Adding Wimsey to My Life

I am 73 years old and happily married, but I recently fell in love—not with an actual person but with a fictional character. This sort of thing hasn’t happened since high school, when Heathcliff inflamed my adolescent imagination. But now, after a lifetime of reading, I find myself besotted by Lord Peter Wimsey, the amateur detective of uncanny insight and resourcefulness who figures in 11 novels and numerous stories by Dorothy L. Sayers.

Sayers was one of the queens of detective fiction’s so-called Golden Age, a period in the 1920s and ’30s that featured such virtuosos of the genre as Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. When I read Sayers in my youth, I was immune to Peter Wimsey’s charms, but my idea of a heartthrob has changed considerably since the 10th grade. Lord Peter is no orphaned, alienated bad boy. He is the wealthy second son of a duke, with a family estate and a devoted valet (the imperturbable and supremely competent Bunter). He took a first-class degree in modern history from Balliol College, Oxford, and is knowledgeable about most everything, from the symptoms of thyroid disease to the fine points of ballistics and dental identification. He collects incunabula (books printed prior to 1501) and is competent in the art of campanology. He is a champion cricketer, so well known during his Oxford days that an elderly man, seeing him play on an amateur team some 20 years later, recognizes Wimsey of Balliol who scored 112 points for Oxford in 1911. He is fluent in several languages, including French, having also been schooled in manners and sex by his French uncle. He is a connoisseur of music and plays Bach on the piano. Finally, he served valiantly in the First World War and is often called on to resolve knotty diplomatic issues for the British foreign service (in the mid-1930s, his fluency in German is a useful adjunct to his diplomatic skills).

Lord Peter, as he is known to all, hearkens back to an era when England had a strict and immutable class hierarchy. And yet, he makes good use of his advantages, working tirelessly and spending lavishly in the cause of justice. For example, he underwrites an entire employment agency for unmarried women, whom he deploys on special missions related to his cases. He is also compassionate, prone to falling into paralyzing depression after the culprits he has unmasked are sent to the gallows.

Sayers’s hero is not without flaws, however. He has a big nose and wears a monocle. He is a bit of a dandy (his socks match his pocket square). He is often flippant in conventionally grave situations and frequently cites lines from poetry that few people recognize. He also speaks with a slight stammer, the result of the PTSD he suffers from his service in the war. But these little quirks that mar his perfection, far from reducing my affection, make me love him all the more. Unlike many other Golden Age detectives, Wimsey has depth, increasingly so as the series of books featuring him progresses. When I happened on three 1980s BBC adaptations of the novels on YouTube, I was enchanted by Edward Petherbridge, who, in the role of Wimsey, could stammer and say “frightfully sorry” with aplomb. Each time Petherbridge’s Wimsey adjusted his monocle, my heart fluttered.

I have extravagantly extolled Peter Wimsey to my friends, bullying them to read at least one of Sayers’s novels, only to find myself disappointed when they aren’t charmed by the character. One woman, who shares my taste in most things, called him foppish and effeminate. How could she so misread a figure of such consummate, if complex, masculinity? Fortunately, I found a group of enthusiasts on Reddit who are, like me, smitten with Wimsey down to the monocle. I have concluded that we are a happy few and share qualities with his creator, a woman admittedly not to everyone’s tastes.