westlake (e.g. The Hot Rock). But usually, if I find a mystery is worth reading, it’s the novelistic stuff, not the mystery stuff that gets me. I assume that Lady Arabella Spoonsbury-Thorpington-Smythe, aristocratic sleuth, or Ignatz McFinn, private eye, will figure out in the fulness of time who did The Bad Thing. Often the answer is painfully obvious and you feel bad watching them flopping around, unable to ask the relevant question that will clarify the murk, solve the puzzle, and end the book.
Clouds of Witness is the rare exception where the characters and the whodunit plot merge seamlessly; the mystery is really about why people behave in the screwed-up way that they do. It’s not about who did the murder because there isn’t a murder.
The action sprawls over seven time zones, but the mysterious death that sets the plot in motion occurs in Yorkshire where the Duke of Denver is hosting a shooting party at Riddlesdale Lodge. Denis Cathcart, the fiancé of Denver’s sister, is found shot to death in the garden under circumstances that strongly implicate the duke himself. Denver stoutly refuses to indicate where he was in the crucial hours when the shooting must have occurred, and is indicted for murder. Lord Peter Wimsey, Denver’s younger brother, flies in from Paris to investigate the case at the side of his friend Inspector Parker of the C.I.D.
The detectives discover suspicious footprints indicating an unknown intruder in Riddlesdale Lodge. They investigate the dead man’s shady life as a card-sharper in Paris. They uncover abortive elopements, illicit affairs, a murderously jealous farmer, and a mysterious motocyclist. Unfortunately, none of this turns out to have anything to do with the death of Cathcart and, if anything, their investigations make Denver’s defense more difficult rather than less.
After falling off a wall or two, being chased by vicious dogs, plunging feetfirst into a deadly bog, and being shot by a panicky Socialist, Wimsey (clued in by the title of a French novel and a few words discovered on a piece of blotting paper at Riddlesdale Lodge) leaves England just as his brother is about to be put on trial in the House of Lords. (In democratic England, a man must be tried by a jury of his peers, and in the case of a Peer of the Realm that means a lot of plump, red-faced gents have to leave their hunting lodges and their clubs to put on velvet and ermine and pretend that it’s the 15th Century.)
Wimsey’s destination is New York City, and he returns from there with the help of a world-famed (but fictitious) aeronaut, bringing in the nick of time the crucial evidence that will acquit his brother: Cathcart’s suicide letter. It was written in impeccable French and addressed to his faithless lover in the hour before Cathcart killed himself. It lay with the other outgoing letters of the household as the body was discovered and suspicion almost instantly fell on the duke. It was carried out of the house the next morning and brought to the post office, because it would take more than bloodshed, scandal, and a police investigation to disrupt the routines of an upper-class English household.
Sayers makes great use of her varied cast of characters here: the Dowager Duchess of Denver and Bunter both play crucial roles; we meet dried-up Mr. Murbles, the Wimsey family solicitor and the celebrated advocate Sir Impey Biggs, both of whom return in future installments; Lady Mary Wimsey plays a prominent role in the story, particularly in interactions with Inspector Parker, who keeps getting flustered and saying stuff like, “All this interrogation is horribly irregular!”
Sayers also has some quiet fun making mock of the pretensions of the avant-garde on the socialist party circuit.
“I say, d’you know you’re dipping those jolly little beads of yours in the soup?”
“Oh, am I?” cried Miss Tarrant, withdrawing hastily. “Oh, thank you so much. Especially as the colour runs. I hope it isn’t arsenic or anything.” Then, leaning forward again, she whispered hoarsely:
“The girl next me is Erica Heath-Warburton–the writer, you know.”
Wimsey looked with a new respect at the lady in the Russian blouse. Few books were capable of calling up a blush to his cheek, but he remembered that one of Miss Heath-Warburton’s had done it. The authoress was just saying impressively to her companion:
“–ever know a sincere emotion to express itself in a subordinate clause?”
“Joyce has freed us from the superstition of syntax,” agreed the curly man.
“Scenes which make emotional history,” said Miss Heath-Warburton, “should ideally be expressed in a series of animal squeals.”
“The D. H. Lawrence formula,” said the other.
“Or even Dada,” said the authoress.
“We need a new notation,” said the curly-haired man, putting both elbows on the table and knocking Wimsey’s bread on to the floor. “Have you heard Robert Snoates recite his own verse to the tom-tom and the penny whistle?”
This is ridiculous—anyone who thinks that Joyce doesn’t employ syntax should, I don’t know, maybe read something by him—but it’s also kind of funny, even if you don’t share Sayers’ Tory-when-it-suits-her social opinions. Sayers had knocked around the seedier side of bookish London a lot and she’d probably sat through a few conversations like this.
This book is a ripping yarn rather than a serious novel but, like the best genre fiction, it suggests depths beyond those that it openly explores. Anyone who’s had the stamina to read this far would probably enjoy it.
