The Documents in the Case

Last updated

The Documents in the Case
The Documents in the Case.jpg
First US edition
Author Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Genre Mystery Epistolary novel
Publisher Ernest Benn (UK)
Brewer and Warren (US)
Publication date
1930
Media typePrint (Hardcover, Paperback)
ISBN 978-0-450-00243-4
OCLC 60267830

The Documents in the Case is a 1930 novel by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace. It is the only one of Sayers's twelve major crime novels not to feature Lord Peter Wimsey, her most famous detective character. However, the forensic analyst Sir James Lubbock, who appears or is mentioned in several of the Wimsey novels, also appears in The Documents in the Case.

Contents

Plot

This is an epistolary novel, told primarily in the form of letters between some of the characters, using the multiple narrative technique associated with Modernist novelists of the period. This collection of documentshence the novel's titleis explained as a dossier of evidence collected by the victim's son as part of his campaign to obtain justice for his father.

Novelist John Munting shares, with former public school contemporary and talented painter Harwood Lathom, a rented top floor flat in respectably suburban Bayswater, London. The landlord and downstairs neighbour, Harrison, is a staid, middle-aged widower who has remarried. His new wife Margaret is younger, attractive, passionate and self-absorbed. Lathom and Mrs Harrison begin an affair, the husband suspecting nothing, and Lathom paints a remarkable portrait of her.

Creeping downstairs to meet his mistress one night, Lathom encounters the Harrisons' neurotic live-in spinster companion, Agatha Milsom, who mistakes him for Munting in the dark and makes accusations of assault. Faced with Harrison's furious reaction and glad of an excuse to leave a distasteful situation, Munting moves out and marries his fiancée. Lathom departs for Paris and his portrait of Mrs Harrison, exhibited at the Royal Academy, makes his reputation on the London art scene.

Meeting Lathom by chance some time later, Munting is persuaded to accompany Lathom to a remote Devonshire cottage where he is holidaying with Harrison, who is pursuing his hobby of cooking with ingredients available in the wild, and is an expert on edible mushrooms. On arrival they find Harrison hideously dead, apparently having cooked and eaten poisonous fungi by mistake.

Returning from Africa, Harrison's engineer son Paul suspects that Lathom and his stepmother have conspired to murder Harrison, and Munting is drawn unwillingly into the investigation. He learns that muscarine – the poison that killed Harrison – in its natural state, differs from synthetic muscarine: all molecules of muscarine are asymmetrical, and differ from their mirror image. Natural muscarine, found in mushrooms, consists purely of one of the two possible forms, but synthetic muscarine is racemic, which means that it consists of a mixture of equal quantities of the molecule as found in nature and its artificial "mirror-image" form.

The two types of muscarine can be distinguished by using polarized light: when linearly polarized light is shone through a solution of the racemic mixture, the direction of polarization does not change, but when the same linearly polarized light passes through a solution consisting of only one form of muscarine (or of any such asymmetrical molecule), the direction of polarization rotates as the light passes through the solution.

The muscarine consumed by Harrison proves to be synthetic, indicating that the mushrooms he ate were poisoned deliberately by addition of synthetic muscarine stolen from a laboratory. Letters between Mrs Harrison and Lathom indicate that she manipulated him into the killing by claiming that she was expecting his child. Lathom is hanged for murder.

Characters in "The Documents in the Case"

Themes and sources

Dorothy Sayers' co-author, under the pseudonym of Robert Eustace, was Dr Eustace Barton, a physician who also wrote medico-legal thrillers. Barton suggested to Sayers the scientific theme crucial to the novel's dénouement, which concerns the difference between a naturally produced organic compound and the corresponding synthetic material, and the use of the polariscope to distinguish between them. He travelled to University College Hospital in August 1928 to consult colleagues and see a practical demonstration of the effect. [1]

As a practising Christian, Sayers was pleased with the religious-scientific theme offered to her by Eustace, which was based on the idea that the asymmetry of living molecules was an indication of the hand of God in creation.

"[The idea] touches the very key note of the mystery of the appearance of Life on this planet. There seems no escape from the conclusion that at some wonderful moment in the evolutionary process a Directive Force-From-Without entered upon the scene of Life itself."

Dorothy L Sayers, Dorothy L Sayers: Her Life and Soul. Barbara Reynolds, Hodder & Stoughton 1993, chapter 15

This point is made very clear in the lengthy exposition at the local vicar's dinner party, where Munting follows a wide-ranging debate about religion, science and the origin of life. A keen choral singer in her Oxford University years, Sayers introduces at this point the key theme of Haydn's oratorio The Creation.

Having established herself as a successful writer, Sayers intended this book as a departure or experiment, away from the conventional detective story towards the crime novel. In her previous novel Strong Poison she had introduced the character of the crime novelist Harriet Vane as the love interest of her popular amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, and now she omitted Wimsey altogether in a very differently structured and conceived crime novel.

The novel clearly draws upon the notable 1922 Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters case, which led to the miscarriage of justice whereby Edith Thompson was hanged, along with her lover Frederick Bywaters, for his murder of her husband, supposedly at her instigation, thanks to her fancifully passionate letters offered in evidence at their joint trial. Sayers' presentation of Margaret Harrison (and her letters) in the novel makes an interesting contrast with F. Tennyson Jesse's 1934 novel A Pin to See the Peepshow , similarly based on the Thompson/Bywaters case. Tennyson Jesse's Julia Almond is presented very differently from Sayers' Margaret Harrison.

However, she was ultimately disappointed with the way the book turned out. "In my heart," she wrote, "I know I have made a failure of it... I wish I could have done better with the brilliant plot.". [2]

Publication history

Related Research Articles

<i>Gaudy Night</i> 1935 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers

Gaudy Night (1935) is a mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, the tenth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, and the third including Harriet Vane.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lord Peter Wimsey</span> Fictional character by Dorothy L Sayers

Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey is the fictional protagonist in a series of detective novels and short stories by Dorothy L. Sayers. A dilettante who solves mysteries for his own amusement, Wimsey is an archetype for the British gentleman detective. He is often assisted by his valet and former batman, Mervyn Bunter; by his good friend and later brother-in-law, police detective Charles Parker; and, in a few books, by Harriet Vane, who becomes his wife.

<i>Murder Must Advertise</i> 1933 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers

Murder Must Advertise is a 1933 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, the eighth in her series featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. Most of the action of the novel takes place in an advertising agency, a setting with which Sayers was familiar as she had herself worked as an advertising copywriter until 1931.

Lindsey Davis is an English historical novelist, best known as the author of the Falco series of historical crime stories set in ancient Rome and its empire. She is a recipient of the Cartier Diamond Dagger award.

<i>Whose Body?</i> 1923 novel by Dorothy L. Sayers

Whose Body? is a mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers first published in 1923 in the US by Boni & Liveright, and in the UK by T. Fisher Unwin. It was her debut novel, and the book in which she introduced the character of Lord Peter Wimsey.

<i>Clouds of Witness</i> 1926 novel by Dorothy L. Sayers

Clouds of Witness is a 1926 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, the second in her series featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. In the United States the novel was first published in 1927 under the title Clouds of Witnesses.

<i>Unnatural Death</i> (novel) 1927 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers

Unnatural Death is a 1927 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her third featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. It was published under the title The Dawson Pedigree in the United States in 1928.

<i>Strong Poison</i> 1930 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers

Strong Poison is a 1930 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her fifth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and the first in which Harriet Vane appears.

<i>Have His Carcase</i> 1932 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers

Have His Carcase is a 1932 locked-room mystery by Dorothy L. Sayers, her seventh novel featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and the second in which Harriet Vane appears. It is also included in the 1987 BBC TV series. The book marks a stage in the long drawn out courting of Harriet Vane by Wimsey. Though working closely with him on solving the book's mystery, she still refuses to marry him.

<i>The Nine Tailors</i> 1934 mystery novel by Dorothy L Sayers

The Nine Tailors is a 1934 mystery novel by the British writer Dorothy L. Sayers, her ninth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. The story is set in the Lincolnshire Fens, and revolves around a group of bell-ringers at the local parish church. The book has been described as Sayers' finest literary achievement, although not all critics were convinced by the mode of death, nor by the amount of technical campanology detail included.

<i>Busmans Honeymoon</i> 1937 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers

Busman's Honeymoon is a 1937 novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her eleventh and last featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, and her fourth and last to feature Harriet Vane.

<i>Thrones, Dominations</i> Novel by Dorothy L. Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh

Thrones, Dominations is a Lord Peter Wimsey–Harriet Vane murder mystery novel that Dorothy L. Sayers began writing but abandoned, and which remained at her death as fragments and notes. It was completed by Jill Paton Walsh and published in 1998. The title is a quotation from John Milton's Paradise Lost and refers to two categories of angel in the Christian angelic hierarchy.

Mervyn Bunter is a fictional character in Dorothy L. Sayers's novels and short stories. He serves as Lord Peter Wimsey's valet, and served as Wimsey's batman during the First World War. Bunter was partially based on the fictional butler Jeeves, created by P. G. Wodehouse.

In the works of Dorothy L. Sayers, the fictional title of Duke of Denver is held by Gerald Wimsey, older brother of the books' protagonist, Lord Peter Wimsey. In novels written after Sayers' death by Jill Paton Walsh, Lord Peter also eventually holds the title. Sayers and several friends constructed an elaborate backstory for the duchy.

Delano Ames was an American writer of detective stories. Ames was the author of some 20 books, many of them featuring a husband and wife detective team of amateurs named Dagobert and Jane Brown. A later series of novels involved a character named Juan Lorca, of the Spanish Civil Guard, who solved local mysteries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amateur detective</span> Type of fictional character

The gentleman detective, less commonly lady detective, is a type of fictional character. He has long been a staple of crime fiction, particularly in detective novels and short stories set in the United Kingdom in the Golden Age. The heroes of these adventures are typically both gentlemen by conduct and often also members of the British gentry. The literary heroes being in opposition to professional police force detectives from the working classes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dorothy L. Sayers</span> English novelist, translator and Christian writer (1893–1957)

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English crime novelist, playwright, translator and critic.

Robert Eustace was the pen name of Eustace Robert Barton (1869–1943), an English doctor and author of mystery and crime fiction with a theme of scientific innovation. He also wrote as Eustace Robert Rawlings. Eustace often collaborated with other writers, producing a number of works with the author L. T. Meade and others. He is credited as co-author with Dorothy L. Sayers of the novel The Documents in the Case, for which he supplied the main plot idea and supporting medical and scientific details.

<i>The Attenbury Emeralds</i> 2010 novel by Jill Paton Walsh

The Attenbury Emeralds is the third Lord Peter Wimsey-Harriet Vane detective novel written by Jill Paton Walsh. Featuring characters created by Dorothy L. Sayers, it was written with the co-operation and approval of Sayers' estate. It was published by Hodder & Stoughton in September 2010.

<i>The Late Scholar</i> 2013 novel by Jill Paton Walsh

The Late Scholar is the fourth and final Lord Peter Wimsey-Harriet Vane detective novel written by Jill Paton Walsh. Featuring characters created by Dorothy L. Sayers, it was written with the co-operation and approval of Sayers' estate. It was published by Hodder & Stoughton on 5 December 2013 in the UK, and on 14 January 2014 in North America.

References

  1. Reynolds, Barbara. Dorothy L Sayers: Her Life and Soul. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993. ISBN   0-340-58151-4
  2. Reynolds, Barbara. Dorothy L Sayers: Her Life and Soul p 221. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993. ISBN   0-340-58151-4