Lord Peter Wimsey falls in love in 1930’s Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers. The only problem is that famed mystery novelist Harriet Vane is on trial for her life in a murder case that looks really bad for her chances to live. Fortunately, the jury can’t agree on a verdict, so Lord Peter has a month to clear the name of the woman he would dearly love to marry. But even more difficult than that will be to convince Harriet to accept his marriage proposal, despite his daily visits to her and advantages.
As the book opens, we see the judge give a summing up of the evidence, and we quickly recognize that he is slanting his portrayal of the case and criticizing Harriet’s moral character to get the jury to convict the defendant. Harriet Vane has been arrested for murdering her former lover, Philip Boyes, a writer of “more literary” texts. Boyes earlier convinced Harriet to live with him outside of marriage on the grounds that he did not believe in the institution, so when he then proposed marriage, Harriet moved out, saying he had made a fool of her when he obviously lied about his position on marriage. This break-up led to Philip’s getting severe depression, and he saw Harriet only a few times. After each time, he felt sick, and then the final time he returned home incredibly sick, dying a few days later of what was soon determined to be arsenic. Since Harriet has been researching the topic of poisons for her latest book, she is arrested for the murder of her former lover.
Lord Peter, hopelessly in love, works feverishly to find a way to solve the case in order to free Harriet, even though she won’t agree to marry him. Using every resource at his fingertips, Lord Peter finds this to be his hardest case ever, as even when he finds motive in someone else, no one but Harriet had opportunity to poison Philip.
I appreciate the reliance that Lord Peter makes upon the women who work for him and thus indirectly for Scotland Yard at the “cattery.” In Unnatural Death, we meet Miss Climpson, whom Lord Peter has hired and set up in a flat, who utilizes women’s special gift of gossip to gain information that a male inquiry agent never could learn. In the earlier book, Lord Peter points out that the country has an extreme imbalance between marriageable men and women as a result of the loss of so many men in the Great War. So the country has been left with a great many spinsters whose gifts have been under utilized.
One of the ways that Miss Climpson finds to get the important knowledge Lord Peter requires is through the fraudulent use of spiritualism. As the Great War claimed so many young men, bereft families turned to spiritualism to try to talk to their lost ones, but most, if not all, of these were frauds taking advantage of people’s loss. That led to the rise of such debunkers as Harry Houdini. This book reveals ways that such frauds accomplished their scams.
The trial itself reveals a lot about attitudes of 1930. The judge’s summing up makes negative statements about Harriet throughout, so we can see that he is trying to influence the jury to vote against her. This apparently was a common occurrence during trials of the era. The judge criticizes Harriet for agreeing to “live in sin” with Philip, but her greater offense was refusing Philip’s expectation of marriage after she had “proven” herself to be worthy of him. He doesn’t see the duplicity that Harriet sees in Phillip’s proposal after she earlier gave in against her desire to live with him because he expressed firm beliefs against the institution of marriage. This whole incident reflects the life of Sayers, who had a painful love affair with the Russian poet John Cuomos after he made the same claim against marriage. Then, he dropped Sayers in order to marry another, more minor, writer. The idea of living together outside of marriage was a deep scandal in that era, as through most of history.
A theme that arises in Strong Poison is that of literature as high art and popular fiction as low art. Philip’s friends see his work as important and high art while seeing Harriet’s more popular mystery fiction as low art. This attitude continues today in academic circles, where literature classes don’t study the works of those like Sayers despite all the depth and strength of the books because her books are popular fiction.
Ian Carmichael performs the audio version of this book, doing an incredible job of interpreting the parts of Lord Peter and Harriet with power. He plays Bunter solidly as the stiff and proper manservant, while Miss Climpson has her own degrees of emphasizing words in her letters.
Strong Poison contains a special intensity, borne of Lord Peter’s earnestness in trying to free the woman he loves within the span of the month he is allotted. In addition, Sayers laid bare her own life in fiction form, putting herself in Harriet’s place, adding to the depth of the book.
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