Saturday, March 23, 4-5 p.m.

Panelists: Susan Smith (moderator), Laura Thomas, Carol Rasmussen, Tom Beck, Anne Collins Smith

Transcribed by Anne Collins Smith

Note: quotations are not precise; this was done from handwritten notes. Dialogue should be taken as representing the gist of what each person said. Where discussions were too rapid for individual contributors to be noted, you will see "consensus" or "debate."

Susan Smith: I'll begin with some backstory. My source is Alzina Stone Dale; I have notes from her speech at the Centennial Celebration in Madison, Wisconsin, where she distributed a synopsis of Thrones, Dominations, which Sayers was working on at the same time as Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon. During the writing of the story, George V died, Edward took the throne and abdicated; the inference is that Sayers stopped working on Thrones, Dominations at that point (Edward's abdication) and turned her attention to her playwriting and other work.

Terry Neill: The theme of the book is responsibility. Peter's responsibility is not to be the parasitic aristocrat; Harriet's responsibility is to keep writing because of her talent. Edward, by contrast, abandons his responsibilities.

Susan Smith: There's also St. George's lack of responsibility, not taking seriously his role as heir to the estate. It is Harriet who will provide the "spare."

Gail Moore: Regarding Edward's abdication, he was forced out because he was pro-German; the affair with Mrs. Simpson was just an excuse.

Tom Beck: It wasn't an excuse; the Church of England would not have permitted him to stay king and marry her.

Terry Neill: Even if Edward had not been pro-German and irresponsible, they still wouldn't have let him stay on the throne if he had married Mrs. Simpson.

Carol Rasmussen: And he would have been fired from any real job for his carelessness with state papers.

Tom Beck: It's ironic that George VI, one of the best kings in English history, only came to power because of the abdication.

Susan Smith: Sayers obviously did not write the part of the book dealing with the Edward's being pro-German. How much of that, and its connection to Peter's diplomatic work, would have crossed Sayers' mind? Would she have gone into all this detail, as Jill Paton Walsh does?

Terry Neill: Walsh is writing after the fact. Sayers wouldn't have known all this at the time.

Tom Beck: People at that time didn't realize that the Germans under Hitler were not like the Germans in World War I.

How much of the book was actually written by Sayers, anyway?

Susan Smith: About the first four chapters, though not every scene. The outline Sayers mentions in the letter printed on the back of the book jacket was never found. We can't tell from her notes who was murdered, or even whether anyone was going to be murdered.

Tom Beck: There's a noticeable change in the writing style.

Susan Smith: Yes, it changes after the dinner party. None of the murder was written by Sayers.

Anne Collins Smith: For the murder to remain a mystery, too many people had to be stupid. As soon as Bunter mentioned that the sink was stopped up, I expected him or Peter to investigate, but they didn't. Later, when Amery mentions the sink running freely, Peter assumes Amery's mistaken, not that the sink was clogged up later. Peter just shouldn't overlook a clue like that! We also have to depend on the police not noticing that the two murdered women lived next door to each other.

Tom Beck: In the Wimsey-Vane novels, the mystery is not that important; the murderer isn't hard to guess.

Gail Moore: Sayers and Allingham had changed the form from murder mystery to novel.

Anne Collins Smith: But the mystery still shouldn't depend on detectives being stupid.

Susan Smith: Do you all think that Peter and the other characters in this book are in character?

Laura Thomas: Laurie King, a mystery author who writes novels about Sherlock Holmes, ought to write Lord Peter Wimsey. There's a two-scene cameo involving Lord Peter in one of King's novels, A Letter from Mary, set shortly after World War I, and she gets the characterization dead-on.

Susan Smith: What do you think of the writing quality of Thrones, Dominations?

Tom Beck: I think Walsh was trying too hard, especially with her use of the quotations. It's really hard to fake genuine erudition.

Sandra: I thought she did a good job.

Terry Neill: I thought she was trying too hard, and copied from Sayers' other books.

Anne Collins Smith: I thought I recognized the part about the detective story as morality play from a non-fiction essay Sayers had written. I thought Walsh did a clumsy job of converting it into dialogue.

Susan Smith: Sayers' philosophy on marriage, duty, and obligation was not as integral to the plot as it should have been.

Janet D'Agostino-Toney: I liked Harriet's struggle with her new roles and where she fit. You got some sense of Harriet feeling her way into a position that she wasn't prepared for. Women's roles were more concrete in the thirties, but Harriet didn't fit the typical mold.

Gail Moore: She was not unlike Sayers in that way, who was also not typical. Harriet's struggle mirrors Sayer's own struggle.

Carol Rasmussen: I didn't like Peter being gone so much, when he had just been married.

Terry Neill: He had to go, because of the call from the Foreign Office.

Tom Beck: It shows us his sense of duty.

Laura Thomas: It reminds me of when Harriet says in Busman's Honeymoon, "I have married England."

Susan Smith: What about Bunter?

Anne Collins Smith: I thought the eight photos of Lord Peter in Bunter's room were a bit much. Devotion is admirable, but obsession is scary!

Susan Smith: It seems forced that Walsh married him off. I don't mind him getting married, but I didn't think it was well-written.

Tom Beck: We know so little about Bunter, though there are hints that Bunter off-duty is not Bunter on-duty.

Tom Beck: Bunter used to hold back because of his duty to Peter; now Peter's marriage has freed him.

Susan Smith: What did you think of Mango?

Anne Collins Smith: Her adventure bamboozling Rose and Mary seemed like a ripoff of Miss Climpson and the ouija board.

Tom Beck: I feel sorry for the author; she could not have made the novel satisfactory.

Diane: It was like the sequel to Gone With the Wind; no matter how good it was, it wouldn't have satisfied everyone.

I didn't like the way the point-of-view kept flipping between the two couples.

Susan Smith: That was actually Sayers' idea, but Walsh didn't handle the parallelism well.

Anne Collins Smith: The painter was Sayers', wasn't he? (Sue: yes) I thought the device of the painter who shows the murder victim's true unpleasant personality was a little too close to the "Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face." Except here the painter wasn't the murderer.

Terry Neill: Well, stealing from your own short stories is different than stealing from novels.

Anne Collins Smith: That's true; Chandler lifted at least one entire scene verbatim.

I also didn't like the scene between Helen and Harriet; it seemed flat, especially compared with the visit from Lady Severn and Thames, which sparkled.

Anne Collins Smith: Then maybe it was Harriet's response to her that didn't ring true.

Anne Collins Smith: What did people think of Lady Mary and her lecture on communism vs. fascism?

Susan Smith: What was Mary doing in this novel?

Terry Neill: It was as if the author felt she had to drag in everybody, because it's a Lord Peter Wimsey story.

Susan Smith: This was to be "the London novel;" there's also a theme that despite the change of modern life, some duties do not change. A spare heir has to be provided; murder must be paid for.

Terry Neill: The news of Mrs. Simpson was not known to the British public until just a couple of weeks before the abdication, so Sayers wouldn't have known, although Peter would have.

The extent of the characters' involvement with reality (real historical events) bothered me.

Carol Rasmussen: But Sayers wrote the funeral scene. How much more reality would she have put in?

Susan Smith: Walsh felt obligated to address the Wallis & Edward issue because it was apparently the reason Sayers stopped writing. She used the opportunity to provide a third "marriage" for contrast.

Carol Rasmussen: Couldn't Sayers have finished it herself ten or twenty years later?

Gail Moore & Terry Neill, almost simultaneously: No; she would have lost her "voice" by then.

Tom Beck: But she was in love with Wimsey.

Anne Collins Smith: I've got to say something here! This idea that Sayers was in love with Wimsey was propounded in Such a Strange Lady, which my mother, Maureen Collins, wrote a critique of entitled "Such a Strange Book." The author wasn't friendly to Sayers; for one thing, the dedication is to the woman who served as the model for Harriet's old classmate in Gaudy Night who had married and let her intellect go. (Someone quoted: "a racehorse making shift with a coal cart"--everyone remembered the character.) This gives you an idea of the author's attitude toward Sayers. The author made a number of inaccurate statements, and part of the basis of her contention that Sayers was in love with Peter was that he went from five-foot-nine in Clouds of Witness to over six feet in Busman's Honeymoon.

Anne Collins Smith: But this myth has been handed down because it was in that book.

Terry Neill: I don't think Sayers was in love with Peter; she had a "fannish" attitude toward him, but her real value in life was her Christian writing. She was a Christian apologist who ranked right up there with C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle.

[Note from transcriber: by "fannish" attitude Terry means, at least partly, that Sayers enjoyed working out a detailed backstory for Peter and his family and exploring different perspectives on Peter's character.]

Carol Rasmussen: There are many Sherlock Holmes books by other writers. Thrones, Dominations is the only Wimsey novel not (entirely) by Sayers. Why is that?

Gail Moore: Sayers was a much better writer than Conan Doyle. Harder to imitate.

Terry Neill: Doyle wrote puzzles, which Holmes solved and Watson explained for the reader. Sayers wrote characters.

Diane: Has anyone actually tried to write Peter, to put him in a fan story? (Consensus of groans from a few brave souls.) It's really hard.

Tom Beck: Also, Sherlock Holmes is a cultural icon; Lord Peter Wimsey is not. It would be hard to get it published.

Terry Neill: And look what Walsh went through in this very room today! [i.e., scathing criticism] It's hard to capture the essence of Wimsey.

Laura Thomas: What is the quality of Walsh's other works?

Susan Smith: Joyce Carol Oates reviewed Thrones, Dominations for the New York Times and she just didn't get it. I was disappointed; it was a superficial review.

Tom Beck: London wasn't a character in this novel as it should have been.

Susan Smith: Yes, as Oxford was in Gaudy Night. I agree. And the rivers under London could have been like the bells in The Nine Tailors.