nineveh_uk

I promised an erotic novel featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. I might have also mentioned that it is a Wooster crossover. Said volume goes by the name of Himon temppeli, which according to the blogger to whom I owe this information (see original post) is Finnish for “The Temple of Lust”. It’s published 1972, and the author is one Phoebe Kisshagen. Anyone else think that might be a pseudonym?

Anyway, the plot is apparently as follows:

Wooster is a client of Phoebe Kisshagen's brothel and he gets into a fight with young Wimsey. Wimsey claims that Wooster is no longer the lover he once was and Wooster sets out to prove his reputation. And so they get into a seduction competition, which Wooster wins, dying afterwards of exhaustion.

Wouldn't you just love to read Bunter's take on this?

Obviously this is not a genuine Sayers/Wodehouse collaboration. Wimsey would think the contest in question appalling déclassé, and Wooster has surely never been a lover of any description. Also, by 1972, Sayers had been dead for fifteen years. The blogger takes what might be an excessively long time to reach what might seem the obvious conclusion (surely rule no. 1 of this sort of thing is that they’re almost always fakes. I don’t believe for a second that Slaves to Sin, that classy volume* which I picked up in Cambridge market, is a genuine account of a French police inspector who spent his career investigating white slavery), that a hack has ripped off an extant work (with what accuracy I couldn’t say) and has added the names of a couple of reasonably well-known characters in order to add verisimilitude to an otherwise unconvincing narrative - so at least a hack with literary taste - but I thank him nonetheless for bringing this peculiar beast to my attention.

What really intrigues me about this, though, as it does with the Finnish crime novel written by “Harriet Vane” (sorry, the link is buried somewhere) is that the characters were sufficiently well-known to make using them in this way worth-while. These days in the UK it’s published pr0n about Pride and Prejudice, a book of which I have no more to say than that it includes the words “[Elizabeth’s] sweet, pink, tufted demesnes”.

Finally, I note that it appears to be available second-hand via a reputable site. antisoppist, your mission should you choose to accept it…

*Considerably cleaner than the average modern Mills and Boon. The basic model goes “Jenny was an innocent Berlin secretary. She was seduced by her boyfriend. The boyfriend then revealed that he had photos and blackmailed her. She ended up in a harem in Tangiers, where in the stultifying eastern heat and boredom all the women ended up having sex with one another to pass the time.”

In the previously-mentioned universe in which Harriet Vane’s detective novels are made into a TV series (hopefully more faithfully than your average Christie adaptation), someone will have to be found to play her detective, Robert Templeton.

[Robert Templeton] was a gentleman of extraordinary scientific skill, combined with almost fabulous muscular development. He had arms like an orang-utan and an ugly but attractive face. She took conjured up his phantom before her in the suit of rather loud plus-fours with which she was accustomed to invest him, and took counsel with him in spirit.

I can now announce that that man is French rugby union player Sebastian Chabal. If this was Harriet’s vision of the archetypal great detective, no wonder it took her a while to reconcile herself to fancying Lord Peter Wimsey, who undoubtedly spent his first two terms at Eton having his head stamped into the mud every time he was forced, white knees trembling, out on to the field.

Still perfecting my Yuletide sign-up plans. Question, if twenty-one people have already volunteered to write Wimsey fanfic, why the hell aren’t they doing it the rest of the time?