The Nine Tailors [Paperback]

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) earned a lasting respect for her translations, poetry and Christian writing, but it was her detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey that won her the lasting affection of so many readers. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham are known as the "Queens of Crime" for their domination of crime writing in the 1920s and '30s.

THE NINE TAILORS was published in 1934 and opens on New Year's Eve. Lord Peter Wimsey runs his car into a ditch in the village of Fenchurch St. Paul, in England's low-lying East Anglia fen country. Rescued and given shelter for the night by the rector, Wimsey is astonished to find that the church is a magnificent old edifice on Norman foundations with a "full ring" of eight bells in the tower. To the detriment of his sleeping prospects, the ringers are planning a nine-hour ring starting at midnight. Readers who know Wimsey will not be surprised that when one of the ringers falls to the influenza, our sleuth is able to step in and take the rope.

Critics of this book cite the extremely detailed descriptions of change-ringing, or campanology, the very English, very mathematical progressive ringing of large cast bells. You may love it or you may hate it, but the bell ringing is integral to this picture-perfect novel of English country life; it would be a mistake to disregard the role of the bells. The eight bells in the tower at Fenchurch St. Paul have names and voices, personalities even. The tenor bell known as Tailor Paul is typically rung nine times to announce a death in the village; the traditional Nine Tailors of the title.

Some months later there is a death in the village and when the grave is opened for the burial, it's already occupied. Lord Peter is back on the scene to investigate. The mysteries of the body in the grave and a stolen emerald necklace have their origins in the past and therefore lack some urgency, but the book progresses to a startling and appropriate ending.

The moody countryside and expertly drawn characters lift this book above its genre. THE NINE TAILORS is a literate period novel that captures English rural life between the wars. Of the eleven Wimsey novels it's the most readable as a stand-alone, and it showcases the characterization and style that are the best part of this series. This is a good book to start with if you want to acquaint yourself with the Wimsey stories; as long as you don't hate the change-ringing.

Linda Bulger, 2008

This novel, Dorothy L. Sayers' best-known, is, without doubt, one of her best-if not the best. Sayers takes the customary English village, and makes something new of it, by setting it in the Fen country, and by giving to it a church, which, as the well-drawn rector describes, "East Anglia is famous for the size and splendour of its parish churches. Still, we flatter ourselves we are almost unique, even in this part of the world." The church services show great feeling and power, and neatly tie in with the theme of religion. The church possesses bells, the book being best-known for the bell-ringing, described in such powerfully beautiful descriptions as:

"Out over the flat, white wastes of fen, over the spear-straight, steel-dark dykes and the wind-bent, groaning poplar trees, bursting from the snow-choked louvres of the belfry, whirled away southward and westward in gusty blasts of clamour to the sleeping counties went the music of the bells-little Gaude, silver Sabaoth, strong John and Jericho, glad Jubilee, sweet Dimity and old Batty Thomas, with great Tailor Paul bawling and striding like a giant in the midst of them. Up and down went the shadows of the ringers upon the walls, up and down went the shadows of the ringers upon the walls, up and down went the scarlet sallies flickering roofwards and floorwards, and up and down, hunting in their courses, went the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul."

The bells are also eerily threatening-"Bells are like cats and mirrors-they're always queer, and it doesn't do to think too much about them."-which is fitting, as the plot hinges on bells: both an ingenious cryptogram (again, to quote the rector, "I should never have thought of the possibility that one might make a cipher out of change-ringing. Most ingenious."), and an ingenious murder method.

The whodunit aspect of the story is not neglected; for once, it is a genuine problem. The body is buried in a grave, and involves a complicated problem of identity, and an unknown method. The victim, as Wimsey describes, is "a perfect nuisance, dead or alive, and whoever killed him was a public benefactor. I wish I'd killed him myself." Wimsey is engaging here, and not the parody of Bertie Wooster he sometimes is-he is a human being, without being the equally obnoxious creature found in Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon. The detection is excellent, and, as was to be the trend in nearly every detective story following (especially Nicholas Blake's), the detective "felt depressed. So far as he could see, his interference had done no good to anybody and only made extra trouble. It was a thousand pities that the body of Deacon had ever come to light at all. Nobody wanted it." These tie in with the burden of guilt and innocence, redemption and repentance.

Finally, the book comes to its powerful climax in a flooded village, "with an aching and intolerable melancholy, like the noise of the bells of a drowned city pushing up through the overwhelming sea."

This is not a detective story-this is, if anything, a novel.

The 1934 Dorothy L. Sayers mystery titled "The Nine Tailors" is not about the garment industry. Instead it centers on the venerable tradition of "change ringing" still practiced in England in which a given number of church bells or "tellers" are rung in every possible combination. So nine of them would have to be rung in (what we call in math class) "9 factorial" or 362,880 different combinations. You can figure out how long that would take at one peal per second.

Well the combinations do play a part in the solution of a particularly involved plot concerning jewelry stolen considerably in the past, a freshly dug grave with the wrong body in it, a flood, a snowstorm, and a villageful of really interesting characters, one of whom might be a thief, another a murderer, and so on. However, I am not reviewing the book itself but a marvelously effective complete reading of it by Lord Peter Wimsey himself, which is to say character actor Ian Carmichael who played Wimsey so well on the television series (now available on both VHS and DVD from Acorn Media). Here is the novel, complete on 6 cassettes, from Audio Partners, which is increasing their catalogue of complete mystery recordings very quickly indeed.

Of course, Carmichael is the perfect Wimsey; but he is also very good at every other voice needed to make this an excellent reading. Some books-on-tape readers merely use their own voices throughout; and success depends on how interesting and appropriate that single voice is. Like David Suchet on the companion Poirot readings, Carmichael makes his reading into a full dramatization.

Highly recommended for those who love a really intricate mystery read by a terrific actor.