Choose Your Own Adventure (Authors Edition)

[fictional]

Item: Lord Peter Wimsey.

Sadly Dorothy Sayers wrote Lord Peter mysteries of a finite number, and then moved onto religious plays, and Dante of all things...[and I say, wasn't one infernal poet enough??? I ask you. When the world could have been blessed with tales of Lady Peter (nee Miss Harriet Deborah Vane) and the Wimsey sproglets in WWII to say nothing of Bunter & Lord Peter's engrossing activities in Intelligence as well as those of Viscount St. George alias Jerry (it occurs to me that nickname couldn't have done him any favors in the RAF, now could it???) and his adventures in the Battle of Britain... from where I am sure he effected a daring escape of some kind, Miss Sayers' opinion to the contrary. And Winnifred. Perhaps we might actually meet her. And some more Dowager Duchess wouldn't come amiss. But I digress.]

So, okay, you read all the mysteries, then move on to the continuations by Jill Paton Walsh, then you want more. Naturally, being a person of sound taste and judgement, you proceed to the Wimsey fanfic on the web, all of it being of a surprising quality, but small in number. (Perhaps the explanation of the former lies in the latter.) You watch the filmed adaptations (Strong Poison and Have His Carcase excellent; Gaudy Night unforgivably awful).

And then? What then?

There are numerous directions to go: one can proceed to the incomparable Miss Heyer for the regency worldbuilding tinged with a gorgeous and delightful twenties/thirties aesthetic - (Incidentally Lord Peter's world, and Heyer's Regency are... surprisingly similar, now that I think of it. Including rhythms of phrase, etc.; says something about our tendency to merrily and muddily accept anything prewar and historical as "back then")... and know the path from there is straight towards comedies of manners, and probably on into fantasies of manners. Unexceptionable, what?

But suppose that's not desired... one can go and read inspirational texts... not the spiritual kind (not the chicken soup meaning anyway), but the ones that have their genesis in love. I've got Lois McMaster Bujold at my fingertips... and I remember my last reread of the Sayers oeuvre was in fact a sort of reverse application of this phenomenon -- I was desperate for more Miles Vorkosigan, and clearly the only thing to do was apply poultice of Lord Peter and hope for the best.

However! Ruthlessly back to the original quandary. One could go straight into P.G. Wodehouse say, and maybe after that wind up with a little Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in A Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)... and then... maybe a soupçon of Evelyn Waugh? Or backwards instead and choosing to indulge in a little, as Lord Peter might say, coming over all Galsworthy? I've always meant to give the Forsyte saga another wallop. And from thence backwards to Miss Austen? And then through to Emily Eden's "The Semi Attached Couple" and oh golly, back to la belle Georgette. A person could get dizzy with all this perambulating backwards and forwards in time.

[Incidentally, it occurs to me there is something quite Wimsey-esque to the Doctor and his TARDIS. Screwdriver/monocle, TARDIS/enviable Lagonda, post-(Time)war PTSD -- the arrogance, and the angst over condemning those that must be condemned... the list goes on and on. There's the fun of it all too.

Anyone up for a Tennant-Wimsey remake????

Incidentally, I wonder what pre-WWII era Torchwood would have made of Lord Peter....

...I but stir the pot.]

Thoughts? The important thing is to have a Plan.

Also, I really need a "reading books" icon.

Comments

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

Oh -- and have you read the ephemera story Sayers wrote for a newspaper during the war, documenting Peter and Harriet's various adventures during WWII? I have them archived at http://community.livejournal.com/commonplace_sam/53631.html but I haven't actually read them myself yet.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

From the Spectator, no? I haven't read 'em yet, but bits of 'em have been summed up for me. Also, I presume they were used as the basis for the Walsh books. I really like her whole deal about Peter as a complete person, and the quote you mention re: time/timelessness; it sort of highlights my ideas on serial fiction, and characters coming alive. I love that Harriet was meant to be Peter's kinder Reichenbach Falls... and then they obstinately refused to twitter off into happily-ever-after exile. There's something real about them. And I love how Sayers said that Peter never left her head, but stayed there for all the rest of her life, even after she'd quit writing him, and she was always holding things up to the "bar of his opinion."

I've been saving the rest of your Wimseyfic for when I finish this latest re-read. I watched the dvds, read all the Harriet ones, and am now working my way through the rest of the corpus. Almost done with Unnatural Death, now so fic ahoy soon. I'll check out the one you mention; sounds just in my line.

I was pretty fond of your Royal Society one ;-) They are quite a bunch, all of them. Competance is so... hot.

Your proposed library weekend sounds pretty cool; if you discover any lost works, let me know. I'd love a chance to get up there myself someday, fear of ms's and handwriting aside.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

Sayers never wrote the easy loves. I reckon because she never had any of her own. Which is just as well, because most of us don't, and Peter and Harriet are much more interesting than almost any other couple in the literature of the time, IMO.

(I do love Nero and Archie's timelessness, though; it makes me think they're still out there somewhere solving crimes, and Wolfe is FURIOUS that cable television EXISTS.)

Okay, for serious, I don't mean to be like HEY LOOK AT THIS NEXT but you pushed my LPW geekout button, and I haven't gotten to geek about Sayers in ages. I have the radio plays of Busman's and MMA with Ian Carmichael if you want those, and also a BBC docu about the books, with Jill Walsh, done in I think the early 80s.

Wheaton is a terrifying little town, super-religious (three bookstores, all Christian) and basically built around an ultra-fundie college, but their library is remarkably well-stocked. They have archives (first-editions, manuscripts, etc) of "The Seven": seven popular fiction writers who also wrote on Christian themes. Sayers, Tolkien, and CS Lewis are the only three I can recall off the top of my head.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Sayers never wrote the easy loves. I reckon because she never had any of her own. Which is just as well, because most of us don't, and Peter and Harriet are much more interesting than almost any other couple in the literature of the time, IMO.

Right there with you. And they stay interesting, which I find fascinating. So much of romance (or other genre fiction) is goal oriented, which I find... less than satisfying at times. I mean, even as they experience one stage -- and the culminations of books are always satisfying -- they move on to the next. Married or not. It's not neat, and they don't stagnate. I love the part in Busman's Honeymoon (and I think it was an intriguing change from/addition to the play version) where there's all the angst about sending the prisoner to the gallows. And Bunter tells us that there always is. Whoever heard of a detective story going there???

Also, ghosts! They have ghosts.

The other thing I love about Sayers is that she seems really just; the world of the novels is not always approving of Peter, or Harriet, or whatever. That makes the characters even more lovable to me somehow.

Feel free to "hey look at this next" -- especially when you come bearing such goodies. Want, want, want.

Is is the rest of the Inklings? Charles Williams and all them? Now there's a group I'd like to have a few drinks with. Imagine those being your colleagues at the office water cooler or whatever.

[chiara7.livejournal.com]

Dead on about the easy loves. And you know, the best thing is that this makes both Harriet's long resistance and her capitulation the more believable. Even when they've taken refuge in each other, they know that it's not a place of total safety; they have to keep working at their happiness and there's always an element of risk. That lack of complacency, that sense that both their friendship and their passion contain minefields -- that's a tremendously difficult thing to write; it must also have seemed a fairly radical view of marriage at its time (since people who held those sorts of values often chose not to marry).

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

They really are very radical novels in a number of ways. I know Sayers gets a lot of flack for her classist/racist/anti-semitic things, but taken in context... and for what they say about partnership and women's work... it's all quite staggering, I think.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

I think it must be the Inklings, yes -- the name sounds familiar, although I wasn't paying much attention. I was mostly just interested in the T;D manuscript, and while I have nothing per se against Christianity (anymore) I always get wigged out when my favourite writers are fetishised for their religious beliefs.

(I suspect this has something to do with finding out my beloved Narnia books were Christian allegory right at the height of my teenage rebellious years. I still feel BETRAYED.)

I have to say, Sayers was probably a lot more fun to hang out with when she was young. :D She was obviously a brilliant writer all her life, but from what I've seen I think she got rather staid in her later years.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

(I suspect this has something to do with finding out my beloved Narnia books were Christian allegory right at the height of my teenage rebellious years. I still feel BETRAYED.)

My betrayal still runs strong as well, but not as strong as most; I suspect this is because I was always an outsider to Christianity, so had less trouble making it one mythology among many. (When it has aesthetic appeal. Lots of Christian stuff doesn't.)

Just re-read The Last Battle when I taught it last semester and was overly amused at the Stable which is Bigger on the Inside. But these days I see lots of things with TARDIS-shaped/colored goggles. CURSES ON YOU, WHO!