nineveh_uk

Took a bit longer to finish off than I had hoped, as Easter holiday appears to have brought the phenomenon of 'aha! Now that you don't have to do anything, you are going to collapse' so my plans for a relaxing weekend of a bit of art and writing were replaced with a relaxing weekend of cleaning the bathroom very slowly and sewing a patch on the sofa because my brain revolted at the prospect of the screen. But tis done, and it was a lot of fun to writes a good old Harriet Vane-centric type of fic. I literally got the idea for this at 3am and jotted down the rough version. My current dodgy sleep is good for something, it seems!

Fic: Feeding the Vultures
Fandom: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L Sayers
Rating: G, CNTW
Chapters: 1
Length: 2557 words
Summary: Miss Harriet Vane may have been cleared of murder, but there's no escape from publicity.

Today I am supposed to be tidying my office and listening to the cricket. I am not listening to the cricket. Not because it is raining, but because the Test match is next weekend…

Tomorrow I have the joy of a 200 mile drive to north Wales for an extended family celebration on Sunday. It really ought not to be 200 miles, which involves going almost as far north as Warrington*, but there is no decent alternative. I have been warned off considering a short cut via Wrexham by several people. As my only memory of Wrexham is of sitting in the back of the car while my parents got lost in it, I shall heed this advice. But it will be fun when I get there. I was also planning to listen to the cricket in the car, so I will need to dig out some CDs.

On the subject of motoring, finally I am approaching the end of the Wimsey bodyswap fic (it is not that long, it has just taken forever). In tribute to this, I present Lord Peter Wimsey’s gearbox, the Wilson pre-selector (as used on all Daimlers in the 1930s). And because the internet is full of enthusiasts, I present the man to tell you what it is like to drive it. To which the answer turns out to be “surprisingly easy”.

I had always assumed that an enormous car like a racing-style Daimler would be a nightmare of double-clutching to drive, and that Peter’s taste for fast driving went with someone who was a genuinely good driver. But not so! It’s the 1930s equivalent of a semi-automatic that cannot stall, involves little finesse with the clutch pedal, and sounds like it is actually easier to drive than my Ford Fiesta** - and also enormous fun. Exhibit 427 in “the rich are better at things because they have better tools to do them with.” I do recommend the article - it makes a subject I would not normally find interesting rather fascinating, and presents a potential method for murder that I like to think Harriet later used in a short story.

*But sadly not close enough to want to swing by Ikea.

**Except for the lack of power steering, because it must weigh an awful lot.

In the course of looking up references to guns in the Wimsey canon, I came across this line in Dragon’s Head,

‘Now run into my bedroom, and in the bottom of my wardrobe you will find a bundle of stout cord.’

Tell us, Lord Peter, are midnight burglars a regular occurrence in Piccadilly, or do you keep the rope for other purposes?

Since Wimsey’s nephew knows about this, and has a tendency to be indiscrete, I’m now imagining what he might have said to Harriet when he bumped into her in Gaudy Night...

***

‘Why should anybody object to Uncle Peter? He’s no beauty and he’d talk the hind leg off a donkey; but he’s dashed well-off and he’s got good manners and he’s in the stud-book.’ Lord Saint-George balanced himself on the edge of Mercury and peered into its tranquil waters. ‘Where’ve the carp taken themselves off to? They never resist meringues. Perhaps the fountain’s got hidden depths. So’s Uncle Peter, come to think of it. I stayed with him once when I was a kid – measles at school, parents away, uncle steps in – and we had an attack of burglars and Uncle Peter tied them up with this rope in the bottom of his wardrobe. The rope, that is, not the burglars – they were in the library. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but a chap grows up and the French novels get passed around and all that, and obviously one gets to wondering.’

‘Obviously,’ said Harriet, fascinated by this new light on the subject.

***

Following on from my last post, it strikes me that one advantage for Paton Walsh of an Oxford-set book is that it would allow her to leave Bunter at home in London*, which might be a good thing for all concerned given that she clearly regards him as an embarrassing anachronism who gets in the way of Peter’s embracing her particular take on modernity.

The novel is set in 1952, by which point Bunter and Peter have known one another for a possible 38 years**. Raising the question of what do you get your manservant for your fortieth anniversary? A question happily answered for us by Mitchell and Webb...



*As long as the question of who picks up Peter’s socks isn’t raised

**Bunter is a bit older than Harriet, but she and Peter are both going to have to live a long time beyond him for her to beat him.

Following on from antisoppist’s recent post on whether Peter Wimsey enjoyed his job in advertising in part because it gave additional opportunities for stalking running into Harriet leads me to a further question:

when Peter rings up Harriet’s flat for the first time in Gaudy Night, how did he get her phone number?

Harriet has just been abroad for 18 months. Peter knows she is back because she’s been mentioned in the Times*. She has recently returned to a new flat, and a new telephone number. I think we can assume that the new number is not in the phone book on the grounds that even if she weren’t ex-directory**, which I’d expect her to be given that if she can’t avoid nasty letters from strangers she doesn’t want nasty phone calls as well, there hasn’t been time for the number to enter a new book in the few weeks in which she’s been in London again.

A quick search of the internet has not been especially fruitful, but the Daily Mail tells me that directory enquiries started with the first telephone service, so that would have been an option, except that Peter doesn’t know Harriet’s new address (she tells him that she has moved flat in answer to his comment that she has a new phone number), and if the books were being used we’re back to the original problem of her not being in them.

So how did he get the number so quickly? Would the operator have sufficient local knowledge to put him through to Miss Vane, newly living in a Bloomsbury flat at an unknown address? Has he phoned the host of the literary party, or got Sally Hardy to do so? Has he phoned Harriet's agent with an excuse, or is that too embarrassing? As Parker lives round the corner, has he got him to make an official enquiry?

I am assuming that he didn’t in fact see her at Ascot, have her trailed home, and only waited for the paper to give him an excuse for knowing she was back, or got whatever border agency there was at the time to report...

*As Bunter’s duties including reading the paper and picking out notable articles, one can only imagine what he was thinking as he marked that particular column in black ink.

**Assuming that to be an option at the time.

Let me quote a short passage from the start of chapter VII of Murder Must Advertise (shortly before Charles gets slugged on the staircase):

“[Chief-Inspector Parker] had had a long day at the Yard — no thrills, no interesting disclosures, no exciting visitors, not so much as a dis-diamonded rajah or a sinister Chinaman — only the reading and summarizing of twenty-one reports of interviews with police narks, five hundred and thirteen letters from the public in response to a broadcast S O S about a wanted man, and a score or so of anonymous letters, all probably written by lunatics.”

My copy of The Attenbury Emeralds has arrived, and I am reading it. That a dis-emeralded Rajah has turned up on page 18 probably says all you need to know about its quality. I shall have much to say, but to spare you will save it until the end. It is a bit slow-going because I keep having to stop to say "WTF?TRY(%HDFNW(HGOAT!"

Jill Paton-Walsh’s The Attenbury Emeralds, announced last year, is published on 16 September 2010. The first thing I’ll note is that whilst I don’t know the stats on novels published in hard back (in this case simultaneously with paperback), that they are bothering at all seems to indicate a fair degree of confidence in the publishers. It’s easy to forget when complaining that the sequels – and now prequel – simply aren’t Sayers, that these are very strongly-selling books, and that an awful lot of people like them. Much as I would like a facsimile of the Thrones, Dominations MS, if we could only have one or the other (which is of course not true), then looked at purely financially the novel was surely the right choice for the Estate.

At this point I owe an apology: I went to a talk by Paton-Walsh at last year’s St Hilda’s crime convention, and completely failed to write it up. The talk was mostly about jewels and crime, but she did talk briefly about the new novel, and read a short extract. I can’t say that it really encouraged me; the scene included Peter’s first-person diary, and I fear, though cannot quite recall, that some of the novel is definitely told from this POV, and Freddy Arbuthnot discoursing intelligently.

Having realised that publication is nearly upon us, I thought I’d have a sniff around for any further details.

( Amazon blurb )

The same page has a short interview with Paton-Walsh – whether or not one likes her Wimsey fanfic, she’s certainly a fan! A good thing, given that she is being paid (handsomely, one assumes) to write fanfic.

There’s a slightly longer version of the same blurb at fantasticfiction.

Apart from the really obvious question of “why has Peter only got round to telling Harriet this story, given that they’ve been married for 16 years?”, I can’t say that JPW’s Peter and Harriet facing a changing world raises my confidence. Does anyone else want to bet whether we have a scene in which Helen rails against the new National Health Service*, and Peter or Harriet politely but firmly defends it? Notwithstanding that both of them would almost certainly have voted for Churchill’s conservatives.**

A much longer review, by a blogger who has actually read the book, is here.

There are some minor spoilers in the text, which I won’t discuss here except to say that once more my hopes are not raised, but I don’t think it’s spoilery to quote this:

The time is now firmly in the 1950s in Festival of Britain time. No more palatial living for most of the Wimseys’ friends and relations, the war has seen to that but Bunter is still here and though he would like to maintain the class distinction he finds it difficult when his son Peter is firm friends with the Wimsey boys.

Because as we know, children are never, ever sensitive to class distinctions and the fact that three of them are going to Eton***, and the other to a London grammar**** (actually, secret jealousy that Peter Bunter gets to stay at home could be interesting, but it won’t happen, nor will “So did he call you after Dad so that he got to say “I love you, too, Peter”?). But then my general policy whenever I hear the words “But I treated her like a daughter” is to assume that the employee thus treated would probably rather have had a decent wage, set hours, and paid holiday. We shall see. If the children are not appallingly cute/precocious, it may be all right. It will be interesting to see how Bunter fits back into domestic service post- the wartime variety, and how Peter copes with perhaps not quite so many housemaids. But the aristocracy were going bust all over the place in the inter-war period and you’d never know it from Sayers’ novels, and the fifties were not the seventies. As DLS put it in 1949: "No doubt the family income from landed estate is considerably reduced; but so long as Harriet can turn out readable fiction they will probably still be paying super-tax."

I await the arrival of my copy with anticipation. I don't anticipate loving it, but Paton-Walsh can at least write, even if I disagree with what she writes. Needless to say, I will not be considering it canon.

*I had not realised how big the Labour victory of 1945 was. They had a majority of 239, and more than twice as many seats as the Conservatives

** I can see Peter as a cross-bencher when he ends up in the Lords, not because he isn’t a Tory, but because he doesn’t strike me as a party political animal (it's hard to see him following a party line or submitting to the whips), and that, plus that whisker of unease at the hereditary principle leads me to think he’d probably be happier feeling he was able to plough his own furrow.

***Where, taught by Bunter, as fags they will all make perfect toast.

****Though my mother has a rather nice 1950s children’s book entitled The Harlands Go Hunting in which the daughters of the main family are at boarding school (considerably down the social scale from Peter – rural professional, I think), but are close friends with a girl in the village who attends the local school and is clearly not in the same social or income bracket (I’m now thinking that her mother may even be a domestic servant, but I’m probably making that up).

(Potential minor spoilers in comments)

"Some thoughts" rather than a thesis. This is a re-post of a message on the LordPeter Yahoo list in response a message that quoted an extract from "Talking About Detective Fiction" by P.D. James. Note, because of the immediate context in which this was originally written (discussion of Whose Body only, with some people on list whose views are on the right wing of the US political spectrum), and the consequent possibility of ructions, I have kept very strictly to answering the questions as posed, and because this is a quick post I have not re-edited for LJ. There's a lot more I could say on this and related issues, but not now. Still, I thought it might not be wholly uninteresting to some.

( Cut for length )

Leafing through some DLS for dialogue help in the course of drafting some fic, a couple of paragraphs struck me.

The first is from the short stories. I don't read them much - they're not particularly good short stories - but I ought to read them more, as they have some interesting little passages in them. Like this one from The Unprincipled Affair of the Practical Joker.

[Peter is staying in a grand hotel somewhere-or-other that liners dock from Africa (Southhampton?), and Mrs Ruyslaender has spotted his name on the register and, desperate, come to his suite at 11 pm to try to get his help on a case. Bunter admits her to the sitting room.]

The man stepped noiselessly to the bedroom door and passed, shutting it behind him. The lock, however, failed to catch, and Mrs Ruyslaender caught the conversation.

"Pardon me, my lord, a lady has called. She mentioned no appointment, so I considered it better to acquaint your lordship."

"Excellent discretion," said a voice. It had a slow, sarcastic intonation, which brought a painful flush to Mrs Ruyslaender's cheek. "I never make appointments. Do I know the lady?"

"No, my lord. But - hem - I know her by sight, my lord. It is Mrs Ruyslaender."

"Oh, the diamond merchant's wife. Well, find out tactfully what it's all about, and, unless it's urgent, ask her to call tomorrow."

The valet's remark was inaudible, but the reply was:

"Don't be coarse, Bunter."

*

I assume that Peter is still being sarcastic here, and not actually ticking Bunter off in the final sentence - it would be a bit much if he were, given that he started it. There are other passages of what Peter and Bunter and Peter and Parker talking about women/sex within the books, but I think that this is the most obviously blokish one.

*

Second, Busman's Honeymoon.

[Chapter 4, Bunter and Peter the morning after, not quite a page after Bunter's "I trust your lordship found everything satisfactory?"]

"Then buzz off and get breakfast before I get like the Duke of Wellington, nearly reduced to a skellington.... I say, Bunter."

"My lord?"

"I'm damned sorry you're having all this trouble."

"Don't mention it, lord. So long as your lordship is satisfied - "

"Yes. All right, Bunter. Thanks."

He dropped his hand lightly on the servant's shoulder in what might have been a gesture of affection or dismissal as you chose to take it, and stood looking thoughtfully into the fireplace till his wife rejoined him.

*

All things considered, perhaps it's a good thing that the body turned up in a cellar and gave them all something to talk about...

Just spell it out for a moment. There's Bunter coming in, asking in code if Peter had a good night's not-sleep, and Peter giving a "you cannot seriously think I'm going to answer that" response and changing the subject. Then they waffle on about business (a bit awkwardly? A little excessively normal?) before Peter appears to feel guilty, calls Bunter back, apologises, ostensibly for the trouble (this the man who in the past has booked a holiday cottage with no indoor plumbing at all without remorse), Bunter brings up - something - again, gets an answer, and the final ambiguous gesture of reassurance/don't need you anymore, and Peter stares at the fireplace Bunter has just relaid mulling over - something - the options being presumably (1) yes, that was a highly satisfactory night, or (2) Oh God, is this about to be a bit difficult?

All of which I've thought before, and tended to assume that Peter is intending to be sympathetic if abstracted. What I haven't thought about before is the implication of Bunter potentially taking it seriously as a dismissal. It certainly makes Peter's laughing about the morning's Humorous Soot/Sink Incident an awful lot harsher from Bunter's POV, and adds greater force to his being off-kilter over the next few days and the absolute triumph when he beats Harriet to be the one wanted once again. No wonder the Duchess wonders how things are going after talking to him.

***

And yet people still think that Bunter fantasises about racehorses. Well, I suppose they have big noses and are famously well-endowed. (Do you think I'd get away on the Yahoo list with "Bunter has a dirty night out in the Denver stables" on the grounds that it if you don't accept anything at all is going on re. Peter then something must be going on re. Equus caballus?)

[Cross-posted from LJ]

So it seems that I should not be allowed out on a school night. Now resuming normal service.

Yesterday was my birthday, and I must make mention of two wholly unexpected presents:

(1) Some time ago I mentioned the existence of a Finnish pr0n novel featuring Peter Wimsey and Bertie Wooster. Going so far beyond the call of duty that she now waves at LJ from Alpha Centauri, antisoppist has taken it upon herself not only to acquire the thing, but to translate and summarize it for the entertainment of the troops. Read it and boggle.

(2) bronze_ribbons offers a Bujold/Sayers crossover, in which Ivan and Jerry commiserate with one another over the attitude of certain steely-minded individuals. I am thoroughly in favour of Jerry not dying in the war when this is the outcome.

Thank you both very much indeed!

*

I have seven weekdays left to go until I have a fortnight off work at Christmas, and – obviously – I am counting down. I am absolutely and utterly shattered. It’s really infuriating; holidays should be about having free time to enjoy, not recuperating in order to be sent back to the salt mines. Still, come next weekend I shall be on the road north (not the train! This will make packing an awful lot easier), just as long as I survive this weekend’s motorway driving lesson. Then I have a glorious two weeks of not having to get the bus in the morning, and other people doing a great deal of the cooking. Oh, and Christmas, to which I am as always looking forward enormously, though it will be hard to top last year’s Christmas dinner balloon modelling extravaganza, and New Year, though here it will definitely be impossible to top last year’s Viennese extravaganza.