"Oh damn," said Lord Peter Wimsey...

Those are the first words of Whose Body? and I would think that they were pretty bold, shocking or at least startling, in 1923, when the novel first appeared. I may be wrong about that, but the opening suggests to me a certain irreverence toward social convention on the part of the author, and the general handling of such things throughout the book supports my surmise. A touch of gentle satire is one of the pleasures of Sayers's writing. 

After reading Strong Poison recently (see this post) I wanted more of Sayers and her characters, and decided to start with this, her first. I'll read in order until I either get to the end or tire of them. I'm also reading a couple of books that are fairly demanding, and it's nice to switch over to Sayers at times for something lighter. She's simply fun to read, but still offers enough substance that I don't feel like I'm wasting my time. 

For someone who reads, or watches on TV, a great many detective stories, I have a lack of interest in the actual process of detection which might be surprising. I don't follow the details closely, and don't put much effort into figuring out the puzzle, but am taken in by the basic appeal of a story: what happened, how did it start, how does it end? Beginning, middle, end: it's an elemental appeal, as is the interest or lack thereof in the characters involved. In a detective novel, the story comes first, but quality of the writing makes the difference between simple entertainment and a deeper pleasure, something one recalls and to which one might return. I mean that in the sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph sense. Sayers is among the very best of the classic mystery writers at that level--almost always elegant, deft, and frequently witty. 

The plot of Strong Poison is complex, involving a somewhat improbably well-planned and performed murder. This one is perhaps not quite so complex, but decidedly more peculiar.

It's common and, you might say, natural for a murder mystery to open with the finding of a corpse. Frequently this happens outdoors, and the corpse is happened upon by a person who has nothing otherwise to do with the story. My wife and I watch a lot of British crime dramas, and when a story opens with a person or two, often with a dog, walking in some relatively isolated place--a wood, an empty beach, an abandoned industrial site--we say "Here comes the body finder." And usually we're right. Sometimes the body is found in its place of residence: a friend or relative or cleaning lady enters, and a few seconds later is screaming, finding the resident deceased, often violently.

Whose Body? also opens with the finding of a corpse, or rather a report of the finding, in the first few pages, but it's not in a lonely place, or in the place where the deceased would naturally be. It's in the bathtub of an apartment, discovered by the  very startled occupant of the apartment, to whom the dead person is a complete stranger. 

No one seems to know who he is--a naked man wearing a pince-nez--or how he got there. Around the same time, a prominent financier has disappeared. But the body in the apartment is not his. Naturally one supposes that the two events are connected, but there is no evidence beyond their proximity in time to connect them. And naturally it takes a while for Wimsey to get the connection, which points in a certain direction, but not conclusively. 

In addition to good prose, it also helps a murder mystery if there is some sort of philosophical depth present. This doesn't have to be explicit, naturally--I think of Elmore Leonard and his flat realism which has great and very serious resonance. In this case, though, it is fairly explicit, in the person of a character who comes close to fulfilling the stereotype of the mad scientist. But he isn't mad in the straightforward way of the person suffering delusions and so forth. Rather, he is firmly committed to the mad doctrine that everything that we think makes us truly human originates in the function or perhaps malfunction of the physical. His notions of how that might work are crude compared to what is now known about the brain, but the basic viewpoint is unchanged and is if anything more strongly present in our culture now. I don't know whether Sayers was, at the time, the vigorously committed Christian which she certainly was later, but Sayers sketches this horrible philosophy in a way that would have done credit to C.S. Lewis.

Strong Poison came seven years after Whose Body?, with four novels between them. Is one better than the other? Not that I noticed, though more serious readers than I say Wimsey becomes a more substantial and deeper character as his career goes on. I'm afraid I was not very attentive to that, but I will say that the introduction of Harriet Vane in the later novel makes him more interesting.

An image search for the cover brings up a surprising number of different ones, and very few are this one, which is the Avon paperback I've had since the '70s.

This is not of great importance, but: I noticed several little things in Sayers's language that surprised, interested, or puzzled me, as artifacts of a time and place not so very distant from our own, but still noticeably different. For instance: when referring to the public transportation provided by large automotive vehicles with many seats, she precedes the word we use with an apostrophe: it's not a bus, it's a 'bus. It was still recognized that "bus" was short for the older horse-drawn "omnibus" taxi.

An omnibus, 1902. From Wikimedia: "Omnibuses and Cabs" by Henry Charles Moore

Another: When Lord Peter uses a word ending in "ing," he frequently drops the "g". "This is only a blinkin' old shillin' shocker," he says early on, referring to the basic facts of the case. This apparently was an aristocratic mannerism. In our time and culture, the class association goes the other way: the less sophisticated--and probably most of us most of the time--drop their "g"s, while keeping them is a bit more careful, if not actually formal. 

And Sayers makes the decidedly middle-class occupant of the apartment where the body is deposited pronounce "really" as "reely," apparently as a class marker, which leaves me wondering: how does Wimsey pronounce it? "Rilly"? Really?

*

In connection with the post on Strong Poison, someone mentioned a series of three television adaptions of Sayers novels done by the BBC in the 1980s. The three books are Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, and Gaudy Night, which feature Harriet Vane. Indeed, the series was originally meant to be called Harriet Vane, but the producers thought the Wimsey name would attract more viewers. Anyway, they are excellent, and as of right now are available on YouTube. This link should take you to a playlist which includes all three. The video quality is poor but watchable. I don't know how much of that is attributable to the quality of the original and how much to whatever processes were involved in getting them on YouTube. The BBC really should re-master (if that's the right word for video) and re-release them. 

I've been wanting for a while to get back to that Pitchfork list of 50 Best Shoegaze Albums. As I reported in the post at that link, I've only heard a third or so of the albums listed there, and although I didn't expect to like them all it seemed way more than likely that I would find some music there that I would really like. So I picked this one, which seems to be pretty high on everyone's list.

Charming cover, isn't it? I admit I am very strongly influenced by album covers, but I don't think that was a strong factor in this case, as I was listening on Pandora and hadn't more than glanced at the image. No, I think it's the music itself that produced my not-positive reaction. I put it that way because I don't actively dislike the album. It just isn't what I want to hear, so much so that I'm violating my three-hearings rule, the rule that I have to listen to a piece of music at least three times, with some reasonable level of attention, before committing myself to a definite opinion about it. 

By any reasonable standard it's good work--interesting, complex, technically accomplished. But without being directed to do so I don't think I would have categorized it as shoegaze. It's pretty hard rock, though so jagged and varied in its beats that it wouldn't fit in on your average hard rock radio station or playlist. I was even reminded of grunge at times. What I don't hear is the dreamy melodicism, often or usually drenched in guitar noise, of the shoegaze music that I like.

I complain about the fact that the lyrics in a lot of shoegaze are more or less unintelligible, sometimes almost inaudible. That's not the case here. But unfortunately I don't find the lyrics especially appealing. Like the music, they're hard-edged; the cover art is not inappropriate. Here's the first track. 

Not bad at all. And obviously the applicability or not of the "shoegaze" label doesn't matter, as labels of that sort are not to be treated as anything more than rough indicators. But, as I said, it's just not what I want to hear. 

Usually I have some loose plan for what I'm going to post about over the coming two or three weeks--I've read this or that, or listened to this or that, and intend to write about it in the not very distant future. It's not a schedule but it's a guide. This symphony, however, was not in the plan. I was going through some of the huge number of old LPs that I acquired several years ago, most of which I haven't listened to, and wondering if I should cull them further. I picked this one up and thought it looked like a candidate. Was I likely ever even to play it, much less care about it?

I knew Honegger's name, and that he was a member of a group of 20th century French composers known as Les Six, and that he had composed Pacific 231, a short work that was said to be a musical description of a steam locomotive accelerating. Those few facts, recalled from a music history course taken more than fifty years ago, were absolutely all I knew of Honegger. In my mind I had lumped him in with the rather large number of somewhat faceless (to me) modern composers who had probably produced some capable but not very interesting work--not very interesting to me, anyway. 

Why not listen to it once, though? I said to myself, and I did. The LP contains two short symphonies, one on each side. I put on side one. And as you have probably guess I liked this work very much, listening to it several times over the next couple of days.

One might quibble about its being called a symphony, as it's written entirely for strings except for the appearance of a solo trumpet in the third movement. It was begun in the late '30s--I suppose I should specify the late 1930s, as we are only five years away from 2030--finished in 1941, and first performed in 1942. In other words, it was begun in the darkening shadows of world war and completed when the storm had burst. Honegger was living in occupied France.

I don't think I noticed that information in the liner notes until after my first hearing, or perhaps I saw it  without really consciously taking it in, but with or without such prompting I found myself seeing grim monochrome images of that period, the images that would have been seen in newsreels: anxious crowds in streets, roads, and railway stations; silhouettes of aircraft against a gray sky--images of fear and escape. The imagery is appropriate, and it's not a stretch to read the atmosphere of the times into the music.

I think the notes on the LP describe the music well, so I'll just quote their uncredited author: 

The music is darkly serious and brooding, alternately violent and despairing in the first movement. The second continues the mood, rising slowly to a dramatic surge, followed by an ebb. Only in the bi-tonal and polyrhythmic third movement is the air cleared, leading to a final Presto in which the first violins and trumpet intone a triumphant chorale-like melody

"Bi-tonal and polyrhythmic" are not promising descriptions to me. They would--if I had read them before hearing the work--have led me to suppose that this was another technically complex but somewhat dry 20th century work. But it's very much alive emotionally, and you don't need to know anything technical to feel its "darkly serious and brooding" atmosphere.

Here are some notes I jotted down for each movement as I was listening:

1: Tense, brooding, busy, martial, somber,  uneasy. Monochrome.

2: Sad. Fading hope. Loss. Yearning. Short rhythmically memorable motifs.

3: Quick, nervous, later threatening, till trumpet appears briefly like sunlight near the end. Triumphant. 

This is a Supraphon release, originally issued in 1961. (Supraphon was/is a Czech company, which means that this was a Soviet or at least Soviet-approved production.) My copy is an American re-issue, from 1966, as you might guess from the ridiculous and inappropriate cover art.

I haven't gotten to side two yet. It's another short symphony, Number 3, subtitled "Liturgical."