Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night. Hodder pb, 2016; first published 1935. 564 pp. Library copy

I’m not a fan of crime fiction, not even the ‘golden age’ variety of which DLS is a prime exponent. Somewhere down the line I must have had Gaudy Night recommended to me, so I collected a copy from my local library and persevered to the end of what’s an overlong, overwritten, intriguing and muddled example of the genre.

First off, there’s no murder for the arch sleuth to solve. Instead, Harriet Vane, a crime novelist clearly intended to be something of a surrogate for DLS herself, is the primary ‘detective’. She’s attended the reunion of the novel’s title at her old (all-female) Oxford college, where some mischief-maker has begun a campaign of poison pen letters, obscene graffiti and other acts of nasty vandalism that seem to be aiming their vitriol at the female academic staff. The college’s senior members ask her to investigate.

What follows is an over-elaborate account of her attempts to identify the perpetrator. There’s a large and (I found) confusingly undifferentiated group of characters who are the main suspects. After a hundred pages or so I couldn’t really get too excited about all this.

There are long philosophical-sociological discussions about intellect v. heart (I think). There are a few implausible undergrad flirtations with HV, including an infuriating Bertie Wooster-type viscount, nephew of Lord Peter Wimsey, the other main sleuth in a sequence of these DLS novels.

There are some interesting debates and observations about the right of women to follow a career, whether in academia or elsewhere, so long as it doesn’t confine them to the domestic sphere. This being the mid-30s, there are a few chilling references to Nazi slogans on such things. In this respect it’s something of a politically charged feminist novel.

What’s disappointing, therefore, is that Harriet is reduced to calling on the help of Lord Peter when her own enquiries seem to be getting nowhere, and the vandalism continues. Like a deus ex machina he swoops in and solves the mystery.

I said at the start that the novel is overwritten. Each chapter starts with an epigraph from renaissance writers, and many of the characters, especially Lord Peter, find it almost impossible to complete more than a few sentences of dialogue without inserting a quotation or allusion to literature of that period, or from Latin or Greek sources. Nothing wrong with that, but it begins to look like the author is showing off her literary erudition in a way that distracts from the main narrative. The effect is stilted and seems affected.

There’s some quite interesting detail about clothes and dress conventions of the thirties; Moira of the excellent blog Clothes in Books (link HERE) has some interesting comments on some of this. Her response to DLS is much more enthusiastic than mine, so it’s worth taking a look at what she has to say to provide an alternative to mine.

There are some single sentences that stand out as marvellous bits of writing – but they are outnumbered by countless others that are too rococo in style.

Not a terrible novel, then, but not my cup of tea.